Talks about how companies now collect as much data on their customers as they can in order to predict behaviour and extract more money.
This does actually benefit small businesses and individuals as well as large companies, as this information is available to purchase through e.g. targeted ads.
Very little supervision or law-making by governments, leads to backlash.
Susskind wonders in the final pages “whether the academics and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their jobs on to the experience of everyone else”.
He says the transition to a workless world would need to be smoothed by the state through something like UBI funded by taxes on capital.
He talks about whether humans can be happy without work, since it tends to loneliness, etc. But wonders if this is just a symptom of a society built around work rather than a fundamental truth.
He also wonders if all the negative commentary about robots replacing jobs is primarily by people who enjoy their jobs (since people in a position to commentate likely have more enjoyable jobs), and is ignoring the majority who don’t.
Talks about how even though AI growth is at the centre of attention, it is far from the only technology improving rapidly right now. Gene editing, DNA synthesis, and other biotechnology is racing forward in parallel. All these things combined are poised to change society.
Mostly it talks about how we can contain the coming changes to ensure safety. It suggests technical solutions, as well as social and political solutions such as international treaties, institutional changes, cooperation, and new regulation.
New platforms offer good services at low cost to attract users, and once users are locked in they progressively make their services worse and worse and charge more and more.
Solutions include reducing the role of opaque recommendation algorithms, decreasing the prominence of sponsorships and adverts, and ensuring people have the right to exit platforms with their data intact.