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

While some of the thinking may not be radically new, overall this is a thought-provoking and stimulating read. It is well written and packed with some truly astounding facts and illustrations - like the combined value of [largely unpaid] housework in the UK (cooking, child care, laundry, cleaning and household chores) being almost four times that of the manufacturing sector. My only surprise is that being read on a Kindle, I thought I was about two thirds of the way through when I got to the conclusion - so long and detailed is the reference section at the end. Much food for thought in this book, and it is well served up and easily digestible. A good read.

Daniel Susskind raises the right question, and sets the right agenda and direction of travel. Technology acting through automation does increase productivity and reduce working hours per unit of output. This will inevitably either vastly increase output, or vastly reduce employment and aggregate wage. It needs an urgent solution such as a basic income. Susskind follows David Autor in distinguishing labour substituting and labour complementing aspects of automation. In fact, it’s the same phenomenon of increased productivity, only differentiated as to whether in early periods, increased output is derived from the same labour, or in more developed economies, decreased labour produces the same output, either due to satiation or to ecological constraints. His analysis of automation technology requires a more complete typology than his ‘purist/pragmatic’ divide. A useful hierarchy might be • Mimicry of human techniques • Simple full enumeration techniques, but by powerful machine processors • Deterministic algorithms, such as Kantorovich’s linear programming solution • One-pass heuristic algorithms, such as Clarke and Wright’s vehicle scheduling algorithm • Iterative adaptive heuristic algorithms, the basis of current AI These are not ‘pragmatic’ techniques, but the implementation of some form of logic. Susskind doesn’t refer to the extensive literature on philosophy of technology, which might suggest that deductive logic is objective. All approaches therefore explore this same objective logic, and cannot be distinguished as ‘pure’ or ‘pragmatic’. The same literature is more nuanced on the interaction of human agency and technology objectivity than Susskind is in airily declaring himself to be ‘not a technological determinist’ (p9). Our choices may very well be very tightly constrained, if not totally determined. Susskind’s wide-ranging claims need deeper challenge. His claim that technology has created more bank employment misses the fact that 3,303 bank branches closed in the UK from 2015 to 2019 (p27). He makes the contradictory complaints that US big business fails to pay tax in Europe, and then that it does pay tax in Europe! (p178-9). But he’s right that education to high skilled work is not a solution, and that it’s not the number of jobs, but personal incomes and aggregate macroeconomic wage which is the worry. The trail he doesn’t follow is that both lead to debt, and debt leads to crisis and austerity. His discussion of basic income (UBI) is unfortunately shallow. He worries about a UBI work disincentive, when it is clear that current welfare systems with their huge benefit withdrawal rates are major work disincentives compared to UBI. He underrates the gain in dignity, the increase in take-up, and the reduction in administrative cost of UBI’s elimination of means testing. And he proposes...

But I felt that his single chapter on potential forward paths could/should have been further developed. Numerous others have detailed a world without (or with less) “work” by humans. I also felt the the author spent too much time admiring the problem from an academic perspective.

The author does a decent job of describing the problem, which will indeed come to pass. But, beyond that he just babbles along with no real conclusions or solutions. Obviously a liberal with "tax the rich and pay the poor" mentality he obviously just likes to hear himself talk. Save your money...

Daniel Susskind, together with his brother Jamie, and their father, Richard, are AI evangelists who preach the end of the world – sort of – for human-centred work. This family has been preaching, en masse, the importance of AI. They are not wrong although there are areas in which they may have overstated their case. This book is well written and is of a wider scope than the other Susskind books. In the next five to ten years, not only will a lot of jobs be rendered otiose by technology, but also by the Coronavirus. In many cases, many jobs that remain will have altered, if not in substance, certainly in the way they are done. So, in that sense, ‘A World Without Work’ is not revolutionary or revelatory, although Susskind likes to think so. He says at p. 183 that ‘To deal with technological unemployment, we will need what I call a conditional basic income – CBI for short’. But CBI is not his creation. It has been the subject of many economic debates long before this book. See the paper on ‘(Un)conditional Basic Income’ by Jan Van Cauwnberghe, Niklas Mannfolk, Jan Klesla, January 2018, for example. Nonetheless, the book discusses interesting issues and although the philosophical underpinnings are there, the idea of work and meaning has a lot more to be discussed, and picking the odd bits to emphasise the importance of technology is inadequate. One area that requires serious consideration, and not sufficiently touched on in this book, is the political question, how will society support the masses who are out of work? Susskind partially discusses this in the last five pages of the book, but they relate to what he claims to be the CBI solution that ‘he proposed’.