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

"Yes, and although it was written pre-pandemic it plays very well into the obsession that we all have now with the future of work and how it’s going to turn out for us. The book picks up on a number of themes that the FT book award has highlighted in previous years. We gave the award to Martin Ford’s book, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment , five years ago. That was early on in the slightly dystopian discussion about what’s coming from automation. Daniel Susskind picks this up, still with a rather negative forecast—that work is going to be completely disrupted by automation and that we need to do something pretty dramatic in order to prepare for that. His prescriptions are curbs on big tech—which is one of the things that we’re already seeing with regulators and policymakers in Europe and now in the US. Perhaps a bit more idealistically, he talks about bringing back the big state. He looks at ways in which we can actually compensate or offset the likelihood that we’re going to have a world without work. Well, the title is hyperbole, it’s not a world without work. What he’s looking at is ways in which you can bring or sustain meaning for people who have got less work—or different types of work—in a future where everything is more automated. The robots are going to take our jobs and we’re going to have to shift towards a world in which we learn how to deal with the amount of time that is going to free up for us. I’m a big believer in the fact that work is useful not only because it’s productive and brings us income, but also because we find meaning in it. “Although it was written pre-pandemic it plays very well into the obsession that we all have now with the future of work and how it’s going to turn out for us” Clearly that’s one of the problems with universal basic income—which is an idea that’s discussed in this book, as it has been in various other books that we’ve looked at for the prize in the past. You need to find ways to make people still feel good about themselves, even if they’re not on the hamster wheel of work—because that hamster wheel is now occupied by robot hamsters, rather than us."

"A World Without Work by Daniel Susskind was published in January 2020, before Covid-19 really got going, but the global pandemic brought the world the book describes immeasurably closer. Susskind is an economist at Oxford, which means he’s good at explaining the economics with words instead of equations, and that’s what this book tries to do. He goes into the economic history and lays out the relationship between technology and employment that has held in the past (covering, for example, the Luddites. Apparently Ned Ludd, from whom they took their name, was not a real person). As I understand it, however, the future is likely to be different from the past, and robots really are going to be taking our jobs. For that reason, we need to be looking at things like Universal Basic Income (UBI) to give people financial support but beyond that, sources of meaning in life other than work. Whether Susskind turns out to be overly dramatic or scarily prescient only time will tell, but it’s definitely something to be aware of and ties in, I think, with the book below."