Susskind declares that machines are getting so smart that they’ll soon replace humans at a growing list of jobs, potentially including doctors, bricklayers and insurance adjusters.

Susskind’s core thesis — that we are heading towards a world in which human work will become obsolete — is built on his supposition that most of the conventional notions about AI learning have been wrong.

It’s the 'robots are coming for your jobs' argument, and it’s often offered as a comeback to the 'immigrants are coming for your jobs' nationalism so prevalent these days, missing the fact that the real threat comes from neither machines nor migrants but management.

People earn incomes on the market for participating in production meant for consumption. Susskind’s argument is that there will no longer be a place for large portions of the population. But if there is not a place for these individuals, and they no longer earn a wage, they will not be consuming goods and services, defeating the rationale for investment in the first place. So, in Susskind’s world, producers would myopically produce goods for an ever-decreasing base of consumers, and the unemployed would have nowhere to go because technology would be better placed to produce everything. But this could only be true if there are no new industries in our horizon (not to mention the literal horizon and space), and that the decrease in prices and necessary labor from innovation do not translate into higher real wages, work in service, niche, or luxury industries, or the allowance for outright increased leisure time.

... an explainer rather than a polemic, written in the relentlessly reasonable tone that dominates popular economics: the voice of a clever, sensible man telling you what’s what. He always has a helpful graph to hand and a greatest hits collection of anecdotes about technology and society.

For a world short on paid work, Oxford economist Susskind advocates a conditional basic income to avoid inequality and provide nonworkers with ways to contribute to society. He also predicts that the worrisome power of tech companies will be political, not economic, and will merit a Political Power Oversight Authority based on moral philosophy. The lives of nonworkers may lose purpose and meaning, so governments must rethink leisure and education. Susskind’s book is so timely, to miss it might be downright irresponsible..

Susskind strong evidence that the progress of artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually result in markedly less work, and jobs, for people, and makes a compelling case that there are few jobs that cannot eventually be performed using AI.

Sometimes densely academic, Susskind’s pragmatic narrative is bolstered by statistical charts and graphs supporting his theories. The author diligently explains the history of these replacement technologies, the patterns they followed, and why their impacts on the giants of industry should be taken seriously.

A thorough and sobering look at automation and the depreciation of human labor.