Daniel Susskind
Economist, King's College London & Oxford
About
Daniel Susskind is an economist who studies what automation does to work, and what work is for once machines can do most of it. He is Research Professor in Economics at King's College London, the Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, a Senior Research Associate at Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Digital Fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Before academia he spent several years inside the British government, as a policy adviser in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, a policy analyst in the No. 10 Policy Unit, and a senior policy adviser in the Cabinet Office. He took a doctorate in economics at Oxford in 2016, having been a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. His argument is that the pressing question is not whether there will be enough work, but how to distribute income and find meaning when there is not — a problem he treats as political and moral rather than technological.
Key Contributions
- Wrote A World Without Work (2020), arguing technological unemployment is a distribution and meaning problem rather than a scarcity of tasks
- Co-wrote The Future of the Professions (2015) with Richard Susskind, on how technology reshapes expert work in law, medicine, education and accountancy
- Wrote Growth: A Reckoning (2024), named by Barack Obama among his favourite books of that year
- Served in three UK government roles — the PM's Strategy Unit, the No. 10 Policy Unit, and the Cabinet Office — before returning to academic economics
- Sits on the UK Government's Expert Panel on AI and the Future of Work
