Questions

Will AI take my job? Why does work pay less than it used to? Who actually gains when the machines get better? These are the questions people are asking, and most of what they get back is either hype or doom. Each essay here answers one of them in plain language, in about a thousand words, using the evidence gathered in the book. No economics degree required.

The essays are free under a Creative Commons licence: share them, translate them, teach from them.

Reading the book itself? There is a one-page guide to what each chapter argues, free to print.

Written and translated with AI, under human editorial control: David Vanheeswijck reviews every essay before publication and holds editorial responsibility.

• If AI does all the work, who buys the products?

  The question is sharper than most people asking it realise. A wage is the pipe through which production turns into customers: people are paid to make things, and their pay buys the things. If automation closes that pipe, profits eventually collapse with it. The economy does not strictly need everyone to earn a wage, but it does need everyone to hold a claim on what the machines earn. So the answer is: whoever owns the machines. The real question is how many people that will be.

  Read the full answer · Français · Nederlands · draws on ch-05, ch-10

• What should I tell my kids to study?

  The honest answer is that the question is slightly wrong. Choosing the right degree assumes the problem is skills, and the evidence says the problem is the ladder itself: the bottom rungs are being removed while the top ones still exist. Tell them to study what builds judgement, and worry less about the perfect subject than about whether they will ever hold a claim on the machines doing the work.

  Read the full answer · Français · Nederlands · draws on ch-03, ch-04

• Why not just tax the AI companies?

  Because the money runs away, and this money runs faster than any before it. Europe tried taxing wealth: twelve countries in 1990, three left today. An AI company's core asset is a file that can be on a server in another jurisdiction by next week. The instinct is right, the companies owe the public plenty, but the durable way to collect is not a tax on profits that can move. It is a stake in the asset itself, taken as the price of access to the market, because the one thing that cannot leave the country is the customers.

  Read the full answer · Français · Nederlands · draws on ch-05, ch-07

• Will AI take my job? Start with what already happened to pay

  The useful place to start is not the future. Pay stopped tracking productivity in 1973, fifty years before AI arrived, and never started again. AI is not doing something new to workers; it is finishing that process faster. Which means the answer is not another training course. It is ownership.

  Read the full answer · Français · Nederlands · draws on ch-04

• OpenAI says the public should get a stake in AI. Is that real?

  It is real enough to take seriously and not yet real enough to count on. The proposal gets the single most important thing right, a share of the assets rather than a tax on the profits, and leaves unanswered every detail that decides whether such a thing survives.

  Read the full answer · Français · Nederlands · draws on ch-07, ch-08, ch-09