Ashley Marc Recanati - AI Battle Royale: How to Protect Your Job from Disruption in the 4th Industrial Revolution

Drawing inspiration from their Renaissance namesake, Copernicus books revolve around scientific curiosity and discovery. Authored by experts from around the world, our books strive to break down barriers and make scientific knowledge more accessible to the public, tackling modern concepts and technologies in a nontechnical and engaging way. Copernicus books are always written with the lay reader in mind, offering introductory forays into different fields to show how the world of science is transforming our daily lives. From astronomy to medicine, business to biology, you will find herein an enriching collection of literature that answers your questions and inspires you to ask even more.

Cover illustration: Science-fiction inspired eye hovering above a battle. Hal-9000 (Alamy images) (Battle of the Chess Pieces: Prosperity and Peace across the Board), by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, woodblock print (1852). Reproduced from the National Diet Library website, of the Japan National Diet Library

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This book would not have seen the day, were it not for the previous work done by scholars, economists, business gurus, demographers, and researchers in fields ranging from technology to the job market, to various aspects of human resources, strategy, and management.

I would like to thank the staff at Springer, in particular, Jacob Dreyer, for his help and support.

Shanghai, China

Word on the street has it, we are on the verge of radical technological feats that will either usher us into a blissful utopia or get us wiped out by machinesdepending on who you listen to. Perhaps the reality will unfold somewhere in between.

A salient characteristic of this future, at least in the rosier version, depicts a jobless society. From its dawn, mankind has invented and perfected tools to increase labor efficiency. This would mark a milestone long dreamt of: ridding us from the need to work.

That was fine while projected on a horizon blurry enough to earn the science-fiction tag. But a rising tidal wave of disruption now leads many a voice to foresee an acceleration in this shift toward more automation and less jobs. We wake up to realize that this miracle might happen within our lifetime!

But not so fast.

Assuming we steer toward a jobless society, it wont appear overnight from out of the blue. Rather, we will face growing unemployment in the years ahead as more jobs get grinded by the steamroller named automation. How are we to cope during this interlude of dubious length, this purgatory to heaven?

A profusion of literature on tech acceleration is filling the shelves, spawning sections with titles like Future Technologies, Futurology or Disruption. These books primarily address the C-Suite, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. Following the initial rhetoric aimed at convincing audiences of an imminent maelstrom, they advise on what society should do and how firms can ride the disruption wave.

But what of the average worker? Not the politician or CEO, but the rest: the 90% who own a reversely (un)important amount of assets, supposedly constitute the backbone of our social tissue, and for who jobs are just about the only thing left to hang on to?