Politicians, techno-futurists, social critics, as well as Silicon Valley's super-rich entrepreneurs have come together to argue that we live on the cusp of an age of rapid technological automation. In conferences and books, through their foundations and in the media, they announce the end of work as we know it. They insist on an immediate future of generalized labor obsolescence and the end of work. But does the much-discussed "rise of the robots" really explain the jobs crisis that awaits us on the other side of recent crises?

In Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav looks at the economic trends that are shaping our working lives. What it reveals to us is not so much a world in which technology rapidly replaces employment as an investment crisis caused by the low profitability of industry at a global level (due to a gigantic excess of capacity and competition) and of the service sector, which has never stood out for its productivity. The economy is growing slowly, interrupted by periodic recessions, and what is offered to the global workforce is precarious, low-paid and often informal employment. Faced with this panorama in which the unfulfilled technological promise and mass underemployment coexist, Benanav wonders about what social movements will be necessary to propel us towards a post-scarcity world with generalized material security. In response to demands like universal basic income, which would barely be enough to support this growing army of underemployed workers, Benanav offers us a counterproposal.