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

Chapter 1
The 
Automation Wave
A warehouse worker approaches a stack of boxes. The boxes are of 
varying shapes, sizes, and colors, and they are stacked in a somewhat 
haphazard way.
Imagine for a moment that you can see inside the brain of the 
worker tasked with moving the boxes, and consider the complexity 
of the problem that needs to be solved.
Many of the boxes are a standard brown color and are pressed 
tightly against each other, making the edges difficult to perceive. 
Where precisely does one box end and the next begin? In other cases, 
there are gaps and misalignments. Some boxes are rotated so that 
one edge juts out. At the top of the pile, a small box rests at an angle 
in the space between two larger boxes. Most of the boxes are plain 
brown or white cardboard, but some are emblazoned with company 
logos, and a few are full-color retail boxes intended to be displayed 
on store shelves.
The human brain is, of course, capable of making sense of all this 
complicated visual information almost instantaneously. The worker 
easily perceives the dimensions and orientation of each box, and

seems to know instinctively that he must begin by moving the boxes 
at the top of the stack and how to move the boxes in a sequence that 
won’t destabilize the rest of the pile.
This is exactly the type of visual perception challenge that the 
human brain has evolved to overcome. That the worker succeeds 
in moving the boxes would be completely unremarkable—were it 
not for the fact that, in this case, the worker is a robot. To be more 
precise, it is a snake-like robotic arm, its head consisting of a suction-

powered gripper. The robot is slower to comprehend than a human 
would be. It peers at the boxes, adjusts its gaze slightly, ponders some 
more, and then finally lunges forward and grapples a box from the 
top of the pile.
 The sluggishness, however, results almost entirely 
from the staggering complexity of the computation required to per-

form this seemingly simple task. If there is one thing the history of 
information technology teaches, it is that this robot is going to very 
soon get a major speed upgrade.
Indeed, engineers at Industrial Perception, Inc., the Silicon Val-

ley start-up company that designed and built the robot, believe the 
machine will ultimately be able to move a box every second. That 
compares with a human worker’s maximum rate of a box roughly 
every six seconds.
 Needless to say, the robot can work continuously; 
it will never get tired or suffer a back injury—and it will certainly 
never file a worker’s compensation claim.
Industrial Perception’s robot is remarkable because its capabil-

ity sits at the nexus of visual perception, spatial computation, and 
dexterity. In other words, it is invading the final frontier of machine 
automation, where it will compete for the few relatively routine, man-

ual jobs that are still available to human workers.
Robots in factories are, of course, nothing new. They have be-

come indispensable in virtually every sector of manufacturing, 

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