Robots Will Steal Your Job

Now that we have sorted out how we want the economy to work in the future, let's discuss what we can do to help bring about those changes.

Now that we have thoroughly explored how the economy is going to be changing in the near future, let's discuss what you can do today to help yourself transition into this brave new world.

If our life's purpose is not the work we do, then what is it?

If acquiring more and more money won't make people happier, and they cannot compete with automation in the workplace, can we simply provide people with basic amenities to make them happy? It is a little more complicated than that.

One of the reasons that pursuing the hedonic treadmill is that our brains are wired to create happiness for us, regardless of the events around us.

There is a bit more nuance to the question of whether income can affect your happiness. It comes down to the difference between emotional well-being and life satisfaction.

Does making more money make us happier? Turns out that once we have met a certain threshold of our needs, making more money does not increase happiness.

A short parable to illustrate that sometimes things just are what they are.

In most of the industrialized world, the "pursuit of happiness" is considered to be an inalienable right. But our current economic system is not set up to allow everyone the opportunity to pursue happiness.

Society has ingrained in us that the most important aspect of our identities is our job.

Many argue that as new technologies eliminate jobs, they create new jobs. This chapter analyzes why that is an unlikely outcome with automation this widespread.

Technologies that are quite useful and safe do not always achieve widespread social acceptance. In this chapter we explore why that is.

The signs of automation taking over our economy are already showing themselves in our world.

Artificial intelligence is already stealing many of our jobs, but not the ones you might think of.

What does it mean to compare machine intelligence to human intelligence, and does it even matter when it comes to the workplace?

Now that we understand the nature of exponential growth, we can look at how it applies to the advancement of information technology.

Most people do not fully grasp the implications of exponential growth. Federico presents us with some examples to help illustrate it.

The idea that machines steal jobs is not a new one. The Luddite movement goes back to 19th century England; is there weight to their argument, or is it all just a fallacy?

Federico takes us through unemployment trends leading up to 2012.

You are about to become obsolete. You think you are special, unique, and that whatever it is that you are doing is impossible to replace. You are wrong. As we speak, millions of algorithms created by computer scientists are frantically running on servers all over the world, with one sole purpose: do whatever humans can do, but better.