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 ... Without some sort of intervention, he says, the inequality inherent in today’s economy will metastasize into an even greater divide between the haves and have-nots. This argument flies against the face of much modern economic thought ... the book should be required reading for any potential presidential candidate thinking about the economy of the future. That’s because Susskind also turns to one of the biggest consequences of technological change — inequality — and what can be done about it. 'Today’s inequalities are the birth pangs of tomorrow’s technological unemployment,' Susskind writes, and he has a point ... Even if Susskind’s prediction is wrong — that machines will soon render many humans irrelevant in the labor market — his book provides a useful exercise in planning for a more unequal future.

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 ... Not all technologists or economists agree that AI will be nearly as disruptive to human labour as Susskind posits ... Still, there are plenty of people in the post-work world camp, including many of those at the top of the tech food chain. The parts of Susskind’s book that are most interesting and useful are those that grapple with how society should respond to that world.

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 ... That’s one of the major failings of Susskind’s book—he treats so much of history as a trajectory that simply happened, as if no human decision-making went into what kinds of machines to build or how to implement them in the workplace. He compresses the history of capitalism—with a bloody record of enclosing the commons, accumulation by dispossession, slavery, and rebellion after rebellion—into one where, 'when machines drove human beings from a traditional life on the fields, those people transitioned into manufacturing with relative ease' ... descriptions simplistic enough for a social-studies textbook are unworthy of his subject matter. When he turns to technology itself, Susskind is more willing to dig in to tougher arguments ... He has a technocrat’s preoccupation with individual intelligence ... Susskind doesn’t dare to imagine a world beyond capitalism, but his dreamiest ambition...echoes, perhaps unconsciously, Marx’s famous line, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.'

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 ... Susskind will never be refuted because he can always claim, as he does, that of course there might be 'a burst of worker displacement here, a surge in demand for workers there' as we evade A World Without Work.

... 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 ... The virtue of his reluctance to take a firm political position on an inevitably political issue is that it makes pragmatism and idealism seem to point in the same direction. While other writers make a strongly socialist, feminist or environmentalist case for a post-work world, he says simply that the jobs will go and we’ll have to make the best of it. In light of the current state of political leadership, his optimistic sign-off feels more dutiful than persuasive. Still, if AI really does to employment what previous technologies did not, radical change can’t be postponed indefinitely. It may well be utopia or bust.

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 ... This work is sure to be controversial, but it will find an audience with those interested in public policy relating to unemployment and inequality.

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 ... Thankfully, the author doesn’t deliver this grim prognosis without a proactive response or hints at how a complementary workforce fueling economic stabilization could be achieved in the long term. He posits a multitiered approach involving new skills-based education for laborers, increased regulatory control over larger technology companies, the introduction of a 'robot tax,' and financial incentives for employers using a sizable manual labor force. Susskind’s economic perspective makes the conundrum crystal clear, and he makes a convincing and illuminating argument to decelerate the onset of global 'automation anxiety' ... A complex yet lucid and surprisingly optimistic account from the frontlines of technology addressing the challenges facing the human workforce.

A thorough and sobering look at automation and the depreciation of human labor ... This dense but lively investigation is not for the reader who wants an easy dinner-party answer, but the curious worrier or the skeptic who wants to understand the theory behind the machines will want to take a look.