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

by Martin Ford

Consider, for example, that in November 2013 Google applied for a patent on a system designed to automatically generate personalized email and social media responses.12 The system works by first analyzing a person’s past emails and social media interactions. Based on what it learned, it would then automatically write responses to future emails, Tweets, or blog posts, and it would do so employing the person’s usual writing style and tone. It’s easy to imagine such a system eventually being used to automate a great deal of routine communication.

the general strategy used by Google can be extended into a great many other areas: First, employ massive amounts of historical data in order to create a general “map” that will allow algorithms to navigate their way through routine tasks. Next, incorporate self-learning systems that can adapt to variations or unpredictable situations. The result is likely to be smart software that can perform many knowledge-based jobs with a high degree of reliability.

Big data and predictive algorithms have the potential to transform the nature and number of knowledge-based jobs in organizations and industries across the board.

WorkFusion’s machine learning algorithms continuously look for opportunities to further automate the process. In other words, even as the freelancers work under the direction of the system, they are simultaneously generating the training data that will gradually lead to their replacement with full automation.

IBM’s Deep Blue computer had defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match—

Facebook, for example, employs a smart software application called “Cyborg” that continuously monitors tens of thousands of servers, detects problems, and in many cases can perform repairs completely autonomously. A

The evaporation of thousands of skilled information technology jobs is likely a precursor for a much more wide-ranging impact on knowledge-based employment.

It asks questions. That’s curiosity.”31 The program, which they later named “Eureqa,” took only a few hours to come up with a number of physical laws describing the movement of the pendulum—including Newton’s Second Law—and it was able to do this without being given any prior information or programming about physics or the laws of motion.

One result is that Eureqa—like IBM’s Watson—is now hosted in the cloud and is available as an application building block to other software developers.