Friday, January 20, 2017

Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford

Image result for rise of the robots book
When acquired by FB for billions of dollars Watsapp employed 55 employees, Youtube had 150 odd employees when acquired by Google. Most firms are now less manual resource intensive. How is this possible?

In "Rise of the Robots" Martin Ford paints a bleak picture of our economy and future job prospects. The rampant unmitigated use of automation has eaten millions of jobs. Thanks to the growing greed of corporations and some political parties, labor unions around the world have either been disbanded or weakened to such an extent that they are completely impotent. Organized unions were meant to protect the rights of workers but their disarmament spelled doom for the average worker.

Automation has permeated all walks of life and work. Machines have taken over human jobs in almost all areas, their existence is now ubiquitous from Banks, Manufacturing, Fast food joints to bots writing articles and conversing with humans over a chat window etc. Low skilled jobs, where repetitive work is needed is easily automated and companies save millions of dollars using automation. who wants to deal with whimsical, moody sometimes sick human beings? With the advancement in technology, no job is safe. Highly skilled jobs are also a target for automation.  Moore's law states that computing ability doubles every two years, just take a moment to think about this, it took several millennia for us to develop the brain power that we have today. Computers, on the other hand, have acquired the same capability and capacity in a few decades. It is almost a certainty that machines will soon match our abilities in all areas and then surpass us!

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