warehouse robotics

77 results back to index

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In other words, Amazon can take advantage of robots with limited capability simply by managing the flow of work within its distribution centers. This ability to reliably predict the outcome of a robotic operation and work around failure is really the bright line between a controlled warehouse-type environment, where robots are likely to thrive in the relatively near future, and the far more chaotic outside world, where the challenges for technologies like self-driving cars are likely to be far more daunting. A warehouse robot that can predictably handle half the items it might encounter can be highly useful. A self-driving car operating on a public road that can reliably navigate ninety-nine percent of the situations it encounters may be worse than useless because that outlying one percent virtually guarantees disaster.

…

(Includes videos.) 8. Will Knight, “Why solving a Rubik’s Cube does not signal robot supremacy,” Wired, October 16, 2019, www.wired.com/story/why-solving-rubiks-cube-not-signal-robot-supremacy/. 9. Noam Scheiber, “Inside an Amazon warehouse, robots’ ways rub off on humans,” New York Times, July 3, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-labor-robots.html. 10. Eugene Kim, “Amazon’s $775 million deal for robotics company Kiva is starting to look really smart,” Business Insider, June 15, 2016, www.businessinsider.com/kiva-robots-save-money-for-amazon-2016-6. 11. Will Evans, “Ruthless quotas at Amazon are maiming employees,” The Atlantic, November 25, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/amazon-warehouse-reports-show-worker-injuries/602530/. 12.

…

Matt Simon, “Inside the Amazon warehouse where humans and machines become one,” Wired, June 5, 2019, www.wired.com/story/amazon-warehouse-robots/. 16. James Vincent, “Amazon’s latest robot champion uses deep learning to stock shelves,” The Verge, July 5, 2016, www.theverge.com/2016/7/5/12095788/amazon-picking-robot-challenge-2016. 17. Jeffrey Dastin, “Amazon’s Bezos says robotic hands will be ready for commercial use in next 10 years,” Reuters, June 6, 2019, www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-conference/amazons-bezos-says-robotic-hands-will-be-ready-for-commercial-use-in-next-10-years-idUSKCN1T72JB. 18. Tech Insider, “Inside a warehouse where thousands of robots pack groceries (video),” YouTube, May 9, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

After dabbling in investing and consulting for a few years, Welty and Johnson began hearing about a start-up named Kiva Systems, which was in the early stage of developing warehouse robots. Kiva had been founded by former executives of Webvan, an online grocer that had gone bust, in part because its warehouses weren’t sufficiently automated. Welty’s immediate reaction was “I don’t believe you. Robots in a warehouse? Not a chance.” But as he and Johnson heard more, they became curious. Kiva robots had been installed in the mid-2000s by a few big retail chains, such as Staples, for their company-owned warehouses. Welty persuaded a former customer to sneak him into a warehouse employing Kiva robots. “I was completely blown away. ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,’” he recalls.

…

They wanted a tour. Who would have thought that warehouse guys could build a robot?” Welty says. Locus has helped Quiet Logistics expand its business in the year since it was cut off by Amazon and Kiva. By 2019, it had begun expanding to the West Coast and operated two million square feet of warehouse space, with plans to double that amount by 2021, and it had doubled its number of customers to more than sixty, adding brands such as the luggage start-up Away and the online mattress brand Tuft & Needle. With only about 10 percent of warehouses nationwide having installed robots, Welty and Johnson are confident that their bet on Locus will pay off.

…

Amazon puts the figure at 270, but that doesn’t include some facilities, such as distribution centers operated by Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary. With more than two hundred thousand robots: Lauren Feiner, “Amazon Shows Off Its New Warehouse Robots That Can Automatically Sort Packages,” CNBC, June 5, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/05/amazon-shows-off-its-new-warehouse-robots.html; Nick Wingfield, “As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles,” New York Times, September 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html. testing new warehouse automation equipment: Jeffrey Dastin, “Amazon Rolls Out Machines That Pack Orders and Replace Jobs,” Reuters, May 13, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-automation-exclusive/exclusive-amazon-rolls-out-machines-that-pack-orders-and-replace-jobs-idUSKCN1SJ0X1.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Amazon’s 175 global fulfillment centers are some of the most automated in the world. After the company bought Kiva robots for $775 million in 2012, it started filling its warehouses with robots, and now some 200,000 of these machines whir around Amazon’s facilities doing many jobs that used to be done by humans. In one sense, this is a good thing. Robots now can perform a lot of the backbreaking lifting of packages and bins. Large robotic arms, for instance, can lift heavy pallets laden with products from one floor to the next. Amazon’s warehouses that use these robots, according to one estimate, contain on average 50 percent more inventory per square foot than those centers without and have helped cut operating costs by some 20 percent.

…

Devices such as cell phones, Amazon Echo smart speakers, Amazon microwaves, earbuds, and thermostats connect to the Internet, making them smarter and easier for us to control. (And as we saw in the previous chapter, easier for the companies that make them to collect data on our buying habits.) In the business arena, warehouse robots, scanners, and self-driving delivery vans also connect to the Internet, thanks to inexpensive sensors and smart algorithms. By 2022, there will be more than 29 billion connected devices worldwide, roughly four times the number of people in the world. Now tech giants such as Alibaba, JD.com, Tencent, and even Google’s parent, Alphabet—with its smart home devices and self-driving cars—are joining Amazon in its quest to infiltrate every corner of our lives with AI.

…

On the day the deal became public, Ocado’s shares jumped 45 percent. Chinese online retailer JD.com, which has designed a warehouse specifically to work smoothly with machines, offers another glimpse of what the future may look like. One of China’s largest online retailers with 310 million customers, JD.com opened a warehouse in 2017 that uses robots to pick up packages of a predictable shape and size—like a cell phone or a box of laundry soap. It’s the world’s most automated facility of its kind. From the outside, the large white building on the outskirts of Shanghai looks like any warehouse in China. What catches the eye—besides the giant red logo of JD.com with its smiling dog—is what’s not there: a large parking lot for employees.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

Dedication For Shep Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Prologue Chapter 1: The Gathering Storm Chapter 2: The Box Chapter 3: Ships and Other Cyborgs Chapter 4: Coming to America Chapter 5: Parallel Parking 1,200 Feet of Ship Chapter 6: Longshoremen against the Machine Chapter 7: The Largest Robots on Earth Chapter 8: The Little-Known, Rarely Understood Organizing Principle of Modern Work Chapter 9: How a Management Philosophy Became Our Way of Life Chapter 10: Rime of the Long-Haul Trucker Chapter 11: 100 Percent of Everything Chapter 12: How “Hitler’s Highway” Became America’s Circulatory System Chapter 13: The Future of Trucking Chapter 14: What Actually Happens Inside Amazon’s Warehouses Chapter 15: The Unbearable Complexity of Robotic Warehousing Chapter 16: Bezosism Chapter 17: From Japan with Love: Origins of the Amazon Way Chapter 18: How Warehouse Work Injures Chapter 19: Amazon’s Employee-Lite Endgame Chapter 20: The Middle Mile Chapter 21: The Future of Delivery Chapter 22: The Last Mile Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Praise Copyright About the Publisher Prologue If I’ve done my job, the book you’re holding is a skeleton key.

…

Chapter 15 The Unbearable Complexity of Robotic Warehousing It’s at this point in the story that a reasonable person asks why, in a company that has deployed so many robots, so many humans must perform the many Sisyphean tasks at the heart of Amazon’s sorting of goods in its warehouses. The world’s first industrial robot was installed in a factory owned by General Motors in 1961; the underlying technology was patented in 1954. Why have we not by now created robotic arms dexterous enough to take over a task as elementary as picking up an object and placing it in a soft-sided cubby? The short answer to that question is that this task only seems elementary because humans are so incredibly good at it.

…

One day, in a state of utter exhaustion, Emily kneeled to grab something off a lower shelf and discovered to her horror that her legs had simply stopped working. Anyone who has ever pushed themselves past the point of complete exhaustion knows the sense of surprise and alienation that can overwhelm you in a moment like this. There Emily sat, sobbing. No one saw her and no one came to help. Amazon warehouses that lack robots are so vast that associates rarely bump into one another. Amazon’s logistics hubs are incredibly diverse, their inner workings dependent on their functions and vintage. The pace at which its associates must work varies by facility and time of year, especially around the holidays, when the company may go so far as to rent out additional space from other warehouse providers to handle the increase in demand.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.’7 What sets Amazon apart, however, is their relentless dissatisfaction with the status quo. They are continuously looking for better ways of serving their customers and making the shopping experience even more convenient. When retailers talk of innovation, they tend to mean things like pop-up stores and digital displays. With Amazon, it’s underwater warehouses and robotic postmen. In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote: There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

…

In many ways, the Whole Foods Market acquisition was an admission that the grocery category will always require an element of physical retail, albeit one of a more versatile nature. At the same time, as we’ve already seen with other sectors, technology will dismantle the barriers traditionally associated with buying food online, while continued urbanization will simultaneously drive demand and bring costs down. Automation – from warehouse robotics to driverless delivery trucks – will improve supply chain efficiencies and the rise in third-party delivery services (Instacart and Shipt, for example) will allow more supermarkets to offer speedy delivery without the hefty investment in infrastructure or systems. Meanwhile, the customer value proposition for online grocery is exploding; today, consumers benefit from improved mobile phone interfaces, single sign-ons, greater personalization and site navigation, automated lists, recipe inspiration, delivery passes, voice-activated shopping, simplified replenishment, same-day delivery and alternatives to home delivery such as click & collect or automated lockers.

…

The rapid expansion of its Prime commitments has almost certainly been a catalyst for Amazon to bring the ubiquitous connectivity of its cloud services to bear on the development of increasingly autonomous, command-and-control operational fulfilment capabilities for many years. In this way, it has also entrusted robots in its warehouses and delivery drones with autonomous functionality to support growth. As previously discussed, in 2012, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, the robotics company that had been supplying warehouse robots for Amazon to automate its order fulfilment processes, and which is now the backbone of the company’s Robotics division. In 2015, MIT Technology Review noted some 2,000 of the orange Kiva robots that were helping humans keep shelves stocked during a tour of a New Jersey Amazon distribution and fulfilment centre.8 Today, consensus estimates put its total robot fleet at over 100,000.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

However, an Amazon warehouse has an almost infinite variety of shapes, sizes, weights, and firmness of items that are placed on shelves with many possible positions and orientations for non-rectangular objects. In other words, the grasping problem in a warehouse is characterized by an infinite number of “ifs,” whereas grasping in a car assembly plant is designed to have very few “ifs.” So, in order to grasp in a warehouse setting, robots must be able to “see” the object (analyze the image) and predict the right angle and pressure in order to hold the object and not drop or crush it. In other words, prediction is at the root of grasping the wide variety of objects in a fulfillment center. Research into the grasping problem uses reinforcement learning to train robots to mimic humans.

…

Steve Jobs in Memory and Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress, Michael Lawrence Films, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c. Chapter 14 1. Steven Levy, “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge,” Wired, October 24, 2014, https://backchannel.com/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge-8de60af7146e. 2. Nick Statt, “The Next Big Leap in AI Could Come from Warehouse Robots,” The Verge, June 1, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/1/15703146/kindred-orb-robot-ai-startup-warehouse-automation. 3. L. B. Lusted, “Logical Analysis in Roentgen Diagnosis,” Radiology 74 (1960): 178–193. 4. Siddhartha Mukherjee, “A.I. versus M.D.,” New Yorker, April 3, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md. 5.

…

., 49–50 human weaknesses in, 54–58 stereotypes, 19 Stern, Scott, 169–170, 218–219 Stigler, George, 105 strategy, 2, 18–19 AI-first, 179–180 AI’s impact on, 153–166 boundary shifting in, 157–158 business transformation and, 167–178 capital and, 170–171 cheap AI and, 15–17 data and, 174–176 economics of, 165 hybrid corn adoption and, 158–160 judgment and, 161–162 labor and, 171–174 learning, 179–194 organizational structure and, 161–162 value capture and, 162–165 strokes, predicting, 44–46, 47–49 Sullenberger, Chesley “Sully,” 184 supervised learning, 183 Sweeney, Latanya, 195, 196 Tadelis, Steve, 199 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 60–61 The Taming of Chance (Hacking), 40 Tanner, Adam, 195 task analysis, 74–75, 125–131 AI canvas and, 134–139 job redesign and, 142–145 Tay chatbot, 204–205 technical support, 90–91 Tencent Holdings, 164, 217, 218 Tesla, 8 Autopilot legal terms, 116 navigation apps and, 89 training data at, 186–187 upgrades at, 188 Tesla Motor Club, 111–112 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 209–210 Tinder, 189 tolerance for error, 184–186 tools, AI, 18 AI canvas and, 134–138 for deconstructing work flows, 123–131 impact of on work flows, 126–129 job redesign and, 141–151 usefulness of, 158–160 topological data analysis, 13 trade-offs, 3, 4 in AI-first strategy, 181–182 with data, 174–176 between data amounts and costs, 44 between risks and benefits, 205 satisficing and, 107–109 simulations and, 187–188 strategy and, 156 training data for, 43, 45–47 data risks, 202–204 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 by humans, 96–97 in-house and on-the-job, 185 in medical imaging, 147 in modeling skills, 101 translation, language, 25–27, 107–108 trolley problem, 116 truck drivers, 149–150 Tucker, Catherine, 196 Tunstall-Pedoe, William, 2 Turing, Alan, 13 Turing test, 39 Tversky, Amos, 55 Twitter, Tay chatbot on, 204–205 Uber, 88–89, 164–165, 190 uncertainty, 3, 103–110 airline industry and weather, 168–169, 170 airport lounges and, 105–106 business boundaries and, 168–170 contracts in dealing with, 170–171 in e-commerce delivery times, 157–158 reducing, strategy and, 156–157 strategy and, 165 unknown knowns, 59, 61–65, 99 unknown unknowns, 59, 60–61 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 171 US Census Bureau, 14 US Department of Defense, 14, 116 US Department of Transportation, 112, 185 Validere, 3 value, capturing, 162–165 variables, 45 omitted, 62 Varian, Hal, 43 variance, 34–36 fulfillment industry and, 144–145 taming complexity and, 103–110 Vicarious, 223 video games, 183 Vinge, Vernor, 221 VisiCalc, 141–142, 163, 164 Wald, Abraham, 101 Wanamaker, John, 174–175 warehouses, robots in, 105 Watson, 146 Waymo, 95 Waze, 89–90, 106, 191 WeChat, 164 Wells Fargo, 173 Windows 95, 9–10 The Wizard of Oz, 24 work flows AI tools’ impact on, 126–129 decision making and, 133–140 deconstructing, 123–131 iPhone keyboard design and, 129–130 job redesign and, 142–145 task analysis, 125–131 World War II bombing raids, 100–102 X.ai, 97 Xu Heyi, 164 Yahoo, 216 Y Combinator, 210 Yeomans, Mike, 117 YouTube, 176 ZipRecruiter, 93–94, 100 About the Authors AJAY AGRAWAL is professor of strategic management and Peter Munk Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

“Smart Hospitality Market to Reach USD 44.38 Billion By 2026 | Reports and Data,” GlobeNewswire, November 19, 2019, www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/19/1949666/0/en/Smart-Hospitality-Market-To-Reach-USD-44-38-Billion-By-2026-Reports-and-Data.html; John Biberstein, “Automation and Its Growing Impact on the Fast Food Industry,” globalEDGE, International Business Center, Michigan State University, September 16, 2019, https://globaledge.msu.edu/blog/post/55773/automation-and-its-growing-impact-on-the; “Robo Taxi Market Size to Reach USD 38.61 Billion by 2030 at CAGR 67.8% - Valuates Reports,” Valuates Reports, CISION PR Newswire, September 16, 2021, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/robo-taxi-market-size-to-reach-usd-38-61-billion-by-2030-at-cagr-67-8---valuates-reports-301378390.html. 20. Adam Satariano and Cade Metz, “A Warehouse Robot Learns to Sort Out the Tricky Stuff,” New York Times, January 29, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/technology/warehouse-robot.html. 21. Will Evans, “Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Maiming Employees,” Atlantic, November 25, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/amazon-warehouse-reports-show-worker-injuries/602530. 22. Josh Dzieza, “How Hard Will the Robots Make Us Work?”

…

Companies like Amazon can be a dominant employer in some regions, attaining a monopsony status, where a single employer can control the market as the major purchaser of labour.17 In an economy where employment has become increasingly precarious, it’s hardly surprising that McDonald’s and Amazon can dictate terms to workers. Though the COVID-induced labour shortage has recently paused this trend, matters may yet get worse. In 2012, Amazon spent $775 million to buy Kiva Systems, an advanced warehouse robotics company, in an effort to reduce its reliance on human workers.18 Collectively, companies are spending billions of dollars a year to research and deploy robots as hotel butlers, fast-food cooks, delivery workers, and of course, taxi drivers.19 Those with a positive outlook on life will view robots as merely another step in a centuries-long process of automation that started with the spinning jenny; in this line of thinking, any workers who are replaced by robots can instantly and painlessly retrain for new jobs, and if they don’t, they’re regrettable casualties in a war that ultimately raises the sum total of human happiness, whose end will see the annihilation of human drudgery.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 6: The Wider Wave Amazon’s “first fully autonomous mobile robot” Mitchell Clark, “Amazon Announces Its First Fully Autonomous Mobile Warehouse Robot,” Verge, June 21, 2022, www.theverge.com/​2022/​6/21/​23177756/​amazon-warehouse-robots-proteus-autonomous-cart-delivery. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Amazon’s Sparrow is the first Dave Lee, “Amazon Debuts New Warehouse Robot That Can Do Human Jobs,” Financial Times, Nov. 10, 2022, www.ft.com/​content/​c8933d73-74a4-43ff-8060-7ff9402eccf1. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Robots are already performing intricate surgery James Gaines, “The Past, Present, and Future of Robotic Surgery,” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 15, 2022, www.smithsonianmag.com/​innovation/​the-past-present-and-future-of-robotic-surgery-180980763.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Altman re-formed the lab as a for-profit company: “OpenAI LP,” OpenAI blog, March 11, 2019, https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/. an international robotics maker called ABB organized its own contest: Adam Satariano and Cade Metz, “A Warehouse Robot Learns to Sort Out the Tricky Stuff,” New York Times, January 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/technology/warehouse-robot.html. “We were trying to find weaknesses”: Ibid. a German electronics retailer moved Abbeel’s technology: Ibid. “I’ve worked in the logistics industry”: Ibid. “If this happens fifty years from now”: Ibid. CHAPTER 20: RELIGION Boyton had recently won the Breakthrough Prize: “Edward Boyden Wins 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences,” MIT News, November 9, 2015, https://news.mit.edu/2015/edward-boyden-2016-breakthrough-prize-life-sciences-1109.

…

This was why he and two of his former Berkeley students, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan, left the lab to found a start-up called Covariant. Their new company was committed to the same techniques OpenAI was exploring, except the aim was to apply them in the real world. By 2019, as researchers and entrepreneurs recognized what Amazon and the rest of the world’s retailers needed in their warehouses, the market was flooded with robotic-picking start-ups, some of them employing the sort of deep learning methods under development at Google Brain and OpenAI. Pieter Abbeel’s company, Covariant, wasn’t necessarily one of them. It was designing a system for a much wider range of tasks. But then, two years after the Amazon Robotics Challenge, an international robotics maker called ABB organized its own contest, this one behind closed doors.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

The new factory has made obsolete the hundreds of Chinese workers who assemble razors in China the old way, using human labor. Not only is manufacturing being revolutionized by robotic workers, but also is the shipping and receiving industry. We are on the cusp of being able to get the inventory from factory to warehouse robotically. In some advanced warehouses, Kiva robots are directed by a computer program to select inventory from the warehouse shelves and bring it to human workers who actually place the items into boxes for shipping. On the transportation end, Google has software for driverless cars. Of course, legal restrictions still require a human driver to be present who is capable of taking over the wheel, but the software is already so good that experimental vehicles have gone hundreds of thousands of miles without any human intervention.

…

It is not hard to imagine that human-driven vehicles may be illegal in 20 years, simply because they would be more dangerous in comparison to robotically driven vehicles. Thus, it only requires the barest extrapolation on today’s technology to imagine robots packing orders at the factory, driverless trucks shuttling inventory between factory and warehouse, and robots packing and delivering orders straight to the doors of customers. Amazon recently demonstrated a helicopter delivery drone that could potentially make 30-minute deliveries possible, with the prediction by its CEO, Jeff Bezos, that the technology could be deployed within five years.4 An obvious analogy here is the great reduction in the workforce as a percentage of the population devoted to agriculture.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Amazon Media Group alone will likely soon surpass Twitter’s 2016 revenue of $2.5 billion,62 making it one of the largest online media properties.63 Amazon Prime, the most nonexclusive club in America (44 percent of U.S. households64), is offering, for $99/year, free two-day shipping, two-hour shipping on select products (Amazon Now), and music and video streaming, including original content.65 Ideas for content are given the budget for a pilot, and then viewers are asked to vote online for which series get greenlighted. Amazon, like any sovereign superpower, pursues a triad strategy: air, land, and sea. Can you, Mr. Retailer, get your stuff to your consumer in an hour? No problem. Amazon can do it for you (for a fee), because it’s making the investment you can’t afford to make—warehouses run by robots near city centers, thousands of trucks, and dedicated cargo planes. Each day, four Boeing 767 cargo planes carry goods from Tracy, California, via an airport in nearby Stockton that was half the size three years ago, to a 1-million-square-foot warehouse that didn’t even exist until last year.66 In early 2016, Amazon was given a license by the Federal Maritime Commission to implement ocean freight services as an Ocean Transportation Intermediary.

…

Increasingly, robots will perform many of the functions of human employees, almost as well (and sometimes a lot better), without annoying requests to leave early to pick up their kid from karate. Amazon doesn’t talk publicly about robotics, one of its core competencies, as it realizes it would soon be fodder for late-night hosts and blustery political candidates. In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired Kiva Systems, a sophisticated warehouse robotics firm, for $775 million.90 In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi feels a dramatic disturbance in the force when the Imperial Army turns the Death Star on Alderaan and destroys the planet. When the acquisition of Kiva closed, every union member should have felt a similar disturbance. Entrepreneurs create jobs, right?

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

,” Mother Jones, May/June 2013. 6Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, pp. 7–8. 7Frey and Osborne, “The Future of Employment.” 8Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, New York: Basic Books, 2015. 9Katie Drummond, “Clothes Will Sew Themselves in Darpa’s Sweat-Free Sweatshops,” Wired.com, June 6, 2012. 10Leanna Garfield, “These Warehouse Robots Can Boost Productivity by 800%,” TechInsider.io, February 26, 2016. 11Ilan Brat, “Robots Step into New Planting, Harvesting Roles,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2015. 12Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. 13Soraya Chemaly, “What Do Artificial Wombs Mean for Women?”

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

., 222–23 lack of assets owned by, 6–7 limits to effects on hotel industry, 221–23 network effects, 193 as O2O platform, 186 peer reviews, 209–10 rapid growth of, 9 as two-sided network, 214 value proposition compared to Uber, 222 Airline Deregulation Act, 181n airlines, revenue management by, 181–82 air travel, virtualization in, 89 Akerlof, George, 207, 210 albums, recorded music, 145 algorithms; See also data-driven decision making bias in systems, 51–53 and Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 95–96 comparing human decisions to, 56 O2O platforms and, 193 Quantopian and, 267–70 superiority to System 1 reasoning, 38–41 “algo traders,” 268; See also automated investing Alibaba, 6–8 Alipay, 174 AlphaGo, 4–6, 14, 74, 80 Alter, Lloyd, 90 Amazon automatic price changes, 47 bar code reader app, 162 data-driven product recommendations, 47 development of Web Services, 142–43 Mechanical Turk, 260 as stack, 295 warehouse robotics, 103 Amazon EC2, 143 Amazon Go, 90–91 Amazon S3, 143 Amazon Web Services (AWS), 75, 142–43 American Airlines (AA), 182 amino acid creation, 271–72 analog copies, digital copies vs., 136 “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, The” (Page and Brin), 233 Anderson, Chris, 98–100 Anderson, Tim, 94 Andreessen, Marc on crowdfunding, 262–63 and Netscape, 34 as self-described “solutionist,” 297 on Teespring, 263–64 Android Blackberry vs., 168 contribution to Google revenue/profits, 204 iOS vs., 166–67 Angry Birds, 159–61 anonymity, digital currency and, 279–80 Antikythera mechanism, 66 APIs (application programming interfaces), 79 apophenia, 44n apparel, 186–88 Apple; See also iPhone acquiring innovation by acquiring companies, 265 and industrywide smartphone profits, 204 leveraging of platforms by, 331 Postmates and, 173, 185 profitability (2015), 204 revenue from paid apps, 164 “Rip, Mix, Burn” slogan, 144n as stack, 295 application programming interfaces (APIs), 79 AppNexus, 139 apps; See also platforms for banking, 89–90 demand curve and, 157–61 iPhone, 151–53 App Store, 158 Apter, Zach, 183 Aral, Sinan, 33 Archilochus, 60–61 architecture, computer-designed, 118 Aristophanes, 200 Arnaout, Ramy, 253 Arthur, Brian, 47–48 artificial general intelligence (AGI), 71 artificial hands, 272–75 artificial intelligence; See also machine learning current state of, 74–76 defined, 67 early attempts, 67–74 implications for future, 329–30 rule-based, 69–72 statistical pattern recognition and, 72–74 Art of Thinking Clearly, The (Dobelli), 43 arts, digital creativity in, 117–18 Ashenfelter, Orley, 38–39 ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), 287 assets and incentives, 316 leveraging with O2O platforms, 196–97 replacement by platforms, 6–10 asymmetries of information, 206–10 asymptoting, 96 Atkeson, Andrew, 21 ATMs, 89 AT&T, 96, 130 August (smart door lock), 163 Austin, Texas, 223 Australia, 100 Authorize.Net, 171 Autodesk, 114–16, 119, 120 automated investing, 266–70 automation, effect on employment/wages, 332–33 automobiles, See cars Autor, David, 72, 101 background checks, 208, 209 back-office work, 82–83 BackRub, 233 Baidu, 192 Bakos, Yannis, 147n Bakunin, Mikhail, 278 Ballmer, Steve, 151–52 bandwagon effect, 217 banking, virtualization and, 89–90, 92 Bank of England, 280n bank tellers, 92 Barksdale, Jim, 145–46 barriers to entry, 96, 220 Bass, Carl, 106–7, 119–20 B2B (business-to-business) services, 188–90 Beastmode 2.0 Royale Chukkah, 290 Behance, 261 behavioral economics, 35, 43 Bell, Kristen, 261, 262 Benioff, Mark, 84–85 Benjamin, Robert, 311 Benson, Buster, 43–44 Berlin, Isiah, 60n Berners-Lee, Tim, 33, 34n, 138, 233 Bernstein, Michael, 260 Bertsimas, Dimitris, 39 Bezos, Jeff, 132, 142 bias of Airbnb hosts, 209–10 in algorithmic systems, 51–53 digital design’s freedom from, 116 management’s need to acknowledge, 323–24 and second-machine-age companies, 325 big data and Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 95 and credit scores, 46 and machine learning, 75–76 biology, computational, 116–17 Bird, Andrew, 121 Bitcoin, 279–88 China’s dominance of mining, 306–7 failure mode of, 317 fluctuation of value, 288 ledger for, 280–87 as model for larger economy, 296–97 recent troubles with, 305–7 and solutionism, 297 “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (Nakamoto), 279 BlaBlaCar, 190–91, 197, 208 BlackBerry, 168, 203 Blitstein, Ryan, 117 blockchain as challenge to stacks, 298 and contracts, 291–95 development and deployment, 283–87 failure of, 317 and solutionism, 297 value as ledger beyond Bitcoin, 288–91 Blockchain Revolution (Tapscott and Tapscott), 298 Bloomberg Markets, 267 BMO Capital Markets, 204n Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian, 58n–59n Bock, Laszlo, 56–58 bonds, 131, 134 bonuses, credit card, 216 Bordeaux wines, 38–39 Boudreau, Kevin, 252–54 Bowie, David, 131, 134, 148 Bowie bonds, 131, 134 brand building, 210–11 Brat, Ilan, 12 Bredeche, Jean, 267 Brin, Sergey, 233 Broward County, Florida, 40 Brown, Joshua, 81–82 Brusson, Nicolas, 190 Burr, Donald, 177 Bush, Vannevar, 33 business conference venues, 189 Business Insider, 179 business processes, robotics and, 88–89 business process reengineering, 32–35 business travelers, lodging needs of, 222–23 Busque, Leah, 265 Buterin, Vitalik, 304–5 Byrne, Patrick, 290 Cairncross, Francis, 137 California, 208; See also specific cities Calo, Ryan, 52 Cambrian Explosion, 94–98 Cameron, Oliver, 324 Camp, Garrett, 200 capacity, perishing inventory and, 181 Card, David, 40 Care.com, 261 cars automated race car design, 114–16 autonomous, 17, 81–82 decline in ownership of, 197 cash, Bitcoin as equivalent to, 279 Casio QV-10 digital camera, 131 Caves, Richard, 23 Caviar, 186 CDs (compact discs), 145 cell phones, 129–30, 134–35; See also iPhone; smartphones Census Bureau, US, 42 central bankers, 305 centrally planned economies, 235–37 Chabris, Chris, 3 Chambers, Ephraim, 246 Champy, James, 32, 34–35, 37, 59 Chandler, Alfred, 309n Chase, 162 Chase Paymentech, 171 check-deposit app, 162 children, language learning by, 67–69 China Alibaba in, 7–8 concentration of Bitcoin wealth in, 306–7 and failure mode of Bitcoin, 317 mobile O2O platforms, 191–92 online payment service problems, 172 robotics in restaurants, 93 Shanghai Tower design, 118 Xiaomi, 203 Chipotle, 185 Choudary, Sangeet, 148 Christensen, Clay, 22, 264 Churchill, Winston, 301 Civil Aeronautics Board, US, 181n Civis Analytics, 50–51 Clash of Clans, 218 classified advertising revenue, 130, 132, 139 ClassPass, 205, 210 and economics of perishing inventory, 180–81 future of, 319–20 and problems with Unlimited offerings, 178–80, 184 and revenue management, 181–84 user experience, 211 ClassPass Unlimited, 178–79 Clear Channel, 135 clinical prediction, 41 Clinton, Hillary, 51 clothing, 186–88 cloud computing AI research, 75 APIs and, 79 Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 96–97 platform business, 195–96 coaches, 122–23, 334 Coase, Ronald, 309–13 cognitive biases, 43–46; See also bias Cohen, Steven, 270 Coles, John, 273–74 Collison, John, 171 Collison, Patrick, 171–74 Colton, Simon, 117 Columbia Record Club, 131 commoditization, 220–21 common sense, 54–55, 71, 81 companies continued dominance of, 311–12 continued relevance of, 301–27 DAO as alternative to, 301–5 decreasing life spans of, 330 economics of, 309–12 future of, 319–26 leading past the standard partnership, 323–26 management’s importance in, 320–23 markets vs., 310–11 as response to inherent incompleteness of contracts, 314–17 solutionism’s alternatives to, 297–99 TCE and, 312–15 and technologies of disruption, 307–9 Compass Fund, 267 complements (complementary goods) defined, 156 effect on supply/demand curves, 157–60 free, perfect, instant, 160–63 as key to successful platforms, 169 and open platforms, 164 platforms and, 151–68 and revenue management, 183–84 Stripe and, 173 complexity theory, 237 Composite Fund (D.

…

., 252–75 overall evaluation criterion, 51 Overstock.com, 290 Owen, Ivan, 273, 274 Owen, Jennifer, 274n ownership, contracts and, 314–15 Page, Larry, 233 PageRank, 233 Pahlka, Jennifer, 163 Painting Fool, The, 117 Papa John’s Pizza, 286 Papert, Seymour, 73 “Paperwork Mine,” 32 Paris, France, terrorist attack (2015), 55 Parker, Geoffrey, 148 parole, 39–40 Parse.ly, 10 Paulos, John Allen, 233 payments platforms, 171–74 peer reviews, 208–10 peer-to-peer lending, 263 peer-to-peer platforms, 144–45, 298 Peloton, 177n Penthouse magazine, 132 People Express, 181n, 182 Perceptron, 72–74 Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (Minsky and Papert), 73 perishing/perishable inventory and O2O platforms, 186 and revenue management, 181–84 risks in managing, 180–81 personal drones, 98 perspectives, differing, 258–59 persuasion, 322 per-transaction fees, 172–73 Pew Research Center, 18 p53 protein, 116–17 photography, 131 physical environments, experimentation in development of, 62–63 Pindyck, Robert, 196n Pinker, Steven, 68n piracy, of recorded music, 144–45 Plaice, Sean, 184 plastics, transition from molds to 3D printing, 104–7 Platform Revolution (Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary), 148 platforms; See also specific platforms business advantages of, 205–11 characteristics of successful, 168–74 competition between, 166–68 and complements, 151–68 connecting online and offline experience, 177–98; See also O2O (online to offline) platforms consumer loyalty and, 210–11 defined, 14, 137 diffusion of, 205 economics of “free, perfect, instant” information goods, 135–37 effect on incumbents, 137–48, 200–204 elasticity of demand, 216–18 future of companies based on, 319–20 importance of being open, 163–65; See also open platforms and information asymmetries, 206–10 limits to disruption of incumbents, 221–24 multisided markets, 217–18 music industry disruption, 143–48 network effect, 140–42 for nondigital goods/services, 178–85; See also O2O (online to offline) platforms and perishing inventory, 180–81 preference for lower prices by, 211–21 pricing elasticities, 212–13 product as counterpart to, 15 and product maker prices, 220–21 proliferation of, 142–48 replacement of assets with, 6–10 for revenue management, 181–84 supply/demand curves and, 153–57 and unbundling, 145–48 user experience as strategic element, 169–74 Playboy magazine, 133 Pliny the Elder, 246 Polanyi, Michael, 3 Polanyi’s Paradox and AlphaGo, 4 defined, 3 and difficulty of comparing human judgment to mathematical models, 42 and failure of symbolic machine learning, 71–72 and machine language, 82 and problems with centrally planned economies, 236 and System 1/System 2 relationship, 45 Postmates, 173, 184–85, 205 Postmates Plus Unlimited, 185 Postrel, Virginia, 90 Pratt, Gil, 94–95, 97, 103–4 prediction data-driven, 59–60 experimentation and, 61–63 statistical vs. clinical, 41 “superforecasters” and, 60–61 prediction markets, 237–39 premium brands, 210–11 presidential elections, 48–51 Priceline, 61–62, 223–24 price/pricing data-driven, 47; See also revenue management demand curves and, 154 elasticities, 212–13 loss of traditional companies’ power over, 210–11 in market economies, 237 and prediction markets, 238–39 product makers and platform prices, 220 supply curves and, 154–56 in two-sided networks, 213–16 Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell), 69 print media, ad revenue and, 130, 132, 139 production costs, markets vs. companies, 313–14 productivity, 16 products as counterpart to platforms, 15 loss of profits to platform providers, 202–4 pairing free apps with, 163 platforms’ effect on, 200–225 threats from platform prices, 220–21 profitability Apple, 204 excessive use of revenue management and, 184 programming, origins of, 66–67 Project Dreamcatcher, 114 Project Xanadu, 33 proof of work, 282, 284, 286–87 prose, AI-generated, 121 Proserpio, Davide, 223 Prosper, 263 protein p53, 116–17 public service, 162–63 Pullman, David, 131 Pullum, Geoffrey, 84 quantitative investing firms (quants), 266–70 Quantopian, 267–70 Quinn, Kevin, 40–41 race cars, automated design for, 114–16 racism, 40, 51–52, 209–10 radio stations as complements to recorded music, 148 in late 1990s, 130 revenue declines (2000–2010), 135 Ramos, Ismael, 12 Raspbian, 244 rationalization, 45 Raymond, Eric, 259 real-options pricing, 196 reasoning, See System 1/System 2 reasoning rebundling, 146–47 recommendations, e-commerce, 47 recorded music industry in late 1990s, 130–31 declining sales (1999-2015), 134, 143 disruption by platforms, 143–48 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 144 redlining, 46–47 Redmond, Michael, 2 reengineering, business process, 32–35 Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy), 32, 34–35, 37 regulation financial services, 202 Uber, 201–2, 208 Reichman, Shachar, 39 reinforcement learning, 77, 80 Renaissance Technologies, 266, 267 Rent the Runway, 186–88 Replicator 2 (3D printer), 273 reputational systems, 209–10 research and development (R&D), crowd-assisted, 11 Research in Motion (RIM), 168 residual rights of control, 315–18 “Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment, The” (Hearn), 306 resource utilization rate, 196–97 restaurants, robotics in, 87–89, 93–94 retail; See also e-commerce MUEs and, 62–63 Stripe and, 171–74 retail warehouses, robotics in, 102–3 Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads (Datar, Garvin, and Cullen), 37 revenue, defined, 212 revenue management defined, 47 downsides of, 184–85 O2O platforms and, 193 platforms for, 181–84 platform user experience and, 211 problems with, 183–84 Rent the Runway and, 187 revenue-maximizing price, 212–13 revenue opportunities, as benefit of open platforms, 164 revenue sharing, Spotify, 147 reviews, online, 208–10 Ricardo, David, 279 ride services, See BlaBlaCar; Lyft; Uber ride-sharing, 196–97, 201 Rio Tinto, 100 Robohand, 274 robotics, 87–108 conditions for rapid expansion of, 94–98 DANCE elements, 95–98 for dull, dirty, dangerous, dear work, 99–101 future developments, 104–7 humans and, 101–4 in restaurant industry, 87–89 3D printing, 105–7 Rocky Mountain News, 132 Romney, Mitt, 48, 49 Roosevelt, Teddy, 23 Rosenblatt, Frank, 72, 73 Rovio, 159n Roy, Deb, 122 Rubin, Andy, 166 Ruger, Ted, 40–41 rule-based artificial intelligence, 69–72, 81, 84 Russell, Bertrand, 69 Sagalyn, Raphael, 293n Saloner, Garth, 141n Samsung and Android, 166 and Linux, 241, 244 sales and earnings deterioration, 203–4 San Francisco, California Airbnb in, 9 Craigslist in, 138 Eatsa in, 87 Napster case, 144 Postmates in, 185 Uber in, 201 Sanger, Larry, 246–48 Sato, Kaz, 80 Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, 304 scaling, cloud and, 195–96 Schiller, Phil, 152 Schumpeter, Joseph, 129, 264, 279, 330 Scott, Brian, 101–2 second machine age origins of, 16 phase one, 16 phase two, 17–18 secular trends, 93 security lanes, automated, 89 Sedol, Lee, 5–6 self-checkout kiosks, 90 self-driving automobiles, 17, 81–82 self-justification, 45 self-organization, 244 self-selection, 91–92 self-service, at McDonald’s, 92 self-teaching machines, 17 Seychelles Trading Company, 291 Shanghai Tower, 118 Shapiro, Carl, 141n Shaw, David, 266 Shaw, J.

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Michael Sainato, “‘We Are Not Robots’: Amazon Warehouse Employees Push to Unionize,” Guardian, January 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/01/amazon-fulfillment-center-warehouse-employees-union-new-york-minnesota; and Noam Scheiber, “Inside an Amazon Warehouse, Robots’ Ways Rub Off on Humans,” New York Times, July 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-labor-robots.html. 47. Matthew Desmond, “American Capitalism Is Brutal; You Can Trace That to Slavery,” New York Times, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html. 48. Studs Terkel and Gary Bryner, “‘Working’ Then and Now: ‘I Didn’t Plan to Be a Union Guy,’” All Things Considered, NPR, September 29, 2016, audio, https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?

…

Another occupation where the technological tools for ever greater supervision meet with management’s demands for hyperefficient quotas and production speeds is Amazon warehouse jobs.86 In early 2019, an employee told the Guardian that “pickers” were expected to grab four hundred items per hour, or one item every seven seconds.87 Warehouse workers spend ten-hour shifts standing on their feet the whole time.88 Every task is monitored inside the warehouse, and numerous former workers report that if associates were off task for an hour or for shorter periods several times, they would be immediately terminated.89 The demanding quotas under high-stress conditions have reportedly led some workers to urinate in trash cans for fear of missing their targets.90 Amazon has even patented a wristband that it could in the future use to track employees’ every move and let their supervisors know if and when they move an inch that is not in the aim of packing boxes.91 Founding president of the American Federation of Labor Samuel Gompers in 1904 said, “We don’t love to work only. The mule works, too.”92 Echoing that line, Rashad Long, a former picker at the Staten Island Amazon warehouse, said, “We are not robots. We are human beings. We cannot come into work after only four hours of sleep and be expected to be fully energized and ready to work. That’s impossible. I feel like all the company cares about is getting their products out to the customers as quickly as humanly possible, no matter what that means for us workers in the end.”93 Sociologist Matthew Desmond traces the origins of hyper-microefficient quota-oriented management to the ultimate degradation and treatment of people as only means to an end: slavery and its use in the production of cotton.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Davis became enthused about the idea and was an early funder of the project. Shakey was key because it was one of just a handful of major artificial intelligence projects that began in the 1960s, causing an explosion of early work in AI that would reverberate for decades. Today Shakey’s original DNA can be found in everything from the Kiva warehouse robot and Google’s autonomous car to Apple’s Siri intelligent assistant. Not only did it serve to train an early generation of researchers, but it would be their first point of engagement with technical and moral challenges that continue to frame the limits and potential of AI and robotics today. Many people believed Shakey was a portent for the future of AI.

…

The ability to quickly recognize objects among dozens of possibilities and pick them up from different positions remains a uniquely human skill. But for how long? It doesn’t take much imagination to see Baxter, or a competitor from similar companies like Universal Robots or Kuka, working in an Amazon warehouse alongside teams of mobile Kiva robots. Such lights-out warehouses are clearly on the horizon, whether they are made possible by “friendly” robots like Baxter or by more impersonal systems like the ones Google’s new robotics division is allegedly designing. As the debates over technology and jobs reemerged in 2012 in the United States, many people were eager to criticize Brooks’s Baxter and its humanoid design.

…

Hanging in the meat locker waiting to be deployed to the respective teams, however, they looked poised to spring into action with human nimbleness. On a quiet afternoon it evoked a scene from the 2004 movie I, Robot, where a police detective played by actor Will Smith walks, gun drawn, through a vast robot warehouse containing endless columns of frozen humanoid robots awaiting deployment. In a close-up shot, the eyes of one sinister automaton focus on the moving detective before it springs into action. Decades earlier, when Raibert began his graduate studies at MIT, he had set out to study neurophysiology. One day he followed a professor back to the MIT AI Lab.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Clark was a leading contender for the job. A major part of his candidacy was his bid to acquire the North Reading, Massachusetts–based robotics startup, Kiva Systems, which made the Roomba-like mobile robots. Instead of pickers walking a dozen miles a day to select items from shelves spread out over giant warehouses, Kiva robots maneuvered portable containers of merchandise around the building, an orchestral symphony conducted by the invisible hand of software. The idea behind Kiva was born from the same disaster that had inspired Doug Herrington to propose Amazon Fresh. After Webvan went bankrupt, one of its executives, Mick Mountz, realized that e-commerce companies were essentially paying people to spend two-thirds of their time walking.

…

Mountz believed Amazon was trying to incite skepticism about the startup in the tech industry. Then Amazon made a low-ball offer to buy Kiva over the spring of 2011. Mountz rejected the proposal. At the same time, Amazon began quietly evaluating other robotics companies and asking them to build a mobile warehouse robot. The effort failed though, and Amazon increased its offer for Kiva. An investment banker who represented Kiva said that the subsequent talks “were the most painful negotiations I’ve ever been through,” with Amazon characteristically arguing every point. After the $775 million deal closed in early 2012, Kiva execs visited Seattle and saw one of Amazon’s unsuccessful robot prototypes parked in a conference room.

…

Amazon needed to add fresh workers amid the overlapping challenges of high absenteeism and exploding customer demand while changing, on the fly, many of the deeply ingrained processes in the vast Amazon supply chain. In this respect, Amazon was in an enviable position. Dave Clark, the bespectacled former middle school band teacher, had proven himself uniquely capable of developing large, complex systems, like the network of warehouses using Kiva robots and the in-house transportation division, Amazon Logistics, which was now responsible for approximately half of all Amazon deliveries globally and two-thirds in the U.S. If supply chains win wars, as the old military proverb went, Bezos had one of the most accomplished generals in the world by his side.

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

Thus, all the program ‘controlling’ the arm has to do is to find the right order of such actions to carry out the required task. It doesn’t need to worry about the messy business of actually carrying them out. But think about a robot in the physical world trying to undertake this action, perhaps in a warehouse. Here, the robot would have to be able to identify the two objects in question, successfully execute a complex locomotion problem to get the arm to the right place and grasp the relevant object. Even the final part of this ‘atomic’ action, grasping the relevant object, is, in reality, far from trivial – getting robots to manipulate even simple objects in the real world is phenomenally difficult, and remains a significant challenge to the present day.

…

And imagine how you would feel if your annual appraisal was with a computer program, perhaps even a program that could decide whether to fire you. Somewhat cynically, I am tempted to suggest that we probably shouldn’t be too concerned about these problems, though, because the jobs in question won’t be around for very long: pretty soon they will be fully automated by AI and robotics. (Amazon is investing heavily in warehouse robotics.) The prospect of a large proportion of the world’s working population employed in jobs like this is not an attractive one, although, as I hope should now be clear, it is nothing fundamentally new – it’s an AI dimension added to trends that began back in the Industrial Revolution. And of course, many people in the working world today are employed in far worse conditions than those of the Amazon warehouse I describe above.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

It sprawled over one million square feet—equivalent to eighteen football fields—a boxy, light gray building with blank walls, nearly a third of a mile long and surrounded by 1,900 parking spots. Large black letters on its side read: AMAZON FULFILLMENT It was an arresting sight, those two words. It was, on one level, simply a term of the trade. The company called its primary warehouses, the cavernous buildings where workers and robots selected goods from racks and workers packed them for shipment, “fulfillment centers.” They were, after all, where customer orders were fulfilled. There were also the “sortation centers,” which were both smaller and smaller in number, where packages already assembled and addressed were sorted for delivery in a given area.

…

The leaders rose one by one: Audio of event recorded by author. the Advils that Amazon provided in vending machines: Heather Long, “Amazon’s $15 Minimum Wage Doesn’t End Debate over Whether It’s Creating Good Jobs,” The Washington Post, October 5, 2018. making their own existence more robotic: Noam Scheiber, “Inside an Amazon Warehouse, Robots’ Ways Rub Off on Humans,” The New York Times, July 3, 2019. two patents for a wristband: Ceyland Yeginsu, “If Workers Slack Off, a Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent For It.),” The New York Times, February 1, 2018. on the verge of building a new rail transit line: Alec MacGillis, “The Third Rail,” Places Journal, March 2016.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

“Amazon.com to Acquire Manufacturer of Robotics.” New York Times. New York Times, March 19, 2012. https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/amazon-com-buys-kiva-systems-for-775-million/. Amazon placed roughly 15,000 robots in its FCs by 2014: Seetharaman, Deepa. “Amazon Has Installed 15,000 Warehouse Robots to Deal with Increased Holiday Demand.” Business Insider. Business Insider, December 1, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/r-amazon-rolls-out-kiva-robots-for-holiday-season-onslaught-2014-12. and had 30,000 in operation by 2015: Levy, Nat. “Chart: Amazon Robots on the Rise, Gaining Slowly but Steadily on Human Workforce.”

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

These models allow engineers to be more creative in the questions they ask and allow for the emergence of previously hidden inefficiencies—with the potential for significant savings of time and money. The Warehouse That’s Packed Today, it’s not uncommon to walk into a modern warehouse or distribution center and see robots rolling along the floor. (For a small sampling of these smarter supply chain and warehouse bots, see the sidebar “AI in Warehouse and Logistics.”) AI in Warehouse and Logistics Artificial intelligence is taking on the task of warehouse navigation and inventory and changing the way people think about warehouse design. When Amazon acquired Kiva Robots in 2012, it signaled that the mobile bots zipping around Amazon’s warehouses were a key to their fulfillment advantage.

…

If it won’t, the robot alerts a central control system, which automatically redirects that box to a shelf where it will fit. The bots zip around the warehouse floor at twenty-five miles per hour, carrying, sensing, and adapting as they go. The difference between a traditional warehouse and one with Symbotic’s robots is stark. Usually, trucks unload pallets of products at the dock; there’s an area where pallets are stored until people can unpack them, and conveyor belts move cases of goods to various parts of the warehouse. But because the Symbotic robots immediately remove products from pallets and put them on shelves, there’s no need to reserve space for storing pallets. And there’s no need for conveyor belts either.

…

The shelves are carried by squat, rolling robots destined to bring the goods to the worker, who plucks the items off the shelves and puts them in a box to ship. Computer vision helps the robots know where they are in the warehouse, sensors keep them from running into each other, and machine-learning algorithms help them determine the best paths and right-of-ways on a warehouse floor full of other robots. The human worker no longer needs to walk miles a day to retrieve goods for packaging. In another example of embodiment, drones are being tested to deliver health care, on demand, to remote parts of Rwanda, out of reach of traditional medical options. A company called Zipline is pioneering the technology, targeting one of the leading causes of death—postpartum hemorrhage—with a delivery of blood for transfusion.12 Drones have become a particularly interesting application of AI: computer vision and smart algorithms process video in real time, thereby allowing people to extend their vision and delivery capabilities up into the air and over miles of potentially impassable terrain.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

While there was still a use for horses ploughing fields, pulling wagons and working in pits, the arrival of the internal combustion engine had driven down costs far enough that the wage for this work was so low it often wouldn’t even pay for a horse’s feed. As machinery became more and more advanced, this trend picked up speed through the twentieth century and beyond. Thanks to dual advances in both Artificial Intelligence and its sibling field of robotics, automation is now sweeping across more industries than ever. In warehouses, robots are increasingly used to select and box up products for shipping. In the service industry, robots are used to prepare food – and even serve it to customers. To whit, the San Francisco startup Momentum Machines, Inc. has built a robot capable of preparing hamburgers. Current models can prepare around 360 per hour, and are capable of doing everything from grinding the meat for the burgers and toasting the buns to adding fresh ingredients such as tomatoes, onions and pickles.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Some might say, “It’s okay that the malls and main streets are closing, because you’ll still need warehouse workers and truck drivers to deliver the goods plus web designers for all of the e-commerce storefronts.” Yet all of the new roles are likely to be located far from the mall and other population centers. Over time the warehouse workers will be replaced by a handful of technicians who supervise and operate warehouse robots and the delivery drivers will be replaced by a handful of logistics specialists. We can celebrate the 200 new robot supervisors in suburban California and the 100 new logistics specialists in Memphis and the 50 new web designers in Seattle and say, “Hey, we didn’t know we’d need these 350 college-educated people—hooray!”

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

As the Seattle Times reported, “illustrations that accompany the patent . . . show a cage-like enclosure around a small work space sitting atop the kind of robotic trolleys that now drive racks of shelves around Amazon warehouses.” It’s as jaw-dropping a metaphor for an undesirable, yet possibly unavoidable, urban future as you’re likely to find. Thankfully, Amazon shelved its human-cage plans. Instead, many of the company’s fulfillment-center workers now don a less repressive protective device to ward off warehouse droids, called the Robotic Tech Vest. By signaling a human presence to nearby machines, this ghost road armor allows more than 125,000 fulfillment-center workers to commingle with some 100,000 warehouse droids, who quickly map out human habitats. “In the past, associates would mark out the grid of cells where they would be working in order to enable the robotic traffic planner to smartly route around that region,” explains an Amazon robotics executive.

…

Streets,” New York Times, October 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-delivery.html. 136Amazon cornered the market: Scott Kirsner, “Acquisition Puts Amazon Rivals in Awkward Spot,” Boston Globe, December 1, 2013, https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/12/01/will-amazon-owned-robot-maker-sell-tailer-rivals/FON7bVNKvfzS2sHnBHzfLM/story.html. 136100,000 of these diligent devices were reporting: Nick Wingfield, “As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles,” New York Times, September 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html. 137cramming 50 percent more inventory: Ananya Bhattacharya, “Amazon Is Just Beginning to Use Robots in Its Warehouses and They’re Already Making a Huge Difference,” Quartz, June 17, 2016, https://qz.com/709541/amazon-is-just-beginning-to-use-robots-in-its-warehouses-and-theyre-already-making-a-huge-difference/. 137bots that slide along tracks suspended: Fiona Hartley, “Over 1,000 Robots Pack Groceries in Ocado’s Online Shopping Warehouse,” Dezeen, June 6, 2018, https://www.dezeen.com/2018/06/06/video-ocado-warehouse-shopping-robots-movie/. 137China’s JD.com employs a freakish spiderlike robot: JD.com, “Tour of the Warehouse of the Future,” YouTube video, May 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24T14VP5vVs. 137will face excruciating pressure to control carbon emissions: OECD/ITF, ITF Transport Outlook 2017 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2017), https://www.ttm.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/itf_study.pdf. 137“that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure”: Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London, UK: Routledge, 1942), 82–83. 138Domino’s Pizza outlet averages a mere 1,500 square feet: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Annual Report Pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d): Domino’s Pizza, December 29, 2013, p. 4, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1286681/000119312514066092/d661353d10k.htm. 138cardboard pizza, scant sauce, and synthetic-tasting: Allison P.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

In theory, the encroachment of online retailers should not necessarily destroy jobs but, rather, would transition them from traditional retail settings to the warehouses and distribution centers used by the online companies. However, the reality is that once jobs move to a warehouse they become far easier to automate. Amazon purchased Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics company in 2012. Kiva’s robots, which look a bit like huge, roving hockey pucks, are designed to move materials within warehouses. Rather than having workers roam the aisles selecting items, a Kiva robot simply zips under an entire pallet or shelving unit, lifts it, and then brings it directly to the worker packing an order.

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

The robotic density of the U.S. automotive industry is higher than that of any other industry, roughly 1,100 robots per 10,000 human employees.6 Each year, automotive companies hire more robots as the robotic density of the global automotive industry continues to grow at a rapid clip, a rate of 27 percent each year. While the car-making process might be heavily robotized, however, driverless cars would not recognize their brawny, simpleminded cousins on the assembly lines as fellow robots. Hard-working manufacturing, assembly line, and warehouse robots are neither mobile nor autonomous. They’re bolted into place, and carefully programmed by human technicians to do a specific task in a highly structured setting. If their environment throws them a curve ball, they can’t deviate from the script, nor are they capable of learning from previous experience.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Adjustments to the robot’s underlying algorithms can sometimes be made remotely, but any mechanical hiccups require hands-on work with the machine. All these frictions will slow down the pace of robotic automation. This is not to say that China’s manual laborers are safe. Drones for deploying pesticides on farms, warehouse robots for unpacking trucks, and vision-enabled robots for factory quality control will all dramatically reduce the jobs in these sectors. And Chinese companies are indeed investing heavily in all of the above. The country is already the world’s top market for robots, buying nearly as many as Europe and the Americas combined.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Mail Online, March 1, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286227/Amazons-human-robots-Is-future-British-workplace.html. Amazon also purchased Kiva Systems, a leading manufacturer of warehouse automation systems. See Scott Kirsner, “Amazon Buys Warehouse Robotics Start-Up Kiva Systems for $775 Million,” Boston.com, March 19, 2012, http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/03/amazon_buys_warehouse_robotics.html. 65.  Stowe Boyd, “If Amazon Is the Future of Work, Then Be Afraid,” Gigaom Research, February 22, 2013, http://research.gigaom.com/2013/02/if-amazon-is-the-future-of-work/. 66.  This dynamic is the central problem drawn out in Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future?

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Penn, “The Pessimism Index,” Time, 178 (July 11, 2011), 36–37. 53 See Gina Kolata, “First Mammal Clone Dies; Dolly Made Science History,” New York Times, February 15, 2003, A4. 54 See Rob Stein, “Glowing Monkeys Raise Ethics Concerns,” Washington Post, reprinted in Boston Globe, May 28, 2009, A7. 55 See Rob Stein, Washington Post, “Mix-ups Spur Calls for Regulation of Genetic Test Kits,” Boston Globe, July 19, 2010, A8. 56 See Francis S. Collins, “The Cancer You Can Beat,” Parade, June 20, 2010, 8, 10. 57 See Sally McGrane, “Social Norms: Online Dating and Genetics,” Time, 173 (June 29, 2009), 47. 58 Scott Kirsner, “Innovation Economy: Kiva, The Warehouse Robot Company,” Boston Sunday Globe, November 28, 2010, G1, G4; and Carolyn Y. Johnson, “Robots May Furnish Lesson in Human Trust,” Boston Globe, July 15, 2010, A1, A6. See also Peter W. Singer, “The Unmanned Mission,” Fortune, 161 (March 1, 2010), S2; Associated Press, “Robot Performs Wedding Ceremony in Tokyo,” Boston Globe, May 17, 2010, A3; and Kirsner, “You, Robot,” Boston Sunday Globe, May 30, 2010, G1, G4.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

But, like Google, Amazon is also massively investing in automated labor technology, with Jeff Bezos telling his investors in May 2014 that he expected to be using 10,000 robots in its fulfillment centers by the beginning of 2015.34 Thus in 2012 Amazon paid $775 million for Kiva Systems, a maker of robots for servicing warehouses. Kiva robots—which, by the way, are already being used by the Amazon-owned online shoe store Zappos (in Zappos’s hierarchy-free holacracy, all robots are presumably equal)—can retrieve and pick 200–400 items an hour. As George Packer warns in a 2014 New Yorker piece, “Amazon’s warehouse jobs are gradually being taken over by robots.”

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Amazon and Alibaba both have robots sorting millions of products across their facilities. Universal Robots (UR), a Danish manufacturer of lightweight multitasking robotic arms, reports double-digit annual growth in Asia. GreyOrange, a robotics company based in Singapore and New Delhi, has two warehouse robots named Butler and Sorter that stock shelves and load hundreds of thousands of parcels per day, eliminating the cheap manual labor on which India’s logistics sector has thrived for so long. GreyOrange’s partnership with Flipkart (originally backed by SoftBank, Tiger Global Management, and Tencent but now owned mostly by Walmart) will help it survive against Amazon’s aggressive incursion into India, allowing managers to focus less on head count and more on quality control.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

, MIT News, 4 May 2020, http://news.mit.edu/2020/how-many-jobs-robots-replace-0504. 81 As economist Henry Siu put it in 2015, ‘The personal computer existed in the ’80s, but you don’t see any effect on office and administrative-support jobs until the 1990s, and then suddenly, in the last recession, it’s huge. So today you’ve got checkout screens and the promise of driverless cars, flying drones, and little warehouse robots. We know that these tasks can be done by machines rather than people. But we may not see the effect until the next recession, or the recession after that.’ Derek Thompson, ‘When Will Robots Take All the Jobs?’, The Atlantic, 31 October 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/the-robot-paradox/505973/.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

These developments are part of a deeper technology trend: the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which some have called the “next industrial revolution.” Technology guru Kevin Kelly has compared AI to electricity: just as electricity brings objects all around us to life with power, so too will AI bring them to life with intelligence. AI enables more sophisticated and autonomous robots, from warehouse robots to next-generation drones, and can help process large amounts of data and make decisions to power Twitter bots, program subway repair schedules, and even make medical diagnoses. In war, AI systems can help humans make decisions—or they can be delegated authority to make decisions on their own.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

You don’t need a salesperson to help you understand which product is the best—Amazon has built software that lets customers rate the products and write reviews to tell you which are best, and then feeds that reputation information into their search engine so that the best products naturally come out on top. You don’t need a cashier to help you check out—software lets you do that yourself. Amazon’s use of automation goes far beyond the use of robots in its warehouses (though Amazon Robotics is one of the leaders in the field). Every function the company performs is infused with software, organizing its workers, its suppliers, and its customers into an integrated workflow. Of course, every corporation is a kind of hybrid of man and machine, created and operated by humans to augment their individual efforts.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

There’s a lot of evidence to support his view. The volume and variety of robots in use at companies is expanding rapidly, and innovators and entrepreneurs have recently made deep inroads against Moravec’s paradox.30 Kiva, another young Boston-area company, has taught its automatons to move around warehouses safely, quickly, and effectively. Kiva robots look like metal ottomans or squashed R2-D2s. They scuttle around buildings at about knee-height, staying out of the way of humans and one another. They’re low to the ground so they can scoot underneath shelving units, lift them up, and bring them to human workers. After these workers grab the products they need, the robot whisks the shelf away and another shelf-bearing robot takes its place.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Even with advanced WMS software automation systems like Manhattan Associates, HighJump or RedPrairie that can optimise the efficiencies of the workforce, order fulfilment costs remained stubbornly high, especially in low margin, high product mix orders like groceries. Kiva’s solution was groundbreaking and simple, and spawned from the answer to the question: Why have people deliver products to and from shelves if the shelves can come to them? Figure 4.6: Kiva’s automated guided vehicle system for warehouse management (Credit: Kiva/Amazon) Kiva created robots that locate the closest automated guided vehicle (robot) to the item that needs to be moved and directs the bot to retrieve the item. The mobile robots drive around the warehouse by navigating a series of barcode stickers on the floor. The robots have enough AI and sensors to avoid running into each other and obstacles.

…

Amazon offers us a glimpse of something that we’ll see often in the future: automation technology reduces the need for and number of low-skilled workers and highly paid sales and marketing employees while creating an entirely new division within the company of highly skilled roboticists and AI software workers. We said earlier that every person and company needs a robot strategy. Who are the early leaders in robot strategy and what are they doing? We’ve seen Amazon embrace robotics with its Kiva warehouse system acquisition. Google acquired eight robotics companies and put them all in a former NASA blimp hangar13 like a giant child’s playroom and made what is probably the most cinematic yet confusing move, since the military nature of the robots seems at odds with Google’s core business and its civilian focus on search. Apple’s main outsourced manufacturer, Foxconn (actually Hon Hai, headquartered in Taiwan) is realising that the only way it is going to be able to continue to keep Apple’s manufacturing business is by upgrading its factories to use more and more robots to make up for ever-increasing labour costs in China, as the number of Chinese aged 15 to 59 (the traditional retirement age) shrinks by 3 to 4 million a year.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

Robots have computation, network, and physical components to enable them to run software to do their tasks, such as to read sensors data, apply algorithms, and send control information to servomotors and actuators that control the robots arms, levers, and mechanisms. Robots also communicate with back-end servers in the operations and management domain and with safety devices on the assembly line. An example of this is that in some deployments, such as in stock handling in warehouses where robots retrieve or return stock from shelves and bins, robots work very quickly. They move at tremendous speeds, performing mechanical arm actions in a blur, and do not tire or need rest breaks, so they outperform humans in every regard. However, robots and humans do not always work together safely, and it is necessary then if a human comes into the working vicinity of a robot that the robot must slow down and perform its actions at a speed compatible with humans.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

A routine cognitive task would be a bank teller, while a sorter on an assembly line would be an example of a routine manual task. It is jobs that involve routine tasks that have already been substantially substituted by technology. Because routine tasks can be described by a specific set of instructions, they can be codified in a program for computers and robots to perform. Take a look in most Amazon warehouses, where robots move inventory from the shelves to Amazon packers while at the same time sending a constant stream of data to a central system about which products are ordered. The process takes place continually without intervention or decision-making by humans. This has been made possible by rapid technological innovations in machine learning and the accuracy of sensors.

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

In these enormous windowless structures ‘stock pickers’ (they are not called ‘employees’) are monitored by cameras, while electronic wristbands algorithmically control their movements by telling them where to go and what to select from the millions of algorithmically ordered products placed to optimize workers’ movements between shelves. Toilet and lunch breaks are timed, emails are constantly monitored and employee performance is measured. Although since dropped, in 2016, the company even patented a cage atop a trolley to carry workers into areas of the warehouse where robotic workers operate.4 It’s hard to imagine a more dehumanized or dehumanizing vision of a workplace, but at least in the real world we can see and identify abuse and exploitation and hopefully correct it. But what happens when we can’t actually see what’s going on, much like the trick Vaucanson played on the public with the hidden guise of his Digesting Duck, or the fraud committed by von Kempelen with the chess master hidden inside his chess playing Turk?

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Around the start of this decade, Amazon’s top operations managers determined that its warehouses were still too inefficient, and so they themselves went shopping for something better. In 2012 Amazon bought Kiva Systems, a robotics firm, and it now uses robots to put its entire shelving system into motion. Amazon’s updated, even more automated fulfillment centers now feature shelves that move and humans who stand in place—the opposite of what a warehouse normally looks like. Flat, Roomba-like robots rove the warehouse floor along designated pathways. They can lift entire shelving units just off the ground and maneuver them along the same pathways to “picking stations.” These are small designated areas where human order pickers stand, taking items from storage bins and putting them into order bins as shelving units come and go.

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Under his direction, the company would, in time, winnow its foreign presence; buy the e-commerce site Jet.com for more than $3 billion—and then shut it down; otherwise rev up its online business by introducing new services and expanding its stable of third-party sellers; unveil a subscription program, akin to Amazon Prime, called Walmart+; build local fulfillment centers—compact warehouses powered by robotics and artificial intelligence—right in its stores; dive into digital advertising; cultivate customers on TikTok, the viral video app; venture into the metaverse and the worlds of cryptocurrency and nonfungible tokens; deliver products by drone and driverless truck; put groceries right into people’s fridges while they weren’t home; open health clinics and offer medical insurance; launch a financial technology startup; buy the menswear company Bonobos; buy and sell the women’s apparel company ModCloth; beef up its fashion brands by hiring a creative director, Brandon Maxwell, who, as Vogue observed, was in a coterie of designers who typically took on engagements in Paris or Milan, not Bentonville; and much, much more.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Amazon has filed patents for “drone nests,” large beehive-like buildings designed to house fleets of autonomous flying delivery robots, and for “airborne fulfillment centers,” airships that cruise at forty-five thousand feet full of products ready for drone delivery.23 Airborne robotic delivery might sound fanciful, and Amazon’s patents may seem just an attempt to stir up some attention. Yet it is worth remembering that Amazon is among the most advanced users of robotics, with a fleet of over one hundred thousand ground-based robots across its warehouses.24 And some robots today are already capable of accomplishing remarkable physical feats, like opening doors and climbing walls, ascending stairs and landing backflips, carrying cables over harsh terrain and knotting ropes together in midair.25 Meanwhile, the global population of industrial robots is rising steadily: the International Federation of Robotics, a trade association, anticipates there will be more than three million of them in operation in 2020, double the number in 2014.27 Figure 5.1: Global Stock of Industrial Robots (000’s)26 The car manufacturing industry provides a good case study of task encroachment unfolding in the industrial world.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Today, robotic computer vision is mature, so it can be applied to safety enhancements for the elderly population (imagine robot-assisted “life alert”), assembly line visual inspection, and anomaly detection for energy and mass-transportation industries. In parallel, mobile platforms such as autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and autonomous forklifts can navigate around indoor spaces, allowing a robot to “see” obstacles, plan its path, and move cargo in a warehouse. Today robotic arms can grasp, manipulate, and move rigid objects in applications like welding, assembling lines, and object picking in e-commerce distribution centers. These robots will gradually become more capable. Computer vision using cameras and other sensors (such as LiDAR) will be an integral part of smart cities and autonomous vehicles.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Colonization of Mars, double helix, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tragedy of the Commons, warehouse robotics

I won’t do it. I’ll fix things where I can, but I won’t fight.” A message came over the radio. Fournier Crater, about 860 kilometers away, had a cracked dome. The populace was trapped in sealed buildings, and running out of air. “I want to go there,” Nadia said. “There’s a big central warehouse of construction robots there. They could fix the dome, and then be set to other repairs down on Isidis.” “How will you get there?” Sam asked. Nadia thought it over, took a deep breath. “Ultralite, I guess. There’s some of those new 16Ds up on the south-rim airstrip. That would be the fastest way for sure, and maybe even the safest, who knows.”

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Alex Rosenblat, Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 5. 10. Ibid., 98, 203. 11. Rob Wile, “Here’s How Much Lyft Drivers Really Make,” CNN Money, July 11, 2017. 12. Josh Zumbrun, “How Estimates of the Gig Economy Went Wrong,” The Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2019. 13. Aimee Picchi, “Inside an Amazon Warehouse: Treating Human Beings as Robots,” CBS News, April 19, 2018. 14. Michael Sainato, “Accidents at Amazon: Workers Left to Suffer After Warehouse Injuries,” The Guardian, July 30, 2018. 15. Foroohar, “Vivienne Ming.” 16. Jodi Kantor, “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” The New York Times, August 13, 2014. 17.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

If we are stuck with the problem of asking humans to monitor computers, it is vital to keep those humans interested, and there may be safe ways to add a little dose of mess. Airplanes are only one type of largely automated system that humans are tasked with keeping an eye on—others include high-speed trains, U.S. military drones, and warehouses full of robot forklifts. Supervising a drone sounds like an exciting job, but it can be dreadfully boring for much of the time. The drone might be circling over Afghanistan while the operator is snacking on M&M’s at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada, keeping half an eye on the screen and idly daydreaming—then they suddenly need to snap to attention and decide whether or not to kill a potential target.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Millions of jobs will disappear. Technology has revolutionized work across the board. Robotic baristas and chefs can displace humans. Recipes are step-by-step instructions on how to cook meals—algorithms, in effect. Express checkout stations replace workers in brick-and-mortar retail stores. Today, e-commerce warehouses rely on robots to move inventory around. Tomorrow, robots and drones will deliver goods to their destinations. Traditional education capped the typical classroom size at a few dozen students. Nowadays one teacher can reach millions of viewers. Why go to community colleges when top universities come into your home?

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Viral images are circulating of urine-filled bottles that delivery workers at Amazon—the world’s largest online retailer, owned by the world’s second-richest man—were forced to produce because they are so overworked and so digitally surveilled that they could not risk taking a proper bathroom break. Modern factories and warehouse floors are buzzing with robotic product pickers and haulers, surrounding the humans whose tasks have been made at once less skilled and more punishingly repetitive. There are picket lines of people outside, protesting inhumane conditions. AI-generated images are flooding the internet—leading artists, illustrators, and stock photo services to file lawsuits against the startups that the plaintiffs say copied, emulated, and degraded their work.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Further up the supply chain, Ocado, the British internet supermarket, is reinventing itself as a supplier of warehouse services to retailers around the world. It has recently landed a contract with the Canadian grocer Sobeys which will launch an online shop with orders picked from an automated warehouse in the Toronto area. There won’t be many jobs for humans in the warehouse. Battery-powered robots are at the center of Ocado’s model. Mind you, robots are still not very good at picking things from the shelves. As a result, warehouses are now using “the Jennifer Unit,” which is a headset that tells human workers what to do. The economist Tim Harford envisages this as a possible harbinger of bigger things to come.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Mergers and acquisitions ballooned on his watch, concentrating power in the hands of just a few companies in sector after sector, leading to higher prices, fewer options for employees, and a less dynamic economy overall. And the amount of taxes paid by corporations has plummeted, while buybacks and dividends have exploded. This is the world Welch bequeathed us. One where Jeff Bezos can afford to send himself to space, while hourly employees at Amazon warehouses are monitored by robots. One where a handful of private equity executives can buy up iconic American food companies and squeeze them dry. One where a media company can go $80 billion into debt buying up rivals, then lay off tens of thousands of workers in the name of profitability. Welchism has made America poorer, less equal, and more insecure.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Apparel is the largest niche in e-tailing—bigger than electronics, bigger than books— surging from zero to $23 billion in sales in barely a decade. The company plans to double its apparel sales this year and predicts clothing will surpass shoes to become its largest category within the next five. If you happen to be in the market for a Michael Kors dress, your order vanishes behind a wall running the height and width of the warehouse, carried by a robot. There are seventy in all—orange cubes three feet tall, resembling oversize Roombas—zooming between the shelves, which they slide under and haul to pickers on their heads. Seen from above, the warehouse itself appears to be moving, as racks shudder and glide to the front, seemingly of their own volition.

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

All of this makes for a rather harsh contrast between the foresight shown by the military as compared with civilian economists and analysts. Consider the uneven terrain and the highly unpredictable and dynamic situations that would be faced by battlefield robots. Now compare that with the environment inside a supermarket or warehouse. It seems obvious that designing robots to perform much of the routine work required within commercial and industrial job settings is far less challenging than producing autonomous military robots. The U.S. military is rightly investing substantial resources in studying the future impact of robotics and artificial intelligence on the way in which future wars will be fought.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

You can’t generally shoot a gun on the street, but you can go to a shooting range if you enjoy firearms. The same might come for driving, with human drivers confined to tracks. To date, robots have existed primarily in tightly controlled areas, where human interaction or the potential for human interaction is minimal/tightly controlled - such as in factories, or warehouses. In those instances where robots venture out, it tends to be in dedicated areas such as tunnels or lanes, again devoid of humans. As they venture visibly further into our lives and although protecting us from harm, become a threat to employment or perceived freedom, pushing us out of the way, how will we react?

Quarantine by Greg Egan

cosmic microwave background, dark matter, disinformation, fudge factor, intermodal, pattern recognition, placebo effect, Schrödinger's Cat, time dilation, warehouse robotics

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Robots are continuing to replace workers on factory floors in several manufacturing sectors. And it seems clear that other jobs in the service sector will also vanish in the future. Trucks and taxis may well become self-driving, thereby displacing millions of professional drivers. Warehouses are increasingly operated with robots carrying, stacking, and packaging the merchandise. And retail stores are giving way to e-commerce and direct delivery of purchases, again with expert systems and potentially self-driving delivery vehicles. In recent decades, lower-skilled workers displaced by machines have seen their earnings stagnate or decline, while higher-skilled workers have been made more productive by those same machines and have seen their earnings rise.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Typically, these inputs each play essential roles; that is, improvements in one do not obviate the need for the other.51 Just as Baxter cooperates with human workers, other robots do not just displace workers but also make the remaining workers more valuable and create new jobs, including those who are building and programming the robots. The complementarity between robots and human workers is illustrated by the cooperative work ritual taking place daily in Amazon warehouses, often cited as a frontier example of robotic technology. Far from replacing all human workers, in these warehouses the Kiva robots do not actually touch any of the merchandise but rather are limited to lifting shelves containing the objects and moving the shelves to the packer, who lifts the object off the shelf and performs the packing operation by hand.52 The tactile skills needed for the robots to distinguish the different shapes, sizes, and textures of the objects on the shelves are beyond the capability of current robot technology.