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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2015 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
A New York Times Bestseller
Top Business Book of 2015 at Forbes
One of NBCNews.com 12 Notable Science and Technology Books of 2015
What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? We might imagine--and hope--that today's industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new innovations of a new era. In Rise of the Robots , Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that this is absolutely not the case. As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making "good jobs" obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries--education and health care--that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself.
In Rise of the Robots , Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work, and we must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what accelerating technology means for their own economic prospects--not to mention those of their children--as well as for society as a whole.
Author Notes
Martin Ford is the author of The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment which won the Business Book of the Year 2015 award in the UK. The award is worth AUD$64,300.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Though economists have generally tied increased productivity to higher wages, workers have fretted about the impact of automation on jobs. Ford, founder of a software development company, offers a very troubling view of the future of the American workforce as trends in automation outpace Moore's Law, which asserts that computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months. Worker robots, humanoid manufacturing robots, artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, cloud robotics, and other developments promise a continuation of stagnant wages, declining labor-force participation, diminishing job creation, and rising inequality. Ford details the disastrous implications for the American workforce, even white-collar workers once thought to be safe from the threat of automation. Technological advancements have seen robots go from filling and stacking boxes to making gourmet hamburgers and reading radiology film. It's only a matter of time before they can perform the duties of doctors, lawyers, journalists, and other professionals. Although these advancements cannot be stopped, Ford offers ideas on changes in social policies, including guaranteed income, to keep our economy humming and prepare ourselves for a more automated future.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN THE LATE 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends unleashed by technology, both robotization and the telecommunication systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the middle class would have to possess a college degree - as well as flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set. But, as Martin Ford documents in "Rise of the Robots," the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others, have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams. Particularly terrifying to me, computer programs can now write clear, publishable articles, and, as Ford reports, Wired magazine quotes an expert's prediction that within about a decade 90 percent of news articles will be computergenerated. It's impossible to read "Rise of the Robots" - for review anyway - without thinking about how the business of book reviewing could itself be automated and possibly improved by computers. First, the job of "close reading," now commonly undertaken with Post-its and a felt-tip red pen, will be handed off to a scanner that will instantly note all recurring words, phrases and themes. Next, where a human reviewer racks her brain for social and historical context, the review-bot will send algorithms out into the ether to scan every other book by the author as well as every other book or article on the subject. Finally, all this information will be synthesized with more fairness and erudition than any wet, carbon-based thinking apparatus could muster. Most of this could be achieved today, though, as Ford notes, if you want more creativity and selfreflexivity from your review-bot, you may have to wait until 2050. This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford, a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation - the military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as infantry. Nor does Ford venture much into the spectacular possibilities being opened up by wearable medical devices, which can already monitor just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U. Human health workers may eventually be cut out of the loop, as tiny devices to sense blood glucose levels, for example, learn how to signal other tiny implanted devices to release insulin. But "Rise of the Robots" doesn't need any more examples; the human consequences of robotization are already upon us, and skillfully chronicled here. Although the unemployment rate has fallen to officially acceptable levels, longterm unemployment persists, and underemployment - part-time jobs when full-time jobs are needed, or jobs that do not reflect a worker's education - is on the rise. College-educated people often flounder for years after graduation, finding temp jobs and permanent roommates. Adults of both sexes are drifting out of the work force in despair. All of this has happened by choice, though not the choice of the average citizen and worker. In the wake of the recession, Ford writes, many companies decided that "ever-advancing information technology" allows them to operate successfully without rehiring the people they had laid off. And there should be no doubt that technology is advancing in the direction of full unemployment. Ford quotes the co-founder of a start-up dedicated to the automation of gourmet hamburger production: "Our device isn't meant to make employees more efficient. It's meant to completely obviate them." Ford offers little hope that emerging technologies will eventually generate new forms of employment, in the way that blacksmiths yielded to autoworkers in the early 20th century. He predicts that new industries will "rarely, if ever, be highly labor-intensive," pointing to companies like YouTube and Instagram, which are characterized by "tiny workforces and huge valuations and revenues." On another front, 3-D printing is poised to make a mockery of manufacturing as we knew it. Truck driving may survive for a while - at least until self-driving vehicles start rolling out of Detroit or, perhaps, San Jose. The disappearance of jobs has not ushered in a new age of leisure, as social theorists predicted uneasily in the 1950s. Would the masses utilize their freedom from labor in productive ways, such as civic participation and the arts, or would they die of boredom in their ranch houses? Somehow, it was usually assumed, they would still manage to eat. Come to find out, there's still plenty of work to do, even if no one is willing to pay for it. This is the "shadow work" that Craig Lambert appealingly brings to light in his new book on "the unpaid, unseen jobs that fill your day." We take it for granted that we'll have to pump our own gas and bus our own dishes at Panera Bread. Booking travel reservations is now a D.I.Y. task; the travel agents have disappeared. As corporations cut their workforces, managers have to take on the work of support staff (remember secretaries?), and customers can expect to spend many hours of their lives working their way through menus and recorded advertisements in search of "customer service." At the same time, our underfunded and understaffed schools seem to demand ever more parental participation. Ambitious parents are often expected not only to drive their children to and from school, but to spend hours carrying out science projects and poring over fifth-grade math - although, as Lambert points out, parental involvement in homework has not been shown to improve children's grades or test scores. "Shadow Work" is generally a smooth ride, but there are bumps along the way. The definition of the subject sometimes seems to embrace every kind of unpaid work - from the exploitative, as in the use of unpaid interns, to the kind that is freely undertaken, like caring for one's own family. At times the book gets weighed down by an unwarranted nostalgia for the old days, when most transactions involved human interactions. For example, Lambert grants that home pregnancy tests offer women "more privacy and more control," while also lamenting - as no woman ever has - that they cut out the doctor and thus transform "what can be a memorable shared event into a solitary encounter with a plastic stick." Lambert, formerly an editor at Harvard Magazine, is on firmer ground when he explores all the ways corporations and new technologies fiendishly generate new tasks for us - each of them seemingly insignificant but amounting to many hours of annoyance. Examples include deleting spam from our inboxes, installing software upgrades, creating passwords for every website we seek to enter, and periodically updating those passwords. If nothing else, he gives new meaning to the word "distraction" as an explanation for civic inaction. As the seas rise and the air condenses into toxic smog, many of us will be bent over our laptops, filling out forms and attempting to wade through the "terms and conditions." Lambert falls short of calling for the shadow workers of the world to go out on strike. But that's what it might take to give us the time and the mental bandwidth to confront the dystopian possibilities being unleashed by technology. If middle-class jobs keep disappearing as wealth piles up at the top, Martin Ford predicts, economic mobility will "become nonexistent": "The plutocracy would shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones." We have seen this movie; in fact, in one form or another - from "Elysium" to "The Hunger Games" - we've been seeing it again and again. In "Rise of the Robots," Ford argues that a society based on luxury consumption by a tiny elite is not economically viable. More to the point, it is not biologically viable. Humans, unlike robots, need food, health care and the sense of usefulness often supplied by jobs or other forms of work. His solution is blindingly obvious: As both conservatives and liberals have proposed over the years, we need to institute a guaranteed annual minimum income, which he suggests should be set at $10,000 a year. This is probably not enough, and of course no amount of money can compensate for the loss of meaningful engagement. But as a first step toward a solution, Ford's may be the best that the feeble human mind can come up with at the moment. There's still plenty of work to do, even if no one is willing to pay for it. BARBARA EHRENREICH, the founding editor of the Economic Hardship Project, is the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America."
Choice Review
Ford, a computer designer and software developer, provides a thought-provoking account of how advances in technology challenge conventional understanding of existing economic and workforce models. His book presents a series of scenarios and examples that illustrate the accelerated speed at which technology influences contemporary society. In some detail, Ford outlines how current advances in automation, big data, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence are "likely [to] threaten jobs across industries and at a wide range of skill levels," including white-collar jobs. He argues that increasing income inequality will have a detrimental impact on economic growth in a consumer-driven economy because consumers will no longer be able to afford the products and services offered. Ford concludes with a series of suggestions (e.g., guaranteed income, education as a public good) for how economic policies can potentially counter these negative effects. The book may serve as a good start for anyone who is curious about advances in technology, economics, and the future of work. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Christoph Winkler, Baruch College
Kirkus Review
Noted technological maven and futurist Ford (The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, 2009) returns with more reasons for working men and women to fear for their futures. Imagine a world in which the want ads, if they appear at all, simply read: "Humans Need Not Apply." That nightmarish scenario might be enough to cause all but the idle rich to lay awake at night. The most terrifying thing about the author's fearful forecast, however, is that this dystopian futurewhere shrewdly sophisticated and ruthlessly cost-effective robots eliminate the need for those anachronistic things once called "jobs"sounds much more inevitable than incredible. For both scientific and economic reasons, which Ford outlines with a comprehensiveness that borders on chilling, there is simply no way in this relentlessly capitalist society to avoid being replaced by a robot. In the labor pyramid to come, even some of the lucky few occupying the white-collar pinnacle will not be safe. Ford's argument is frightening because it does not offer even a whiff of alarm or hysteria. Instead, the author's discourse feels as dispassionate and merciless as the circuitry silently running inside his subjects' metallically whirring bodies. Humankind's inescapable predicament appears so bleak that the only alternative to total societal collapse that Ford can identify is to fashion a system in which the great majority of the working class receives "a basic income guarantee." Elected officialsfrom President Barack Obama all the way down to a small-town mayormay steadfastly bang the drum for more education and training as the way out of the unemployment morass, but Ford clearly demonstrates that free market forces and consumer demand (already on display in Amazon's increasingly automated warehouses) will soon make it nearly impossible to continue employing large numbers of human beings in the workplace. A careful and courageous examination of automation and its possible impact on society. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Chapter 1 The Automation Wave | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Is This Time Different? | p. 29 |
| Chapter 3 Information Technology: An Unprecedented Force for Disruption | p. 63 |
| Chapter 4 White-Collar Jobs at Risk | p. 83 |
| Chapter 5 Transforming Higher Education | p. 129 |
| Chapter 6 The Health Care Challenge | p. 145 |
| Chapter 7 Technologies and Industries of the Future | p. 175 |
| Chapter 8 Consumers, Limits to Growth ... and Crisis? | p. 193 |
| Chapter 9 Super-Intelligence and the Singularity | p. 229 |
| Chapter 10 Toward a New Economic Paradigm | p. 249 |
| Conclusion | p. 281 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 285 |
| Notes | p. 287 |
| Index | p. 317 |
