Martin Ford

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“Some People Remain Nervous About The Growing Role Of Robots”

November 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Rodney Brooks still thinks the future will be fast and cheap, but perhaps not out of control. 

In Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary, the roboticist famously says that in tomorrow’s world of intelligent machines, humans might not be necessary. In a BBC piece written by Regan Morris, Brooks backs off that statement (“You can’t expect me to stand by something I said during a long day of filming 20 years ago!”), and also explains why he doesn’t fear technological unemployment or appreciate “cute” robots.

Brooks is certainly right that AI handling rote, backbreaking tasks is a good thing in the big picture, though distribution of wealth is a sticky point. And the work that disappears won’t only be of the blue-collar variety.

An excerpt:

Some people remain nervous about the growing role of robots.

Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots, says robots will change the global economy in drastic ways beyond manufacturing. White collar jobs, are equally susceptible and likely more at risk, he says.

“I think it’s inevitable that robots will displace a lot of jobs, if you have a PhD in science and engineering, you’re probably safe. But that’s not many people,” Ford says.

“We can’t stop it. We can’t educate ourselves out of it. Top level, highly creative, highly skilled jobs will survive. But most people do average stuff. Even if we tried we couldn’t educate every person to be a rocket scientist or brain surgeon.”

Baby boomers need bots

Mr Brooks is less concerned. He thinks fears of robots taking over jobs are overblown and that robots will improve people’s lives.

“I think there’s a misconception amongst the wealthy people in the bubble that there are endless rows of people wanting dull, boring jobs in factories. It’s not true,” Mr Brooks says, adding that robots will become more pervasive in society as baby boomers age and require more self-driving cars and home healthcare.•

 

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“He Thinks That In 2029 We Will Have AGI”

November 13, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In an excellent Five Books interview, writer Calum Chace suggests a quintet of titles on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, four of which I’ve read. In recommending The Singularity Is Near, he defends the author Ray Kurzweil against charges of techno-quackery, though the futurist’s predictions have grown more desperate and fantastic as he’s aged. It’s not that what he predicts can’t ever be be done, but his timelines seem to me way too aggressive.

Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, another choice, is a very academic work, though an important one. Interesting that Bostrom thinks advanced AI is a greater existential threat to humans than even climate change. (I hope I’ve understood the philosopher correctly in that interpretation.) The next book is Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, which I enjoyed, but I prefer Chace’s fourth choice, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age, which covers the same terrain of technological unemployment with, I think, greater rigor and insight. The final suggestion is one I haven’t read, Greg Egan’s sci-fi novel Permutation City, which concerns intelligence uploading and wealth inequality.

An excerpt about Kurzweil:

Question:

Let’s talk more about some of these themes as we go through the books you’ve chosen. The first one on your list is The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil. He thinks things are moving along pretty quickly, and that a superintelligence might be here soon. 

Calum Chace:

He does. He’s fantastically optimistic. He thinks that in 2029 we will have AGI. And he’s thought that for a long time, he’s been saying it for years. He then thinks we’ll have an intelligence explosion and achieve uploading by 2045. I’ve never been entirely clear what he thinks will happen in the 16 years in between. He probably does have quite detailed ideas, but I don’t think he’s put them to paper. Kurzweil is important because he, more than anybody else, has made people think about these things. He has amazing ideas in his books—like many of the ideas in everybody’s books they’re not completely original to him—but he has been clearly and loudly propounding the idea that we will have AGI soon and that it will create something like utopia. I came across him in 1999 when I read his book, Are We Spiritual Machines? The book I’m suggesting here is The Singularity is Near, published in 2005. The reason why I point people to it is that it’s very rigorous. A lot of people think Kurzweil is a snake-oil salesman or somebody selling a religious dream. I don’t agree. I don’t agree with everything he says and he is very controversial. But his book is very rigorous in setting out a lot of the objections to his ideas and then tackling them. He’s brave, in a way, in tackling everything head-on, he has answers for everything. 

Question:

Can you tell me a bit more about what ‘the singularity’ is and why it’s near?

Calum Chace:

The singularity is borrowed from the world of physics and math where it means an event at which the normal rules break down. The classic example is a black hole. There’s a bit of radiation leakage but basically, if you cross it, you can’t get back out and the laws of physics break down. Applied to human affairs, the singularity is the idea that we will achieve some technological breakthrough. The usual one is AGI. The machine becomes as smart as humans and continues to improve and quickly becomes hundreds, thousands, millions of times smarter than the smartest human. That’s the intelligence explosion. When you have an entity of that level of genius around, things that were previously impossible become possible. We get to an event horizon beyond which the normal rules no longer apply.

I’ve also started using it to refer to a prior event, which is the ‘economic singularity.’ There’s been a lot of talk, in the last few months, about the possibility of technological unemployment. Again, it’s something we don’t know for sure will happen, and we certainly don’t know when. But it may be that AIs—and to some extent their peripherals, robots—will become better at doing any job than a human. Better, and cheaper. When that happens, many or perhaps most of us can no longer work, through no fault of our own. We will need a new type of economy.  It’s really very early days in terms of working out what that means and how to get there. That’s another event that’s like a singularity — in that it’s really hard to see how things will operate at the other side.•

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“Some Computer Scientists Rue This Exponential Fallacy”

October 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Overpromising is cruel.

In technology and science, you see it especially in the area of life extension. The fountain of youth has been with us ever since people had time to stop and ponder, but the irrational rhetoric has grown louder since gerontologist Aubrey de Grey said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” What nonsense. I’m all in favor of working toward longer and healthier lives, but there’s no need to overheat the subject.

When it comes to a Singularitarian paradise of conscious machines, Ray Kurzweil’s pronouncements have ranged further and further into science fiction, promising superintelligence in a couple of decades. That’s not happening. Again, working toward such goals is worthwhile, but thinking that tomorrow is today is a sure way to disappoint.

Weak AI (non-conscious machines capable of programmed tasks) is the immediate challenge, with robots primed to devour jobs long handled by humans. That doesn’t mean we endure mass technological unemployment, but it could mean that. In a Nature review of three recent books on the topic (titles by John Markoff + Martin Ford + David A. Mindell), Ken Goldberg takes a skeptical look at our machine overlords. An excerpt:

Rise of the Robots by software entrepreneur Martin Ford proclaims that AI and robots are about to eliminate most jobs, blue- and white-collar. A close reading reveals the evidence as extremely sketchy. Ford has swallowed the rhetoric of futurist Ray Kurzweil, and repeatedly asserts that we are on the brink of vastly accelerating advances based on Moore’s law, which posits that computing power increases exponentially with time. Yet some computer scientists rue this exponential fallacy, arguing that the success of integrated circuits has raised expectations of progress far beyond what historians of technology recognize as an inevitable flattening of the growth curve.

Nor do historical trends support the Luddite fallacy, which assumes that there is a fixed lump of work and that technology inexorably creates unemployment. Such reasoning fails to consider compensation effects that create new jobs, or myriad relevant factors such as globalization and the democratization of the workforce. Ford describes software systems that attempt to do the work of attorneys, project managers, journalists, computer programmers, inventors and musicians. But his evidence that these will soon be perfected and force massive lay-offs consists mostly of popular magazine articles and, in one case, a conversation with the marketing director of a start-up.•

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“The Late North Korean Dictator Kidnapped South Korean Cinema’s Golden Couple”

June 30, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve read some titles from the Financial Times “Summer Books 2015” list, including Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition and Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, all of which are wonderful–in fact, Harari’s title is the best book I’ve read this year, period. Here are several more suggestions from FT which sound great:

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) is an apocalyptic novel about a world in which almost everyone has died in a flu pandemic, and clans roam the earth killing at random. It could hardly sound less promising. And yet Emily St John Mandel’s fourth novel is different partly because she skips over the apocalypse itself — all the action takes place just before or 20 years afterwards — and because it is less about the survival of the human race than the survival of Shakespeare. The book has been on literary shortlists and won prizes and been much praised for its big themes: culture, memory, loss. Yet it works just as well at a less lofty level, as a beautifully written, compulsive read.

A Kim Jong-Il Production (Paul Fischer) The story of how the late North Korean dictator kidnapped South Korean cinema’s golden couple, the director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee, and put them to work building a film industry in the North. At once a gripping personal narrative and an insight into the cruelty and madness of North Korea.

The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way It Is? (Nick Lane) Biochemist Lane offers a scintillating synthesis of a new theory of life, emphasising the interplay between energy and evolution. He shows how simple microbes, which monopolised Earth for the first 2bn years, took the momentous step towards becoming the “eukaryotic” cells that then evolved into animals, plants, fungi and protozoa.•

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“He Has Begun Worrying About Something That Would Have Been Unimaginable To Him A Few Years Ago”

June 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hod Lipson loves robots, but love is complicated. 

The robotics engineer is among the growing chorus of those concerned about technological unemployment leading to social unrest, something Norbert Wiener warned of more than 60 years ago. Is it, at long last, in this Digital Age, happening?

In a long-form MIT Technology Review article, David Rotman wonders if the new technologies may be contributing to wealth inequality and could ultimately lead to an even a greater divide, while considering the work of analysts on both sides of automation issue, including Sir Tony Atkinson, Martin Ford, Andrew McAfee and David Autor. The opening:

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he’s moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics. His research projects provide a peek into the intriguing possibilities of machines and automation, from robots that “evolve” to ones that assemble themselves out of basic building blocks. (His Cornell colleagues are building robots that can serve as baristas and kitchen help.) A few years ago, Lipson demonstrated an algorithm that explained experimental data by formulating new scientific laws, which were consistent with ones known to be true. He had automated scientific discovery.

Lipson’s vision of the future is one in which machines and software possess abilities that were unthinkable until recently. But he has begun worrying about something else that would have been unimaginable to him a few years ago. Could the rapid advances in automation and digital technology provoke social upheaval by eliminating the livelihoods of many people, even as they produce great wealth for others?

“More and more computer-guided automation is creeping into everything from manufacturing to decision making,” says Lipson. In the last two years alone, he says, the development of so-called deep learning has triggered a revolution in artificial intelligence, and 3-D printing has begun to change industrial production processes. “For a long time the common understanding was that technology was destroying jobs but also creating new and better ones,” says Lipson. “Now the evidence is that technology is destroying jobs and indeed creating new and better ones but also fewer ones. It is something we as technologists need to start thinking about.”•

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“The Reality Is That China Is Now Shifting Its Appetite To Robots”

June 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Martin Ford has written a New York Times op-ed explaining why “China could well turn out to be ground zero for the economic and social disruption brought on by the rise of the robots.” Outsourcing used to mean moving jobs out of country, but more and more it will mean shifting them out of species. And no matter what the official line is, better jobs don’t necessarily await the displaced. The opening:

OVER the last decade, China has become, in the eyes of much of the world, a job-eating monster, consuming entire industries with its seemingly limitless supply of low-wage workers. But the reality is that China is now shifting its appetite to robots, a transition that will have significant consequences for China’s economy — and the world’s.

In 2014, Chinese factories accounted for about a quarter of the global ranks of industrial robots — a 54 percent increase over 2013. According to the International Federation of Robotics, it will have more installed manufacturing robots than any other country by 2017. 

Midea, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in the heavily industrialized province of Guangdong, plans to replace 6,000 workers in its residential air-conditioning division, about a fifth of the work force, with automation by the end of the year. Foxconn, which makes consumer electronics for Apple and other companies, plans to automate about 70 percent of factory work within three years, and already has a fully robotic factory in Chengdu.

Chinese factory jobs may thus be poised to evaporate at an even faster pace than has been the case in the United States and other developed countries. That may make it significantly more difficult for China to address one of its paramount economic challenges: the need to rebalance its economy so that domestic consumption plays a far more significant role than is currently the case.•

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“The Job-Eating Maw Of Technology Now Threatens Even The Nimblest And Most Expensively Educated”

May 19, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Remember when workers were being nickeled and dimed? Ah, the good old days.

Barbara Ehrenreich, who’s spent much of her journalistic career studying the indignities of the working class, has penned a New York Times review of Martin Ford’s excellent book, Rise of the Robots, an extended diagnosis and concise prescription for the potential mass automation of work. The machines, he argues, are coming for your job, whether your collar is white or blue.

Ford is decidedly in the this-time-it’s-different camp who believe that unlike the the Industrial Revolution, which replaced farm jobs with better ones, this second machine age will not create new positions for people who have their careers disappeared. He also argues that the earlier fear of automation, a twenty-or-so-year period beginning in the late 1940s and cresting in the mid-1960s, wasn’t incorrect, just early.

The author’s argument is supported by academic research of all manner, but it’s a compelling and lucid one deserving of a wide readership. While he addresses the longer term possibility of Strong AI, which would clearly make the situation even more pressing, Ford focuses mostly on the type of Weak AI (non-conscious machines) set to invade every industry from taxi to delivery to law to medicine. In fact, the first inroads have already been made, and they’ve been dazzling. If Moore’s Law holds out a little while longer, the march of the non-wooden soldiers will come at a brisk pace, and the idea of near-universal employment will become an impossibility. No nickels for you, no dimes. What then?

Despite the alarmist topic of the book, Ford is reasoned and cautious, conservative even. Like myself, he argues against the most-quoted Piketty approach to combating income inequality, education, as a panacea. A worthwhile thing, sure, but not a broad answer. Ford asserts that we’ll most likely need to opt for a guaranteed basic income (incentivized to promote work whenever possible) to be funded in part from shifting tax responsibilities from workers to capital. (His feelings on the need for basic income have been shared by disparate thinkers: Andrew McAfee, Charles Murray, Friedrich Hayek, Eric Brynjolfsson, etc.) Easier said than done considering our political climate, but if wealth and productivity increase in the next few decades while employment continually ticks down, Americans at some point will likely not be pacified by bread and Kardashians.

From Ehrenreich:

In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends unleashed by technology, both robotization and the telecommunication systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the middle class would have to possess a college degree — as well as flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set.

But, as Martin Ford documents in Rise of the Robots, the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others, have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams. Particularly terrifying to me, computer programs can now write clear, publishable articles, and, as Ford reports, Wired magazine quotes an expert’s prediction that within about a decade 90 percent of news articles will be computer-­generated. …

This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford, a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation — the military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as infantry. Nor does Ford venture much into the spectacular possibilities being opened up by wearable medical devices, which can already monitor just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U. Human health workers may eventually be cut out of the loop, as tiny devices to sense blood glucose levels, for example, learn how to signal other tiny implanted devices to release insulin.

But Rise of the Robots doesn’t need any more examples; the human consequences of robotization are already upon us, and skillfully chronicled here.•

 

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“It’s Really Hard To Come Up With One Explanation Other Than Technology”

May 8, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m nearly done with Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, an excellent book I’ll have more to say about soon. The author sat for an episode of the Review the Future podcast and spoke on automation and wealth inequality.

Ford agrees with something I mentioned in response to Thomas Piketty’s suggestion that we counteract our 1% world with an investment in education (and re-education). While that would be great, I think it likely won’t be nearly enough to solve income disparity or technological unemployment.

Two exchanges from the podcast follow.

_____________________________

Jon Perry: 

This topic often is scoffed at by economists, which is something you mentioned in your first book The Lights in the Tunnel, that it was almost unthinkable to a lot of people. I’m curious, as that book came out in 2009 and now six years have gone by, how has the conversation around this issue changed since then?

Martin Ford:

Well, I think it’s definitely changed and it’s become a lot more visible. As you say, when I wrote that book, I mentioned that it was almost unthinkable in terms of the way economists approached it, and that’s less true today. There are definitely some economists out there, at least a few, that are now talking seriously about this. So, it’s really been quite a dramatic change as these technologies and the implications of them have become more visible.

Having said that, I still think this is very much an idea that is outside the mainstream, and a lot of the economists that do talk about it tend to take what I would call a very conservative tack, which is they still tend to believe that the solution to all this is more education and training–all we have to do is train people so that they can climb the skills ladder and keep ahead of the machines. I think that’s an idea that pretty much has run out of steam, and we probably need to look at more radical proposals going forward. But definitely it is a much more visible topic now than it was back in 2009.

_____________________________

Jon Perry: 

Now, we’ve had information technology for not that long, but we’ve had it for a little while now, and there are certainly some troubling economic trends that we see–stagnating wages, rising inequality, for example. To what extent can we say that, say, information technology or even technology in general is at least partially the cause of these economic trends? And if that’s the thesis here, what would be the best way to actually try to tease that apart and measure technology’s impact on the labor force going forward?

Martin Ford:

It’s kind of a challenging problem. I believe obviously very strongly that information technology has been an important part of it. I would not argue that it’s all of it by any means. And in my new book, Rise of the Robots, I point out about seven general trends that you can look at.

That includes the fact that wages have stagnated while productivity has continued to increase, so productivity and incomes have kind of decoupled. It includes the fact that the share of income going to labor as opposed to capital has gone into a pretty precipitous decline, especially since the year 2000. The labor force participation rate, meaning the number of people who are actually actively engaged in work, is falling. We’re seeing wages for college graduates actually going into decline, so it’s not the case anymore that people with higher educations are doing extremely well; a lot of people with college degrees are also being impacted.

So, there are a number of things you could look at there, and the thing is that if you take any one of these and you look at the research that economists have done, there are lots of explanations. Technology is nearly always one of the explanations, but there, of course, are other explanations. There’s globalization, there’s a basic change in our politics, which will become more conservative. In particular, there’s the decimation of unions in the private sector. Depending on who’s doing the analysis and sometimes what their agenda is, they will point to those things as being more important than technology.

But what I believe is that if you take all of that evidence collectively, if you look at all of those things together, it’s really hard to come up with one explanation other than technology that can explain all of those things.•

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“If We Can Do Anything In A Clear And Intelligible Way, We Can Do It By Machine”

May 7, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Last year, I posted a 1950 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article in which Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, predicted society being crushed by the metal grip of robots, with automation upending our accepted order. The year prior he was assigned to write “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be” by the New York Times. The piece was never published. That article is referenced in Martin Ford’s provocative new book, The Rise of the Robots, so I thought I would present an excerpt (which eventually made it into the NYT two years ago). From the “Mass-Produced Laborers” section:

We have so far spoken of the computing machine as an analogue to the human nervous system rather than to the whole of the human organism. Machines much more closely analogous to the human organism are well understood, and are now on the verge of being built. They will control entire industrial processes and will even make possible the factory substantially without employees.

In these the ultra-rapid digital computing machines will be supplemented by pieces of apparatus which take the readings of gauges, of thermometers, or photo-electric cells, and translate them into the digital input of computing machines. The new assemblages will also contain effectors, by which the numerical output of the central machine will be converted into the rotation of shafts, or the admission of chemicals into a tank, or the heating of a boiler, or some other process of the kind.

Furthermore, the actual performance of these effector organs as well as their desired performance will be read by suitable gauges and taken back into the machine as part of the information on which it works.

The general outline of the processes to be carried out will be determined by what computation engineers call taping, which will state and determine the sequence of the processes to be performed. The possibility of learning may be built in by allowing the taping to be re-established in a new way by the performance of the machine and the external impulses coming into it, rather than having it determined by a closed and rigid setup, to be imposed on the apparatus from the beginning.

The limitations of such a machine are simply those of an understanding of the objects to be attained, and of the potentialities of each stage of the processes by which they are to be attained, and of our power to make logically determinate combinations of those processes to achieve our ends. Roughly speaking, if we can do anything in a clear and intelligible way, we can do it by machine.•

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“When You Have A Safety Net In Place, People Will Take More Risks”

April 7, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, is interviewed by Marguerite McNeal at Wired about the specter of technological unemployment. The story is labeled as “Sponsored Content” and seems to have been paid for by Nokia. Advertorial, I suppose. The ugh side of the media landscape. 

At any rate, Ford answers a question about the role social safety nets will play if we’re all out of work and out of luck. What will the highly ambitious do in such a new world order? It’s similar to the McAfee solution. The exchange:

Question:

So in the all-automated economy, what will ambitious 20-somethings choose to do with their lives and careers?

Martin Ford:

My proposed solution is to have some kind of a guaranteed income that incentivizes education. We don’t want people to get halfway through high school and say, ‘Well if I drop out I’m still going to get the same income as everyone else.’

Then I believe that a guaranteed income would actually result in more entrepreneurship. A lot of people would start businesses just as they do today. The problem with these types of businesses you can start online today is it’s hard to put enough together to generate a middle-class income.

If people had an income floor, and if the incentives were such that on top of that they could do other things and still keep that extra money, without having it all taxed away, then I think a lot of people would pursue those opportunities.

There’s a phenomenon called the Peltzman Effect, based on research from an economist at the University of Chicago who studied auto accidents. He found that when you introduce more safety features like seat belts into cars, the number of fatalities and injuries doesn’t drop. The reason is that people compensate for it. When you have a safety net in place, people will take more risks. That probably is true of the economic arena as well.

People say that having a guaranteed income will turn everyone into a slacker and destroy the economy. I think the opposite might be true, that it might push us toward more entrepreneurship and more risk-taking.•

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“It Was The Software That Did It – A Clear-Cut Case Of What Economists Call Technological Unemployment”

February 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Working off futurist Martin Ford’s forthcoming book Rise of the Robots, Zoë Corbyn of the Guardian analyzes the next phase of labor, in which many of the human laborers will be phased out. The opening:

It could be said that the job of bridge toll collector was invented in San Francisco. In 1968, the Golden Gate Bridge became the world’s first major bridge to start employing people to take tolls.

But in 2013 the bridge where it all began went electronic. Of its small band of collectors, 17 people were redeployed or retired and nine found themselves out of work. It was the software that did it – a clear-cut case of what economists call technological unemployment. Licence-plate recognition technology took over. Automating jobs like that might not seem like a big deal. It is easy to see how it might happen, just as how we buy train tickets at machines or book movie tickets online reduces the need for people.

But technology can now do many more things that used to be unique to people. Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, a dexterous factory robot that can be programmed by grabbing its arms and guiding it through the motions, sells for a mere $25,000 (equivalent to about $4 an hour over a lifetime of work, according to a Stanford University study). IPsoft’s Amelia, a virtual service desk employee, is being trialled by oil industry companies, such as Shell and Baker Hughes, to help with employee training and inquiries. Meanwhile, doctors are piloting the use of Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, to assist in diagnosing patients and suggesting treatments. Law firms are using software such as that developed by Blackstone Discovery to automate legal discovery, the process of gathering evidence for a lawsuit, previously an important task of paralegals. Rio Tinto’s “mine of the future” in Western Australia has 53 autonomous trucks moving ore and big visions for expansion. Even the taxi-sharing company Uber is in on the act – it has just announced it will open a robotics research facility to work on building self-driving cars.

The upshot will be many people losing jobs to software and machines, says Silicon Valley-based futurist Martin Ford, whose book The Rise of the Robots comes out this year. He forecasts significant unemployment and rising inequality unless radical changes are made.•

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