The Robots Are Coming!
The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation
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Staying true to his trademark journalistic approach, Andrés Oppenheimer takes his readers on yet another journey, this time across the globe, in a thought-provoking search to understand what the future holds for today's jobs in the foreseeable age of automation.
The Robots Are Coming! centers around the issue of jobs and their future in the context of rapid automation and the growth of online products and services. As two of Oppenheimer's interviewees -- both experts in technology and economics from Oxford University -- indicate, forty-seven percent of existing jobs are at risk of becoming automated or rendered obsolete by other technological changes in the next twenty years. Oppenheimer examines current changes in several fields, including the food business, legal work, banking, and medicine, speaking with experts in the field, and citing articles and literature on automation in various areas of the workforce. He contrasts the perspectives of "techno-optimists" with those of "techno-negativists" and generally attempts to find a middle ground between an alarmist vision of the future, and one that is too uncritical. A self-described "cautious optimist", Oppenheimer believes that technology will not create massive unemployment, but rather will drastically change what work looks like.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Miami Herald columnist Oppenheimer offers a breezy, superficial survey of trends in automation that are expected to radically transform the workplace in coming decades. Oppenheimer traveled around the world to see for himself how autonomous devices have already begun to assume roles traditionally held by people, such as the robots in Japan who checked him into a hotel, and greeted him when he entered a bank. While he ends up asserting that the "world will continue getting better," despite some "turbulent times," Oppenheimer glosses over reasons to doubt that optimism; for example, he minimizes the potential for large-scale social disruptions when entire professions, such as truck driving, are eliminated, with no obvious or easy replacement jobs. And he also downplays the limits of some advances, lauding massive open online courses, or MOOCs, without noting that many who enroll never finish them. Sweeping generalizations (he writes that many Asian countries have a "family culture of education... that simply doesn't exist in many Western nations") and factual sloppiness (Carrie Fisher didn't have to be digitally recreated for Star Wars: Rogue One because of her death, which occurred after that film's release) also lessen the book's credibility. The result is a readable but less than essential addition to the many volumes already available on this topic.
