Creativity, Skills, and the Useless Majority in the Automated Era (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798198156470)

A provocative and deeply unsettling examination of the collision between artificial intelligence, robotics, creativity, labor, and human value in the twenty-first century.

In Creativity, Skills, and the Useless Majority in the Automated Era, Bernd Riemann argues that society is entering the first technological revolution in history that simultaneously automates both cognition and physical labor. While previous industrial revolutions replaced muscle and later transformed information work, the convergence of AI and robotics now threatens the two foundations upon which modern economies were built: human thinking and human usefulness.

Rejecting the comforting narratives of mainstream economics and technology culture, this book confronts the uncomfortable questions most analysts avoid. What happens when machines become cheaper, faster, more predictable, and increasingly more capable than people across large portions of the economy? What happens when "learn to code" becomes obsolete at the same moment that warehouses, transportation, retail, logistics, customer service, manufacturing, and even parts of skilled trades begin automating simultaneously? And what happens to societies organized around wage labor when fewer humans are economically necessary?

Blending economic analysis, labor-market trends, psychology, philosophy, technological forecasting, and cultural critique, Riemann dismantles many of the dominant myths surrounding AI and automation, including:

- "New jobs will always emerge."
- "AI only replaces tasks, not people."
- "Everyone is creative."
- "Skilled trades are safe."
- "Prompt engineering is a durable career."
- "Reskilling will solve mass displacement."

The book explores the rise of what the author calls the "hallucination economy," where synthetic content floods markets faster than humans can verify it, and where trust, taste, judgment, and authenticity become increasingly scarce and valuable. It also examines the brutal economic arithmetic driving automation adoption: companies are not building AI and robots to empower labor, but to reduce dependence on it.

At the heart of the book lies one of its most controversial ideas: the emergence of the "useless majority." Not morally useless, but economically unnecessary inside systems optimized for automation. The book argues that modern societies are psychologically unprepared for this possibility, and that much of today's optimism about AI functions more as emotional reassurance than serious analysis.

Yet this is not a book of technological doom or anti-AI panic. It is a strategic and deeply human investigation into survival, adaptation, creativity, and meaning in an era where convenience increasingly competes with human relevance. Riemann identifies the capacities most resistant to automation-taste, originality, adaptability, emotional presence, and physical intuition in unstructured environments-and offers frameworks for navigating a rapidly destabilizing future.

Written with intellectual rigor and unusual honesty, Creativity, Skills, and the Useless Majority in the Automated Era is intended both for the exceptionally talented who may still retain leverage in the automated economy, and for the far larger number of readers who suspect they are not insulated from the coming transformation.

This is not a comforting book.

Author: Bernd Riemann
ISBN-13: 9798198156470
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 05/22/2026
Pages: 774
Format: Paperback
Weight: 2.24lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.54d