Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

The question I will ask in this book is bigger: Can accelerating technology disrupt our entire system to the point where a fundamental restructuring may be required if prosperity is to continue?

routine jobs are eliminated for economic reasons during a recession, but organizations then discover that ever-advancing information technology allows them to operate successfully without rehiring the workers once a recovery gets under way.

Indeed, the frightening reality is that if we don’t recognize and adapt to the implications of advancing technology, we may face the prospect of a “perfect storm” where the impacts from soaring inequality, technological unemployment, and climate change unfold roughly in parallel, and in some ways amplify and reinforce each other.

It’s a good bet that the field of robotics is poised to follow a similar path; we are, in all likelihood, at the leading edge of an explosive wave of innovation that will ultimately produce robots geared toward nearly every conceivable commercial, industrial, and consumer task. That explosion will be powered by the availability of standardized soft

Seven Deadly Trends

My point here is that while human-machine collaboration jobs will certainly exist, they seem likely to be relatively few in number* and often short-lived.

A single-payer system is, in practice, always assumed to be run by the government, but in theory this does not have to be the case.

The clear implication is that, as income increasingly concentrates among the wealthy few, we should expect less robust overall consumption.

No matter how you choose to measure it, finance has grown dramatically as a share of economic activity in the United States and, to a somewhat less spectacular degree, in nearly all industrialized countries.