Home > Author > Martin Ford
101 " If computers can create musical compositions or design electronic components, then it seems likely that they will soon be able to formulate a new legal strategy or perhaps come up with a new way to approach a management problem. "
― Martin Ford , Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
102 " The essential point is that a worker is also a consumer (and may support other consumers). These people drive final demand. When a worker is replaced by a machine, that machine does not go out and consume. The machine may use energy and spare parts and require maintenance, but again, those are business inputs, not final demand. If there is no one to buy what the machine is producing, it will ultimately be shut down. An industrial robot in an auto manufacturing plant will not continue running if no one is buying the cars it is assembling. "
103 " 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. "
104 " Within weeks of the product’s introduction, both university-based engineering teams and do-it-yourself innovators had hacked into the Kinect and posted YouTube videos of robots that were now able to see in three dimensions.4 "
105 " 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. "
106 " 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. All "
107 " One of the obvious implications of a potential intelligence explosion is that there would be an overwhelming first-mover advantage. In other words, whoever gets there first will be effectively uncatchable. "
108 " In the late nineteenth century, nearly half of all US workers were employed on farms; by 2000 that fraction had fallen below 2 percent. "
109 " 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. "
110 " The turnaround is being driven by automation technology so efficient that it is competitive with even the lowest-wage offshore workers. "
111 " 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? "