the Vanishing Value: Work, Skills, Meaning in age of AI

Study hard, and you'll be better off than us. For three generations it was true. Today it's a formula recited out of habit - and the kids have already noticed.I'm almost thirty, I work as a cloud architect, and I have everything that currently passes for good fortune: skills in demand, a solid salary, a secure job. And that is exactly where the problem is most visible: I am paid, punctually and well, for work whose contribution I can no longer explain to myself.This book is an investigation conducted from the inside. Inside the industry that builds the machines it describes, inside the meetings where ten qualified professionals spend an hour discussing a metric no customer will ever see, inside a work calendar that would not survive an honest audit. Chapter by chapter, it lays out what artificial intelligence is hollowing out: skills that expire before they can be learned, hiring that has become a lottery disguised as meritocracy, companies discovering they're standing in line too, facts that can no longer be proven, and the identity that remains when "what do you do for a living" no longer has an answer. Down to the question an entire generation is asking in silence, at the end of dinner, quietly enough to disown it: but then, honestly - to do what?You will find no solutions here, and no consoling twist in the final chapter. The optimistic objections - AI will create new jobs, creativity will remain, universal basic income is coming - are taken seriously, one by one, in their strongest form. The only pact is this: no lies about the landscape.For those who are twenty and have to choose what to study. For those who are thirty and keep postponing. For those who are fifty and no longer recognize their own profession. For anyone who suspects the word "value" is emptying out - and would rather look than look away.

Pagina's: 107, Paperback, Independently published