A brave new workless world

In his new book, Oxford University economist Daniel Susskind sketches out the perils and promise of automation’s displacement of labor.

 
A World without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond

How would you feel if you no longer had to work? Ecstatic? Empty? Relieved? Anxious? All of the above? Economists and other thinkers have long debated the function of work in shaping human identity. Sigmund Freud considered work “indispensable,” and Adam Smith thought it “toil and trouble.”

Daniel Susskind, an Oxford professor and former government advisor, believes that work “is so entrenched in our psyches that there is often an instructive resistance to contemplating a world with less of it, and an inability to articulate anything substantial when we actually do.” His argument in A World without Work, a useful and farsighted book on the subject, is threefold: that within our lifetime, automation will result in insufficient work to go around; that this structural technological unemployment, if ignored, would make our already unfair world vastly more unequal; and that to prevent this outcome, governments’ approach to labor policy needs to be entirely rethought.

Of these three strands, Susskind’s first is his most convincing. To be sure, he acknowledges, workers have regularly panicked unnecessarily about being replaced by machines. But this time, he argues, the threat is real. His best evidence of the frightening pace at which AI is developing comes through attempts to build robots to play chess and Go. For years, scientists followed an approach of trying to copy human thought and behavior. This proved impossible to replicate, and by the late 1980s, AI appeared to have hit a wall.

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Πηγή: strategy-business.com