A World Without Work

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of A World Without Work pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

1. Every wave of technology sets off two opposing forces: a **substituting force** that lets machines take work from humans, and a **complementing force** that raises the value of the tasks left to people. For 200 years the complementing force won. Susskind's claim is that it is now weakening.
2. The **ALM hypothesis** (routine tasks are automatable, non-routine ones are safe) has been overturned by **task encroachment**, machines steadily colonizing tasks once thought to require distinctly human judgment, from driving to diagnosing disease.

The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.

1. An Age-Old Fear, and Why This Time May Be Different
2. Two Forces: Substituting and Complementing
3. Task Encroachment and the Fall of the ALM Hypothesis
4. The Pragmatist Revolution and the AI Fallacy
5. Not Zero Work, but Not Enough Work
6. The New Inequality: From Labour to Capital
7. The Big State and Conditional Basic Income
8. The Power of Big Tech
9. The Problem of Meaning and Leisure