IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 18

Erik Stayton

Rise of the Robots
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.
By Martin Ford. Basic Books, 2015, 224 pp.

achines and mechanization have a long
history of displacing
human workers by
eliminating the need
for certain types of human labor.
This process has had its casualties, but is generally acknowledged
to be the source of long-term economic prosperity. While we may
mourn the loss of handicrafts, few
would choose to do away with the
fruits of the multiplicative forces
of mechanization and automation.
We owe our standard of living -
from affordable goods to accessible
public utilities - to the productive
potential of machinery; a combination of education, job-retraining,
and social services have served to
address the plights of those displaced. For much of recent history,
our optimism has been borne out,
with increased prospects, prosperity, and job opportunities - if not
necessarily more fulfilling ones -
for the more highly educated.
But this time, could it be different? Does information technology
represent a new face on the same
old problem? Or do its unique affordances change the situation in a
fundamental way, for which history provides neither models nor
solutions? This is the question that

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2554705
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots
seeks to explore in its first half. In
this capacity, Ford's book carries
echoes of the arguments of many
intellectual forebears who have
studied manufacturing technology
and factory automation - Hugh Aitken, Norbert Wiener, John Diebold,
David Noble, David Nye - though
few of these are referenced in his
text. Instead, history is not Ford's
focus; and while the past is mined
for counter-arguments to be anticipated, Ford's thesis is that the situation is indeed different this time,
and far more dire in terms of the
ultimate fate of human labor. The
book's second half examines the
intersection of developing technology and social problems. How do
we address the coming impacts of
technological change?
Rise of the Robots is laudable
as a trade book about emerging
technologies. It presents a broad,
sweeping overview of the issues at
hand for the modern laborer in the
increasingly automated economy.
From manufacturing to the service
sector, from elder care to intelligent
tutoring, myriad applications of
artificial intelligence are addressed
- enough that, if one accepts
Ford's claims about the impacts
of increasing automation, there is
no conceivable alternate economic
sector in which those job losses
can be offset. This multiple-industry
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focus distinguishes his book from
those focused specifically on manufacturing or commercial robotics,
and aligns it more closely with contemporary works like Brynjolfsson
and McAffee's Second Machine
Age, though Ford is ultimately less
optimistic about the future. Also
key to this work's approach, Ford
fuses the technical, including
approachable (simplified) descriptions of technologies like artificial
neural networks and genetic programming, with economic and
political information and critique.
Rise of the Robots uses descriptions of advancing AI technology to
set up its punchline: the economy
must be restructured to avoid total
collapse. To this end, Ford provides
a number of insightful and productive re-framings of salient economic
issues. Offshoring becomes "virtual
immigration," since remote workers
profit from the economy and the
infrastructure of a nation without
directly contributing to its economy.
Similarly, Ford asks if decades of
public investment in information
technology (via DARPA, NSF, and
other organizations) should give citizens a claim on the ownership of
society's "accumulated technological capital" that is otherwise at risk
of being captured by a small, elite
minority. The economy, in Ford's
eyes, can be likewise reinterpreted
as a resource in which all citizens
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june 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016