What Should My Children Do?

From the author of Growth, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024, a guide for helping the next generation through an educational world, and a job market, forever changed by AI—as well as for anyone navigating the upheaval in today’s workplace

We live at an extraordinary technological moment. Every day, it seems, we hear about machines taking on tasks that we thought only human beings would ever do: making medical diagnoses and composing jokes, drafting legal arguments and designing beautiful buildings, writing lines of code and even forming relationships. The leaders of the largest AI companies now claim that within a few years we will build an AI that can outperform us at every task that we do.

For the last fifteen years, professor Daniel Susskind has been exploring the impact of technology on work. Recent developments in AI—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok—are an astonishing new chapter in this story. And today, the most common question people have is clear: What should my children do?

What Should My Children Do? is an optimistic and hopeful guide for parents thinking about how to help their families flourish in this age of astonishing labor market shifts. It is also for anyone thinking about their career, asking how to respond to the turmoil that is underway in the working world, as well as for business and political leaders experiencing the same upheaval.

With his deep knowledge of AI and how the world of work is changing, professor Susskind offers an evidence-based look at the problem and a practical path forward.