We live at an extraordinary technological moment. Every day, it seems, we hear about machines taking on tasks that we thought only human beings would ever do: making medical diagnoses and composing jokes, drafting legal arguments and designing beautiful buildings, writing lines of code and even forming relationships. The leaders of the largest AI companies now claim that within a few years we will build an AI that can outperform us at every task that we do.
For the last fifteen years, professor Daniel Susskind has been exploring the impact of technology on work. Recent developments in AI—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok—are an astonishing new chapter in this story. And today, the most common question people have is clear: What should my children do?
What Should My Children Do? is an optimistic and hopeful guide for parents thinking about how to help their families flourish in this age of astonishing labor market shifts. It is also for anyone thinking about their career, asking how to respond to the turmoil that is underway in the working world, as well as for business and political leaders experiencing the same upheaval.
With his deep knowledge of AI and how the world of work is changing, professor Susskind offers an evidence-based look at the problem and a practical path forward.
Author
Daniel Susskind
Professor Daniel Susskind is the Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College. He is also a digital fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, a senior research associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at University of Oxford, and a member of the UK government’s Expert Panel on AI and the Future of Work. His most recent book, Growth: A Reckoning, was chosen by President Obama as one of his Favorite Books of 2024 and was a runner-up for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. He is also the author of A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, a runner-up for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2020, and coauthor of The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts. His TED Talk on the future of work has been viewed more than 1.7 million times. He is a father of three.
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