Bonus: If you're an subscriber, you can join David and Richard, alongside's editor in chief, Mat Honan, for an exclusive conversation live on Tuesday, December 9 at 1pm ET about this topic. Sign up to be a part here . Any far-reaching new technology is always uneven in its adoption, but few have been more uneven than generative AI. That makes it hard to assess its likely impact on individual businesses, let alone on productivity across the economy as a whole. At one extreme, AI coding assistants have revolutionized the work of software developers. Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that half of Meta's code would be written by AI within a year.

In the future, machines will replace humans in jobs. This is not controversial: it's what machines have done since well before the start of the industrial revolution. Petrol pump attendants were replaced by automated pumps, secretaries were replaced by Microsoft Office. This is what economists call the substitutive effect of automation: humans are substituted in jobs by machines. From time to time, fears have been expressed that humans would run out of jobs entirely. I first wrote about this concern back in 1980, and like many other people at the time, I under-estimated the resilience of what economists call the complementary effect of automation.

Today, we are no longer confined to what nature or natural intelligence must offer. From the steam engine to electricity and digital transformations to artificial intelligence, molecular manufacturing, and bioengineering, each new transformative innovation has brought us a new (man-made) way of doing things in ways that nature did not provide for. As new ways of manufacturing and production are emerging, they are taking away an ever-increasing number of tasks and roles previously performed by a human labor force. Furthermore, the automation, self-improvement, self-replication and distributed nature of the manufacturing processes are producing products and goods at a minimal cost. As a result, each of these existing and emerging technologies, individually and collectively, will likely one day eliminate the need for human labor for the production of goods and services--shaking the very fundamentals of economics as we know today.

Calum is an author and speaker about artificial intelligence, and its likely future impact on society. His work is informed by the experience of a 30-year career in business. You can see some of his talks here. If you are new to the idea that machine consciousness and superintelligence may be with us soon (in decades rather than centuries), his novel Pandora's Brain and his non-fiction books Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity are great places to start.

Today, we are no longer confined to what nature or natural intelligence must offer. From the steam engine to electricity and digital transformations to artificial intelligence, molecular manufacturing and bioengineering, each new transformative innovation has brought us a new (man-made) way of doing things in ways that nature did not provide for. As new ways of manufacturing and production are emerging, they are taking away an ever-increasing number of tasks and roles previously performed by a human labor force. Furthermore, the automation, self-improvement, self-replication and distributed nature of the manufacturing processes are producing products and goods at a minimal cost. As a result, each of these existing and emerging technologies, individually and collectively, will likely one day eliminate the need for human labor for production of goods and services--shaking the very fundamentals of economics as we know today.

This is really just half a book, as the first half is a decent review of current technology and trends, and the second half contains unsubstantiated, poorly rationalized prognostications. The predictions are not really credible because the author expresses lack of understanding and abundance of shallow thinking, undermining the entire second half. For example, the author seems compelled to mention Bitcoin and 3D printing, without grasping their true impact or tractability in future economies. They are among the latest tech buzzwords, so rah, rah. Another case, did you know that Google Wikipedia omniscience?

My recent book, The Economic Singularity, argues that improvements in machine intelligence are going to make it impossible for many of us –maybe all of us – to earn a living. If this is even an outside possibility, we'd all be wise to spend some time working out how we intend to deal with it. In 1900, 40 per cent of American workers were employed in agriculture. That has now fallen below three per cent and while the farm workers eventually found better jobs elsewhere in the economy, their horses didn't. For the year 1900 was'peak horse', with around 25m of them working on farms in America.

Are we approaching Economic Singularity? My recent book, The Economic Singularity, argues that improvements in machine intelligence are going to make it impossible for many of us –maybe all of us – to earn a living. If this is even an outside possibility, we'd all be wise to spend some time working out how we intend to deal with it. In 1900, 40 per cent of American workers were employed in agriculture. That has now fallen below three per cent and while the farm workers eventually found better jobs elsewhere in the economy, their horses didn't.

I picked up this book over the weekend after seeing an ad on reddit. Wasn't sure what to expect because I haven't read any Calum Chace books before. Until seeing the ad I hadn't even heard of him. Anyway, economic survival is something I've been thinking about, and despite trying to find predictions, forecasts and timelines I mostly found nothing. So I gave this book a chance and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of thought put into it.

As well as his new upcoming book "The Economic Singularity" that Calum is nice enough to be sharing a review copy of. So what is "Singularity" you ask? Well there are many types Wikipedia puts it this way... Because the capabilities of such a superintelligencemay be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence. "I don't like the term'singularity' when applied to technology. A singularity is a state where physical laws no longer apply because some value or metric goes to infinity, such as the curvature of space-time at the center of a black hole. No one can predict what happens at a singularity."