The Future Without Work. Technologies, Automation, and Should We Be Afraid of Them

Technologies not only make our lives easier but also change it beyond recognition. Professions are transforming the fastest—and in recent decades, humanity seems to have grown weary of fearing competition from machines. However, now, in light of the coronavirus, we stand on the brink of unprecedented labor automation—the future without work is already upon us. Will technologies completely replace us? What will the world look like when people lose their income and perhaps their sense of purpose in life? Or are all these fears unfounded and machines will simply assist us so that we can spend more time with family and self-development? The book by English economist and former advisor to the British government Daniel Susskind is a detailed guide to the new economic reality and a debunking of misconceptions about 'the replacement of humans by robots'. To demonstrate the seriousness of the author's assumptions, we employed new technologies in the publication of the book: the image on the cover is drawn by Yandex's neural network for generating contemporary art, and the translation from English was done using Yandex.Translate. We left some fragments of the text unedited so that everyone could appreciate the incredible capabilities of self-learning algorithms and decide for themselves whether they are friends or foes.