Are super-capable robots and algorithms destined to devour our jobs and idle much of the adult population? Predictions of a jobless future have recurred in waves since the advent of industrialization, only to crest and retreat as new jobs-usually better ones-have replaced those lost to machines. But there's good reason to believe that this time is different. Ongoing innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics are already destroying more decent middle-skill jobs than they are creating, and may be leading to a future of growing job scarcity. But there are many possible versions of that future, ranging from utterly dystopian to humane and broadly appealing. It all depends on how we respond. This book confronts the hotly-debated prospect of mounting job losses due to automation, and the widely-divergent hopes and fears that prospect evokes, and proposes a strategy for both mitigating the losses and spreading the gains from shrinking demand for human labor. We should set our collective sights, it argues, on ensuring access to adequate incomes, more free time, and decent remunerative work even in a future with less of it. Getting there will require not a single "magic bullet" solution like universal basic income or a federal job guarantee but a multi-pronged program centered on conserving, creating, and spreading work. What the book proposes for a foreseeable future of less work will simultaneously help to address growing economic inequality and persistent racial stratification, and makes sense here and now but especially as we face the prospect of net job losses.

About the Author
Cynthia Estlund is the Catherine A. Rein Professor at New York University's School of Law. She has written widely on the law and policy of work, including three prior books, Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (2003), Regoverning the Workplace: From Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation (2010), and A New Deal for China's Workers? (2017).

Reviews
Automation Anxiety offers readers a sound and accessible analysis of how automation will likely shape work into the near future, along with a bevy of ideas to address it. * Trevor Brown, PhD Student Department of Government, Cornell University, ILR Review *
How to generate enough jobs, and especially enough good jobs, in the age of automation and AI is one of the most momentous challenges facing us today. This delightful book describes the main challenges and rightly emphasizes the need for fundamental institutional and regulatory changes necessary for re-creating shared prosperity." -Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Steering clear of the future-of-work tropes of breathless futurist sci-fi boosterism or doomsaying prognostications of a dystopian world of robots taking all our jobs, Estlund explores how machine learning is transforming work for a diverse array of people. Automation Anxiety melds perceptive analysis and trenchant critique with bold, constructive, and feasible proposals for policy change. This is a highly readable diagnosis of what ails today's labor markets and working conditions and a well-informed and sophisticated plan for action written by one of today's leading scholars on the law of work." -Catherine Fisk, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley Law
Ambitious and pragmatic, visionary and judicious, and a surpassingly graceful writer, Cynthia Estlund is the country's premier scholar when it comes to thinking large about the laws and policies surrounding work in the United States and the world. Her new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of work in the age of high-tech automation. That future, Estlund shows, is likely to be one of greatly diminished and often terribly degraded work for the millions of Americans already hardest hit by wealth and income inequalities. What is to be done? Estlund's answers are compelling. Automation Anxiety draws out the best of the big ideas afoot today, with keen attention to ethno-racial rifts and the urgent need for a sustainable future for the planet, and therefore, also for human work." -William E. Forbath, Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law, Associate Dean of Research, The University of Texas at Austin



Book Information
ISBN 9780197566107
Author Cynthia Estlund
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 486g
Dimensions(mm) 242mm * 164mm * 20mm