PERSON
Robert Skidelsky
British economic historian (b. 1939) and Keynes's preeminent biographer — the three-volume John Maynard Keynes biography and The Machine Age (2023) — whose late work extends Keynesian analysis to AI and the future of work.
Robert Skidelsky is the preeminent contemporary interpreter of Keynesian thought. His three-volume biography John Maynard Keynes (1983–2000) is the definitive scholarly account of Keynes's life and intellectual development, and his subsequent books — including How Much Is Enough? (2012, with Edward Skidelsky) and The Machine Age (2023) — have extended Keynesian analysis to contemporary questions of technology, work, and human flourishing. Skidelsky's particular contribution to the AI discourse is the recognition that Keynes's 1930 prediction about leisure failed because Keynes treated work purely as a cost — and that this theoretical choice, inherited by mainstream economics, renders the discipline systematically incapable of addressing what happens when the cost is eliminated.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Skidelsky's biographical work reconstructed Keynes as a more philosophically sophisticated figure than the caricatured 'deficit-spending' advocate of popular economic history. His Keynes is a moral philosopher, art patron, and political thinker whose technical economics served a vision of civilization that the