Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Chris Funk (my Dad)

Author:  Martin Ford

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Futuristic

Info:  352 pages, published May 5, 2015

Format:  Book

Summary 

In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford discusses what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and warns employers and policy makers to face the implications.  As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary.  The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work, and we must decide soon whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity.  This book helps you understand what accelerating technology means for your economic prospects and those of your children, as well as for society as a whole.

Quotes

“Imagine that you get in your car and begin driving at 5 miles per hour. You drive for a minute, accelerate to double your speed to 10 mph, drive for another minute, double your speed again, and so on. The really remarkable thing is not simply the fact of the doubling but the amount of ground you cover after the process has gone on for a while. In the first minute, you would travel about 440 feet. In the third minute at 20 mph, you’d cover 1,760 feet. In the fifth minute, speeding along at 80 mph, you would go well over a mile. To complete the sixth minute, you’d need a faster car—as well as a racetrack. Now think about how fast you would be traveling—and how much progress you would make in that final minute—if you doubled your speed twenty-seven times. That’s roughly the number of times computing power has doubled since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. 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. The answer to the question about your speed in the car, by the way, is 671 million miles per hour. In that final, twenty-eighth minute, you would travel more than 11 million miles. Five minutes or so at that speed would get you to Mars. That, in a nutshell, is where information technology stands today, relative to when the first primitive integrated circuits started plodding along in the late 1950s.”

“In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.  Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion—20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.”

“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.”

“Perhaps the most remarkable elder-care innovation developed in Japan so far is the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)—a powered exoskeleton suit straight out of science fiction. Developed by Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, the HAL suit is the result of twenty years of research and development. Sensors in the suit are able to detect and interpret signals from the brain. When the person wearing the battery-powered suit thinks about standing up or walking, powerful motors instantly spring into action, providing mechanical assistance. A version is also available for the upper body and could assist caretakers in lifting the elderly. Wheelchair-bound seniors have been able to stand up and walk with the help of HAL. Sankai’s company, Cyberdyne, has also designed a more robust version of the exoskeleton for use by workers cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the wake of the 2011 disaster. The company says the suit will almost completely offset the burden of over 130 pounds of tungsten radiation shielding worn by workers.  HAL is the first elder-care robotic device to be certified by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.”

“Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.”

“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.”

“In a recent analysis, Martin Grötschel of the Zuse Institute in Berlin found that, using the computers and software that existed in 1982, it would have taken a full eighty-two years to solve a particularly complex production planning problem. As of 2003, the same problem could be solved in about a minute—an improvement by a factor of around 43 million. Computer hardware became about 1,000 times faster over the same period, which means that improvements in the algorithms used accounted for approximately a 43,000-fold increase in performance.”

“acquiring more education and skills will not necessarily offer effective protection against job automation”

“We eventually will have to move away from the idea that workers support retirees and pay for social programs, and instead adopt the premise that our overall economy supports these things. Economic growth, after all, has significantly outpaced the rate at which new jobs have been created and wages have been rising.”

“potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings.” The result would be massive unemployment, soaring inequality, and, ultimately, falling demand for goods and services as consumers increasingly lacked the purchasing power necessary to continue driving economic growth.”

“Knowing the ideological predisposition of a particular economist is often a better predictor of what that individual is likely to say than anything contained in the data under examination.”

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