
Rise of the Robots
Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
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Narrated by:
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Jeff Cummings
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By:
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Martin Ford
In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists. And that, no doubt, will only be the beginning.
In Silicon Valley the phrase "disruptive technology" is tossed around on a casual basis. No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend various sectors of the job market. But Rise of the Robots asks a bigger question: can accelerating technology disrupt our entire economic system to the point where a fundamental restructuring is required? Companies like Facebook and YouTube may only need a handful of employees to achieve enormous valuations, but what will be the fate of those of us not lucky or smart enough to have gotten into the great shift from human labor to computation?
The more Pollyannaish, or just simply uninformed, might imagine that this industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new devices of a new era. In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford argues that is absolutely not the case. Increasingly, machines will be able to take care of themselves, and fewer jobs will be necessary. The effects of this transition could be shattering. Unless we begin to radically reassess the fundamentals of how our economy works, we could have both an enormous population of the unemployed-the truck drivers, warehouse workers, cooks, lawyers, doctors, teachers, programmers, and many, many more, whose labors have been rendered superfluous by automated and intelligent machines.
©2015 Martin Ford (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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I couldn't believe the social babble the author then fabricated at the end of this book. The naïveté that you can give entire groups of people a salary and not have an offsetting inflationary cost and lack of overall motivation is very naïve. I don't see this author as an economist more of a technologist.
A very insightful look to the future but then the author goes socialistic
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Knows Robotics ... Doesn't Understand Economics
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Great read
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Apocalyptic Words; Salvageable Solution
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Fact filled and hought provoking.
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A little off base, but worth the time
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A interesting forshadowing of the Economic future
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very presumptuous
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Any additional comments?
There is a reviewer above who thinks that he knows something about economics. He thinks cheaper t-shirts is important, while massive global poverty and climate destruction, the result of global capitalism are not important to mention. As if it's all been uphill, and no one has been left out. The fact that near slaves make those cheap t-shirts doesn't occur to him. It all works out in the wash, if you're completely ignorant of the entire world.Greater automation, especially robots, while in the hands of an owner class, will only create massive economic inequality, because the owner class will now own slaves, only slaves that never die, never complain, never strike, never ask for wages, and will work for you forever. To think that won't have an effect on a system that relies on people selling their bodies on the open market for wages competing against indestructible, programmable slaves is a level of ignorance that shocks me. He goes on and on complaining about the authors flawed perception of economics, when he clearly doesn't know the very very very basic simple facts about supply and demand. Alternatively, if ownership wasn't limited to the capitalist class, robots would usher in a new era of human leisure and personal development, because the fruits of automaton labor would not be merely the benefit of a tiny ruling class, but the entire human race instead.
Previous reviewer is wrong
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Thorough and sober analysis
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