Susskind’s predictions will likely make his book catnip to supporters of the presidential candidate Andrew Yang, whose campaign focuses on solutions to technological unemployment. But the book should be required reading for any potential presidential candidate thinking about the economy of the future. That’s because Susskind also turns to one of the biggest consequences of technological change — inequality — and what can be done about it. “Today’s inequalities are the birth pangs of tomorrow’s technological unemployment,” Susskind writes, and he has a point.... Even if Susskind’s prediction is wrong — that machines will soon render many humans irrelevant in the labor market — his book provides a useful exercise in planning for a more unequal future. The dire predictions of workers losing their jobs to machines have not come true in the past. That doesn’t mean they never will.
