Name: Rise of the Robots
ISBN: 9780465097531

Rise of the Robots

Examines the effects of accelerating technology on the economic system. "In Silicon Valley the phrase "disruptive technology" is tossed around on a casual basis. No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend various sectors of the job market. But Rise of the Robots asks a bigger question: Can accelerating technology disrupt our entire economic system to the point where a fundamental restructuring is required? Companies like Facebook and YouTube may only need a handful of employees to achieve enormous valuations, but what will be the fate of those of us not lucky or smart enough to have gotten into the great shift from human labor to computation?"

What Hacker News says

SharpSightLabsNov 2016

1. Race Against the Machine by Brynjolfsson and McAfee

2. The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee

3. The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

4. Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford

5. Average is Over by Tyler Cowen -specifically, the parts about labor market bifurcation and man-machine pairs

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are MIT economists. Top notch. Cowen is also an excellent economist at George Mason.

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DanBCSep 2013

> Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it.

Myst - 1993

Rise of the Robots - 1994

People not aware of RotR should do some googling. The pre-release hype was impressive. The game was shiny and looked nice. It was appalling to play.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_robots)

> Rise of the Robots was announced early in development, and generated considerable buzz for its advanced graphics. On release it became notorious in the video gaming industry for myriad crippling gameplay problems. Today it is generally considered one of the least successful and most critically reviled fighting games of its time.

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bwbMar 2025

You might check out

Ghost Work By Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri https://shepherd.com/book/ghost-work

"Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none."

This is a bit recent though, but still helpful for a modern big picture perspective.

Rise of the Robots By Martin Ford https://shepherd.com/book/rise-of-the-robots

This one I haven't read yet, but I've heard it tries to look historically as it looks at this concept.

And then of course, you have the historic luddites :)

Rebels Against the Future By Kirkpatrick Sale Book cover of Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age https://shepherd.com/book/rebels-against-the-future

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tuatoruSep 2022

And what happened to the Rise of the Robots[1]? And Frey and Osborne[2], and Daniel Susskind[3], and all the others like them?

Weren't assembly and logistics workers all supposed to be obsolete by now?

1. Earliest iterations before 2012! https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless...

2. 2013! https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Fut...

3. https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/01/23/robots-m...

4. The hype is still being sold: https://www.teaminternational.com/automation-future-jobs/

https://financesonline.com/jobs-lost-to-automation-statistic...

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dorgoMay 2017

I read a book "Rise of the Robots" and after some chapters I checked the last page almost expecting to read something like "By the way, this book was writen by a machine...". But no, no such luck :-P

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FrickenNov 2016

It's interesting, though, to see rise of the robots talk breach tech circles and enter into mainstream economic and political discussions. Between the arrival of imagenet in 2011 and now the drums have been steadily getting louder.

In 2013 an oft-cited and alarming study out of oxford suggesting most jobs will be automated over the next decade was released. It was followed by a series of influential books whose authors ran the lecture circuit: 'The Second Machine Age', 'The Zero Marginal Cost Society', 'Superintelligence', and 'The Rise of the Robots'.

There were some bold bold and well publicized statements from respected luminaries such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.

Aggressive maneuvering to hoover up machine learning talent, and bold investments from automakers pursuing autonomous driving has only added gasoline to the fire.

Automation became the talk of the town at Davos in Switzerland. There's been a rising chorus from Basic Income supporters.

Now the hype is out of control. Nobody is actually looking at the technology. It's okay, though. Hype is self-correcting.

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