What Should My Children Do?

A Human's Guide to the Age of AI

De: Daniel Susskind

From the author of Growth, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024, a guide for parents thinking about how to help their families through a world—and a job market—forever changed by AI, as well as for anyone thinking about how to navigate the turmoil that is underway in the working and political worlds

We live at an extraordinary technological moment. Every day, it seems, we hear about machines taking on tasks that we thought only human beings alone would ever do: making medical diagnoses and composing amusing jokes, drafting legal arguments and designing beautiful buildings, writing lines of code and 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 they do.

For the last fifteen years, Prof. Daniel Susskind has been exploring the impact of technology on work. Recent developments in AI – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok – are astonishing, but are nevertheless best thought of as a remarkable new chapter in this far longer story.

Still, the most common question parents have remains–what should my children do?

What Should my Children Do? is a guide for parents thinking about how to help their families flourish in this age of tectonic labor market shifts. It is also for anyone thinking about their career, asking how to navigate the turmoil that is underway in the working world. And it is for leaders, too, in politics and business, whose ‘labor market policies’ and ‘learning and development strategies’, while well-intentioned, are too often ineffective at best and harmful at worst.

With his deep knowledge of the field, Prof. Susskind offers an evidence-based lens on the problem and path forward.