After Work

The career as we know it is ending. Not someday. Now.A radiologist discovers that a machine reads scans she spent thirteen years learning to interpret. A warehouse manager watches his workforce shrink from 240 to 62 in five years. A marketing executive with an MBA from Kellogg is restructured out of the profession he spent two decades building. None of them failed. All of them were superseded.After Work is the book for anyone who senses that the rules have changed but hasn't yet seen the full picture. Drawing on economics, psychology, philosophy, and the stories of real people navigating the disruption, Ari C. Mercer maps the transformation that artificial intelligence is bringing to professional life - and asks the harder question that most books on AI avoid: if the machines can do what we trained to do, what are we for?Inside you'll find:- Why white-collar professionals are now more vulnerable than factory workers- The "Great Hollowing" - how AI is eliminating the middle of every organization- Why "just learn to code" is the reskilling fallacy of our generation- The case for distributed AI ownership, care economy investment, and a new social contract- Two possible futures for 2045 - and what determines which one we getInformed by the work of Daron Acemoglu, Shoshana Zuboff, Thomas Piketty, Hannah Arendt, Richard David Precht, and Michael Sandel, After Work is not a technology book. It is a book about what happens to people, communities, and democracies when the economic foundation shifts beneath them.A Guiding Mortals Book