“The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?”

If you were paired with a machine to do a task, could together you do better than the machine alone? For Cowen, the answer matters more than you might think – with intelligent machines, he believes, lies the answer to The Great Stagnation he has worried about in the past.

There are two types of people in the world, he argues; those who can increase the productivity of machines, and those who will be replaced by them. One group will earn increasingly higher wages and rewards; the other will earn relatively less and less. Average is over, and though machines won’t replace human labour entirely, as the Luddites feared, they will completely change how labour is allocated.

This is not to say that computer programmers are the only ones who will make money, of course. Rather, Cowen thinks of working with machines more broadly; using the automatic checkouts in supermarkets, for example, or adapting your smartphone to improve workflow. It is these teams of humans and machines, he argues, that can really make our productivity soar. This is true of life in general, he says, not just the workplace, whether it be relationships, hobbies, or education.

It’s a provocative idea, particularly in light of today’s concerns over inequality. The Economist this week, for example, quotes Daimler as describing their employees as “robot farming” because the workers are there to shepherd the robots as they do the work; presumably the ratio of sheep to shepherds is diminishing. To my mind, Cowen has a point; the highest payoff activities in life will always be those that cannot be done by another person or machine.

What I am less sure of is how this affects young people preparing to enter the workforce. In some ways there have always been key skills that are most lucrative in the world of work, but if Cowen is correct, the segregation of students who do not learn to work with machines may be even more extreme than the income divisions between disciplines today. Is it possible, however, to conduct a classical education while also developing those skills? Should that be the point of education? Degrees that focus on deep, reflective thinking, like philosophy, may find significant difficulties adjusting if indeed they even want to. Either way, our society may lose out, as certainly do our would-be philosophers. The rise of the machines may decide much in the world to come, but under it lies a perspective that may not be compatible with everything we do – can and should we attempt to reconcile them?

Anyway, the book is clearly fascinating: you can keep reading it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Average is Over as a free advance reader copy – it is released tomorrow.