Welcome to inverted AI utopia! Why Dr Vivienne Ming's future looks positively merciless

In her book Robot Proof – When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People (Wiley, March 2026), neuroscientist, technologist, and serial entrepreneur Dr Vivienne Ming suggests that robots and AI will leave ninety-five percent of humanity worse off – not only economically, but also cognitively.

However, the remaining five percent of the population will become “the most powerful creative force on the planet”, she claims, with “humans and machines working together to do things neither could do alone” – a symbiotic relationship akin to intellectual cyborgism.

(It is certainly the case that no AI or robot could achieve anything without data harvested from humans: it would be a blank page, an empty table, a blinking cursor, or a motionless mechatronic puppet.)

That aside, Ming predicts that the twin forces of robots and AI will form a sorting mechanism, of sorts, creating a system that works for a small elite but sidelines everyone ...