Rise of the Robots Quotes

“In Japan, a new machine is able to 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.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Vision Robotics, a company based in San Diego, California, is developing an octopus-like orange harvesting machine. The robot will use three-dimensional machine vision to make a computer model of an entire orange tree and then store the location of each fruit. That information will then be passed on to the machine’s eight robotic arms, which will rapidly harvest the oranges.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“chickens are grown to standardized sizes so as to make them compatible with automated slaughtering and processing.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Future shoppers will rely more and more on their phones as a way to shop, pay, and get help and information about products while in traditional retail settings.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Loans are often rolled over continuously, so that the principal is never repaid. This makes capital investment extremely attractive even when labor costs are low and has been one of the primary reasons that investment now accounts for nearly half of China’s GDP.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“automation technology so efficient that it is competitive with even the lowest-wage offshore workers.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Indeed, a 2013 study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne at the University of Oxford concluded that occupations amounting to nearly half of US total employment may be vulnerable to automation within roughly the next two decades.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“The company warned that cuts to the US food stamp program (officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) as well as increases in payroll taxes were poised to hit hard at low-income shoppers. About one in five Walmart customers rely on food stamps, and evidence suggests that many of these people are stretched to the point where they have virtually no discretionary income.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“colossal, billion-dollar data center built by Apple, Inc., in the town of Maiden, North Carolina, had created only fifty full-time positions.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In the late nineteenth century, nearly half of all US workers were employed on farms; by 2000 that fraction had fallen below 2 percent.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In fact, advancing technology has already had a dramatic impact on Chinese factory jobs; between 1995 and 2002 China lost about 15 percent of its manufacturing workforce, or about 16 million jobs.9”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Vending machines make it possible to dramatically reduce three of the most significant costs incurred in the retail business: real estate, labor, and theft by customers and employees.”
― Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

“The top 5 percent of households are currently responsible for nearly 40 percent of spending, and that trend toward increased concentration at the top seems almost certain to continue. Jobs remain the primary mechanism by which purchasing power gets into the hands of consumers. If that mechanism continues to erode, we will face the prospect of having too few viable consumers to continue driving economic growth in our mass-market economic system.”
― Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

“The virtuous feedback loop between productivity, rising wages, and increasing consumer spending will collapse.”
― Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

“Wages for new university graduates have actually been declining over the past decade, while up to 50 percent of new graduates are forced to take jobs that do not require a degree”
― Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

“It is an era that will be defined by a fundamental shift in the relationship between workers and machines. That shift will ultimately challenge one of our most basic assumptions about technology: that machines are tools that increase the productivity of workers. Instead, machines themselves are turning into workers, and the line between the capability of labor and capital is blurring as never before.”
― Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

“In the US, the symbiotic relationship between increasing productivity and rising wages began to dissolve in the 1970s. As of 2013, a typical production or nonsupervisory worker earned about 13 percent less than in 1973 (after adjusting for inflation), even as productivity rose by 107 percent and the costs of housing, education, and healthcare have soared.”
― Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

“Will smart machines lead to a world of plenty, leisure, health care, and education for all; or to a world of inequality, mass unemployment, and a war between the haves and have-nots, and between the machines and the workers left behind?”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future