Introduction Robots and AI tools are invading the workforce en masse. Reports from the White House, McKinsey, and Oxford University confirm one of the most disturbing trends since the advent of the Industrial Revolution: much of the workforce across the world can and will be automated. This is an overview of what to expect based on different points of view. What makes us human will allow us to survive and prosper, although few know exactly what skills and qualities are most important. This book examines that question in great depth. The answers will surprise many. We’ve been alerted to the problem in many ways in recent years. President Obama warned us on the way out of the White House: “The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas,” the president’s team said at the end of his second term in 2016. “It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle- class jobs obsolete.”1 It’s already happened and will be the biggest societal sea change of our time. What’s changing? Let’s look inside the White House study, which came out in the last month of the Obama administration and was mostly ignored at the time. • Every three months, about 6 percent of jobs in the economy are destroyed by shrinking or closing businesses, while a slightly larger per- centage of jobs are added—resulting in rising employment and a roughly constant unemployment rate. • The economy has repeatedly proven itself capable of handling this scale of change, although it would depend on how rapidly the changes hap- pen and how concentrated the losses are in specific occupations that are hard to shift from.