Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-28 0

In 1920 the Czech writer Karel Čapek needed a name for the artificial laborers in his new play, and his brother Josef suggested one built from robota, an old word for forced labor. A century later, software can draft legal memos, write code and plan a delivery driver's day, and the question his play raised feels less like science fiction: when machines can do more of what people do for a living, what happens to the people? The answers on offer range from a world of leisure to a world of mass joblessness, and both have been predicted many times before.

Here you will meet the switchboard operators whose jobs vanished in the 1920s, the bank tellers who unexpectedly multiplied, and the economists who learned to ask which tasks a machine can do instead of which jobs it will "take." You will weigh rival forecasts about AI, the fight over whether gig drivers are employees, and policies from retraining to basic income on their actual evidence. The next headline about robots and jobs should then prompt the questions that matter: who gains, who loses, how fast, and who gets a say.

Levels

  1. 1 1. What Work Gives Us 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. Machines and Jobs Before Now 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. Tasks, Not Jobs 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. AI and Which Work Is Exposed 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. Gigs, Apps and Platforms 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. Wages, Skills and Inequality 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. What Should Be Done? 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Work, Dignity and Citizenship 5-question quiz

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