Review of 'Rise of the Robots' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
This is a fairly thorough coverage of the displacement of human labourers by robots or AI software. Although there is some gee-whiz over-enthusiasm for the technology, it is more realistic than some I have read and it rightly covers more economics than the details of the technology. If you are reasonably up-to-date on the technology, you may learn a lot about the economic context and vice versa.
As a technologist, I found it not too far from accurate except that I found many of the explanations by analogy wasted far to much time explaining the thing the technology was analogous to. If you don't understand that thing, a direct explanation is just as effective. And the analogies were often weak.
I've spent a fair bit of time reading economics too, but there were some very helpful statistical details in here from my point of view. For example, about correlations between …
This is a fairly thorough coverage of the displacement of human labourers by robots or AI software. Although there is some gee-whiz over-enthusiasm for the technology, it is more realistic than some I have read and it rightly covers more economics than the details of the technology. If you are reasonably up-to-date on the technology, you may learn a lot about the economic context and vice versa.
As a technologist, I found it not too far from accurate except that I found many of the explanations by analogy wasted far to much time explaining the thing the technology was analogous to. If you don't understand that thing, a direct explanation is just as effective. And the analogies were often weak.
I've spent a fair bit of time reading economics too, but there were some very helpful statistical details in here from my point of view. For example, about correlations between technology and more focussed employment trends (e.g. total hours worked is a better measure than employment percentage as it shows where people have been forced into part-time work).
The biggest issue I had was that it is all based on extrapolating existing trends on an assumption that capitalism won't change radically or be replaced, even though many of the statistics seemed to me to be fairly good evidence that the underlying assumption is false.
There is some useful discussion about how we should change things, including some good analysis of basic income, though this is limited by the assumption that we will continue to patch the system, with no discussion of more radical alternatives, not even to explain why they can't work, if that's what he thing.
