Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

by Martin Ford

Moore’s Law—the well-established rule of thumb that says computing power roughly doubles every eighteen to twenty-four months—not everyone has fully assimilated the implications of this extraordinary exponential progress.

The revolution now under way is happening not just because of the acceleration itself but because that acceleration has been going on for so long that the amount of progress we can now expect in any given year is potentially mind-boggling.

automation is primarily a threat to workers who have little education and lower-skill levels.

While lower-skill occupations will no doubt continue to be affected, a great many college-educated, white-collar workers are going to discover that their jobs, too, are squarely in the sights as software automation and predictive algorithms advance rapidly in capability.

“predictable.”

radiology will be a job performed almost exclusively by machines.

lawyers, journalists, scientists, and pharmacists—

higher education and health care—

have, so far, been highly resistant to the kind of disruption that is already becoming

evident in the broade...

Can accelerating technology disrupt our entire system to the point where a fundamental restructuring may be required if prosperity is to continue?

choosing parts from a bin and then feeding them into the next machine, or loading and unloading the trucks that move products to and from the factory.

Industrial Perception

Boston-based Rethink Robotics

Baxter,

moving half-finished yarn between machines on forklifts.”6

Foxconn—

Delta Electronics, Inc.,

ABB Group and Kuka AG

“engineering the labor out of the product.”

ATMs and self-service checkout lanes,

Momentum Machines, Inc.,

Kura sushi restaurant chain

“retail salesperson”

Amazon purchased Kiva Systems,

Kroger’s automated system

packing a mixture of items for final shipment to customers, that require visual recognition and dexterity.

intelligent vending machines and kiosks.

AVT, Inc.,

create jobs in areas like maintenance, restocking, and repair.

Redbox

swapping the translucent movie advertisements displayed on the kiosk—a process that typically takes less than two minutes for each machine.

stocking shelves in stores.

rove store aisles at night and automatically scan barcodes in order to track product inventories.

Silvercar,

Google announced support for cloud robotics in 2011 and provides an interface that allows robots to take advantage of all the services designed for Android devices.*

In the late nineteenth century, nearly half of all US workers were employed on farms; by 2000 that fraction had fallen below 2 percent.

select ripe strawberries based on subtle color variations and then pick a strawberry every eight seconds—working continuously and doing most of the work at night.

The fundamental assumption, of course, is that a dynamic economy like the United States will always be capable of generating sufficient higher-wage, higher-skill jobs to absorb all those newly freed up workers—given that they succeed in acquiring the necessary training.

Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution.

The Ad Hoc Committee went on to propose a radical solution: the eventual implementation of a guaranteed minimum income made possible by the “economy of abundance”

the Triple Revolution report was released in 1964,

Between 2005 and 2012, the average time to execute a trade dropped from about 10 seconds to just 0.0008 seconds,56 and robotic, high-speed trading was heavily implicated in the May 2010 “flash crash” in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly a thousand points and then recovered for a net gain, all within the space of just a few minutes.

If we had deposited that initial penny in 1949, just as Norbert Wiener was writing his essay about the future of computing, and then let Moore’s Law run its course—doubling the amount roughly every two years—by 2015, our technological account would contain nearly $86 million.

IBM released a cognitive computing chip—inspired by the human brain and aptly branded “SyNAPSE”—in 2011 and has since created a new programming language to accompany the hardware.

the theory of comparative advantage.

The problem is that as digital technology continues to transform industries, more and more of the jobs that provide that primary-income source are likely to disappear.

the basic research that enabled progress in the IT sector was funded by American taxpayers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created and funded the computer network that ultimately evolved into the Internet.*

Narrative Science has its sights set on far more than just the news industry. Quill is designed to be a general-purpose analytical and narrative-writing engine, capable of producing high-quality reports for both internal and external consumption across a range of industries.

knowledge-based jobs can be automated using only software, these positions may, in many cases, prove to be more vulnerable than lower-skill jobs that involve physical manipulation.