THE OPTIMISTIC BOOK PEOPLE HAND TO SOMEONE WHO’S AFRAID OF AI.

In 1920s England if you wanted to be woken up on time to get to your job at the factory, you had to hire a ‘knocker-upper’—a guy who drags a big wooden stick around town and knocks on your window.

Then, the alarm clock arrived, and the knocker-uppers were left asking, ‘what are we worth now?’

Now, AI is here to do the same thing the alarm clock did to the knocker-uppers, but this time it’s the doctors, lawyers, accountants, designers, developers, teachers and business owners. It’s every job that can be done on a computer.

And we’re all left asking the same question. What are we worth now?

This book is about what happens when technology—something that makes the expensive cheap, the exclusive widely available, and the impossible routine—gives us everything we could ever dream of, but replaces our role in society in the process.

You’ll discover:

• Why those fighting to save your job are fighting to keep you a robot, stuck in a system designed for machines before we had machines smart enough to run it

• The lies you’re being told about who is and isn’t using AI, and what will happen if you continue to believe them

• Why “Accelerate or Die” might be our only choice—and what slowing down AI will actually cost us.

And why the most valuable thing you can become in the age of machines is the one thing a machine will never be.

More human.