The Machine Age Is Upon Us

- Steve Levine

JUST AS AT THE BEGINNING of the Industrial Revolution, outsized angst over the imminent disappearance of jobs is a rampant concern in our age. When intelligent humanoid robots strip labor away from the vast majority of the working-age population, the apprehension goes, society as we know it may not make it. The Atlantic foretold this prophecy in a cover story titled “The End of Work”; Foreign Affairs exclaimed simply, “Hi, Robot.” It is demoralizing, to say the least. In the summer science-fiction chiller Humans, a teenager wonders why one should aspire to a career in medicine when future robots will do the job better.

A minority of our thinkers are pushing back: Martin Wolf, the ordinarily decorous chief economics columnist at the Financial Times, can barely contain his scorn on this subject; certainly, no super robot race is imminent, Wolf grumbles. At Quartz, my colleague Tim Fernholz thinks that the panic is far overdone not only are robots not frightening, but we need as many as we can get to help us become more productive.

Doing the Robot

No one can predict with certainty the outcome of the torrent of fresh automation washing over us. But this is no faddish debate. As Martin Ford makes clear in his impressively researched and, yes, frightening Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, the evidence is ample that artificial intelligence is already occupying jobs previously thought doable only by humans. That Ford writes in a terse, understated style and himself comes from an engineering background — he was chief technology officer of a Silicon Valley software company — makes his message all the more worrying. His book is my pick for the best business book of the year on technological disruption.