Adults in the Room - Yanis Varoufakis

Continuing my journey down the rabbit hole my next book was Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis. I started with AI and read quite a bit on that, was interested in the ethics and existential threat aspect. But along the way I guess I so a more imminent danger of the disruption AI will have as the next wave of automation that will affect all cognitive tasks and work. It will do this before we reach AGI and ASI.

Whilst reading Andrew Yang, I understood that there are already big chunks of at least US population who are already pushed into poverty without a way out and not being taken care of. I went looking for similar signs closer to home and found the yellow vest protests.

I understood that the yellow vests represented a revolution by a section of society in France and greater Europe affected by Globalisation, concentration of wealth and constant drive for profit optimisation. It cast the French government in quite bad light and there were peculiar documented 180 degree direction changes in policies that were meant to help people but eventually made their lives even worse.

So this is how I ended up with this book on what happened to Greece and it is quite illuminating. It reenforces the worry that not only in US but also in Europe, the current power structures are not set up to care about the next wave of automation and how that would benefit the whole population and not an increasingly higher concentration of the few.

I'm not going to try and summarise the book. I found it well written and engaging. I suggest you read it and if you would rather have the summary. It thought this was quite well written: https://lifeclub.org/books/adults-in-the-room-yanis-varoufakis-review-summary