Martin Ford > Quotes

“I find it somewhat ironic that many conservatives in the United States are adamant about securing the border against immigrants who will likely take jobs that few Americans want, while at the same time expressing little concern that the virtual border is left completely open to higher-skill workers who take jobs that Americans definitely do want.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion—20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Knowing the ideological predisposition of a particular economist is often a better predictor of what that individual is likely to say than anything contained in the data under examination.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In this, there is a strong cautionary note as we look to the future: as IT continues its relentless progress, we can be certain that financial innovators, in the absence of regulations that constrain them, will find ways to leverage all those new capabilities—and, if history is any guide, it won’t necessarily be in ways that benefit society as a whole.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“acquiring more education and skills will not necessarily offer effective protection against job automation”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“The nearly perfect historical correlation between increasing productivity and rising incomes broke down: wages for most Americans stagnated and, for many workers, even declined; income inequality soared to levels not seen since the eve of the 1929 stock market crash; and a new phrase—“jobless recovery”—found a prominent place in our vocabulary.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“impact of technology on these kinds of jobs, you are very likely to encounter the phrase “freed up”—as in, workers who lose their low-skill jobs will be freed up to pursue more training and better opportunities. The fundamental assumption, of course, is that a dynamic economy like the United States will always be capable of generating sufficient higher-wage, higher-skill jobs to absorb all those newly freed up workers—given that they succeed in acquiring the necessary training.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In a recent analysis, Martin Grötschel of the Zuse Institute in Berlin found that, using the computers and software that existed in 1982, it would have taken a full eighty-two years to solve a particularly complex production planning problem. As of 2003, the same problem could be solved in about a minute—an improvement by a factor of around 43 million. Computer hardware became about 1,000 times faster over the same period, which means that improvements in the algorithms used accounted for approximately a 43,000-fold increase in performance.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Sometime during the 1960s, the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman was consulting with the government of a developing Asian nation. Friedman was taken to a large-scale public works project, where he was surprised to see large numbers of workers wielding shovels, but very few bulldozers, tractors, or other heavy earth-moving equipment. When asked about this, the government official in charge explained that the project was intended as a “jobs program.” Friedman’s caustic reply has become famous: “So then, why not give the workers spoons instead of shovels?” Friedman”
― Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

“Nearly 90 percent of fast food workers are twenty or older, and the average age is thirty-five.17 Many of these older workers have to support families—a nearly impossible task at a median wage of just $8.69 per hour.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Imagine that you get in your car and begin driving at 5 miles per hour. You drive for a minute, accelerate to double your speed to 10 mph, drive for another minute, double your speed again, and so on. The really remarkable thing is not simply the fact of the doubling but the amount of ground you cover after the process has gone on for a while. In the first minute, you would travel about 440 feet. In the third minute at 20 mph, you’d cover 1,760 feet. In the fifth minute, speeding along at 80 mph, you would go well over a mile. To complete the sixth minute, you’d need a faster car—as well as a racetrack. Now think about how fast you would be traveling—and how much progress you would make in that final minute—if you doubled your speed twenty-seven times. That’s roughly the number of times computing power has doubled since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. 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. The answer to the question about your speed in the car, by the way, is 671 million miles per hour. In that final, twenty-eighth minute, you would travel more than 11 million miles. Five minutes or so at that speed would get you to Mars. That, in a nutshell, is where information technology stands today, relative to when the first primitive integrated circuits started plodding along in the late 1950s.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“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.59”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Today’s computer technology exists in some measure because millions of middle-class taxpayers supported federal funding for basic research in the decades following World War II. We can be reasonably certain that those taxpayers offered their support in the expectation that the fruits of that research would create a more prosperous future for their children and grandchildren. Yet, the trends we looked at in the last chapter suggest we are headed toward a very different outcome. BEYOND THE BASIC MORAL QUESTION of whether a tiny elite should be able to, in effect, capture ownership of society’s accumulated technological capital, there are also practical issues regarding the overall health of an economy in which income inequality becomes too extreme. Continued progress depends on a vibrant market for future innovations—and that, in turn, requires a reasonable distribution of purchasing power.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings.”3 The result would be massive unemployment, soaring inequality, and, ultimately, falling demand for goods and services as consumers increasingly lacked the purchasing power necessary to continue driving economic growth.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“We eventually will have to move away from the idea that workers support retirees and pay for social programs, and instead adopt the premise that our overall economy supports these things. Economic growth, after all, has significantly outpaced the rate at which new jobs have been created and wages have been rising.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“As of 2013, a typical production or nonsupervisory worker earned about 13 percent less than in 1973 (after adjusting for inflation), even as productivity rose by 107 percent and the costs of big-ticket items like housing, education, and health care have soared.1”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“The evaporation of thousands of skilled information technology jobs is likely a precursor for a much more wide-ranging impact on knowledge-based employment.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“a great many college-educated, white-collar workers are going to discover that their jobs, too, are squarely in the sights as software automation and predictive algorithms advance rapidly in capability.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In particular, the rise of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon has propelled a great deal of progress. Never before have such deep-pocketed corporations viewed artificial intelligence as absolutely central to their business models—and never before has AI research been positioned so close to the nexus of competition between such powerful entities. A similar competitive dynamic is unfolding among nations. AI is becoming indispensable to militaries, intelligence agencies, and the surveillance apparatus in authoritarian states.* Indeed, an all-out AI arms race might well be looming in the near future.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion—20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Growth in median incomes during this period tracked nearly perfectly with per capita GDP. Three decades later, median household income had increased to about $61,000, an increase of just 22 percent. That growth, however, was driven largely by the entry of women into the workforce. If incomes had moved in lockstep with economic growth—as was the case prior to 1973—the median household would today be earning well in excess of $90,000, over 50 percent more than the $61,000 they do earn.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Different people have different levels of understanding of the many things around them, and science is about trying to deepen our understanding of those many things.”
― Martin Ford, Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it

“Genetic programming essentially allows computer algorithms to design themselves through a process of Darwinian natural selection. Computer code is initially generated randomly and then repeatedly shuffled using techniques that emulate sexual reproduction. Every so often, a random mutation is thrown in to help drive the process in entirely new directions.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Grande parte do aconselhamento convencional oferecido aos trabalhadores e aos estudantes que se preparam para entrar no mercado de trabalho não tem, muito provavelmente, nenhuma eficácia.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In fact, advancing technology has already had a dramatic impact on Chinese factory jobs; between 1995 and 2002 China lost about 15 percent of its manufacturing workforce, or about 16 million jobs.9”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“Foi o recurso ao crédito que permitiu que os consumidores americanos continuassem a gerar o crescimento económico ao longo das décadas que conduziram à crise financeira de 2008. (…) Aquilo que distingue as economias de sucesso é a duração dos ciclos de crescimento. Os economistas descobriram que quanto maior é a desigualdade, mais curtos são os períodos de crescimento económico.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“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.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“In 2010, the Northwestern University researchers who oversaw the team of computer science and journalism students who worked on StatsMonkey raised venture capital and founded a new company, Narrative Science, Inc., to commercialize the technology.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future