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

by Daniel Susskind

Recommendations from our site

“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” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books of 2020

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“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.” Read more...

The Best Business Books of 2020: the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Andrew Hill, Journalist

The book, according to the author

Ideas in my book which, only a few months ago, some might have dismissed as outlandish or infeasible—something like a basic income, for instance—have become completely commonplace today in thinking about how we respond to the current pandemic-induced world with less work. The last few months demonstrate that, when we face the distributional problem again in the future, a key part of the response to it will have to be through the state. And, given what we have seen over the last few months, I expect that people could be willing to support that.

The Best Books on the Future of Work