Rob Wiblin

I'll list six of them briefly here.

First, Ben argues that even if you think AI is going to take all of the jobs from human beings before long, you might also reasonably expect salaries to actually explode in the short run.

One well-respected economic model that he goes through suggests that average wages could rise tenfold before the party ends, creating what might be the best brief window ever to be a worker.

Second, Ben explains why retraining as a plumber or other physical laborer, a piece of advice that you hear more and more in reaction to AI, and which sounds sort of common sense, including to me, he explains why he thinks that's probably counterproductive for most listeners to this show anyway.

Third, Ben explains why it's not sufficient to just have a job that's very hard to automate with AI.

You need to find a job that's highly complementary with AI outputs as well.

Fourth, the book investigates why the jobs most exposed to the current wave of AI are people earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year, which is a pretty significant reversal of previous automation trends.

Fifth, he goes into why Geoffrey Hinton's very famous 2016 prediction that hospitals should stop training radiologists turned out to be completely wrong.

And nine years later, radiology employment is hitting record levels.

While on the other hand, another hugely influential prediction from 2013 that creative work would resist automation

That's also turned out to be totally wrong, but in the reverse direction.

And sixth, why induced demand asymmetries suggest that people providing things that people want in almost unlimited amounts, like better health, they're going to do well, while people delivering things that we want in kind of more of a fixed amount, like tax compliance, they're going to struggle no matter how productive AI potentially makes them.

Of course, nobody actually knows what skills are going to be more valuable in five years or most valuable in five years.

It would be crazy to think that you did.

But the chapter gives you a lot of tools to avoid making mistakes that would look really predictable in retrospect.

And it also gives you an understanding of the underlying economic effects and trends so that you can make sense of shifts as they start to happen and try to take advantage of them rather than just get steamrolled.

And Ben doesn't chicken out from having actual concrete conclusions as well.

He has a specific list of fields he thinks you shouldn't train in without serious thought.

Okay, that's a taste of what you'd get just from chapter 8 of a 15-chapter book.

As I said, this is the wisdom we've been gradually compiling for the last 14 years, so it's pretty information-dense.