the robots are coming!

In his new book, Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford considers the social and economic disruption that is likely to result when educated workers can no longer find employment.

But what we're seeing now in robotics is that finally the machines are ... being driven by advances in areas like visual perception. You now have got robots that can see in three-dimension and that's getting much better and also becoming much less expensive. So you're beginning to see machines that are starting to have the kind of perception and dexterity that begins to approach what human beings can do. A lot more jobs are becoming susceptible to this and that's something that's going to continue to accelerate, and more and more of those jobs are going to disappear and factories are just going to relentlessly approach full-automation where there really aren't going to be many people at all.

for example, machines can now fully produce very, very high quality hamburgers ... about 350 to 400 per hour; they come out fully configured on a conveyor belt ready to serve to the customer. ... it's all fresh vegetables and freshly ground meat and so forth; it's not frozen patties like you might find at a fast food joint. These are actually much higher quality hamburgers than you'd find at a typical fast food restaurant.