Dr. Vivienne Ming

During a visit to the Department of Education a few years ago, some of the world’s top education researchers posed this question: “How do we robot-proof students?”

The simple truth is that there is no skill or knowledge that is robot-proof. Still, every major government in the world has a policy paper about AI and the workforce. They are all wrong. None of them seem to understand anything about the most important component of the future of work: people.

How to Robot-Proof Your Kids is about people. We are the complex, flawed, central characters in this story, one that explores what it means to be human in an increasingly automated world. Insightful, engaging, hilarious, vulnerable, and shocking, Dr. Vivienne Ming undertakes a truly fun and unusual tour through how natural and artificial intelligence will co-exist in the future.

There is an unspoken tax that we all pay. It is a tax that impedes growth and stagnates economies, a tax that causes massive amounts of money and productivity to be lost every year. This tax is collected around the world and often targets those least able to pay it. It is the tax on being queer, POC, or female. It is the tax on being different.

Dr. Vivienne Ming provocatively addresses this tax by making it tangible. Leveraging massive amounts of HR data, she rewrites issues of bias and discrimination in order to understand and quantify what your differences are costing you. Simultaneously didactic and richly autobiographical, The Tax on Being Different combines vibrant life stories with profound insights about people and, more importantly, how we can change them for the better.