Download or read book Summary of Martin Ford s Rise of the Robots by Swift Reads written by Swift Reads and published by Swift Reads. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015) by Martin Ford describes the ways automation and rapid advances in technology are shaping the global economy, as well as the profound consequences these technological changes will have for future workers. The role of technology in production has evolved. No longer a mere means of increasing the productivity of human workers, technology has developed methods for replacing workers entirely... Purchase this in-depth summary to learn more.
Download or read book Albion s Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 981 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Download or read book America s Assembly Line written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation. The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century. The assembly line—developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts—first created and then served an expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of “lean manufacturing”; American industry reluctantly adopted the new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in America and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.
Download or read book Seeing Like a State written by James C. Scott and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Download or read book Overhaul written by Steven Rattner and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A uniquely informed investigative account of one of the biggest financial crises of President Obama’s early administration During his first year in office, President Obama faced the possibility of more than a million lost jobs as GM and Chrysler headed for financial ruin. He joined forces with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and economic advisor Larry Summers in a historic government intervention to keep these two auto-industry giants afloat, working against a ticking clock and fielding vocal opposition from free market champions along the way. It's from this vantage point that former New York Times financial journalist Steven Rattner witnesses a new administration's grace under pressure in the face of gross corporate mismanagement—a scenario rich in hard-earned lessons for managers and executives in any industry.
Download or read book Martin Ford s Rise of the Robots Summary written by Ant Hive Media and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a summary of the original book Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? We might imagine-and hope-that today's industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new innovations of a new era. In Rise of the Robots, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that this is absolutely not the case. As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making "good jobs" obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries-education and health care-that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work, and we must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what accelerating technology means for their own economic prospects-not to mention those of their children-as well as for society as a whole. This summary is available in a variety of formats, and is aimed for those who want to capture the gist of the book but don't have the current time to devour all 352 pages. You get the main summary along with all of the benefits and lessons the actual book has to offer. It fills the gap, making you understand more while enhancing your reading experience. This is a summary that is not intended to be used without reference to the original book.
Download or read book Fast Food Nation written by Eric Schlosser and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the fast food industry in the United States, from its roots to its long-term consequences.
Download or read book Billion Dollar Burger written by Chase Purdy and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting story of the entrepreneurs and renegades fighting to bring lab-grown meat to the world. The trillion-dollar meat industry is one of our greatest environmental hazards; it pollutes more than all the world's fossil-fuel-powered cars. Global animal agriculture is responsible for deforestation, soil erosion, and more emissions than air travel, paper mills, and coal mining combined. It also, of course, depends on the slaughter of more than 60 billion animals per year, a number that is only increasing as the global appetite for meat swells. But a band of doctors, scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs have been racing to end animal agriculture as we know it, hoping to fulfill a dream of creating meat without ever having to kill an animal. In the laboratories of Silicon Valley companies, Dutch universities, and Israeli startups, visionaries are growing burgers and steaks from microscopic animal cells and inventing systems to do so at scale--allowing us to feed the world without slaughter and environmental devastation. Drawing from exclusive and unprecedented access to the main players, from polarizing activist-turned-tech CEO Josh Tetrick to lobbyists and regulators on both sides of the issue, Billion Dollar Burger follows the people fighting to upend our food system as they butt up against the entrenched interests fighting viciously to stop them. The stakes are monumentally high: cell-cultured meat is the best hope for sustainable food production, a key to fighting climate change, a gold mine for the companies that make it happen, and an existential threat for the farmers and meatpackers that make our meat today. Are we ready?
Download or read book Approaches to Class Analysis written by Erik Olin Wright and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few themes have been as central to sociology as 'class' and yet class remains a perpetually contested idea. Sociologists disagree not only on how best to define the concept of class but on its general role in social theory and indeed on its continued relevance to the sociological analysis of contemporary society. Some people believe that classes have largely dissolved in contemporary societies; others believe class remains one of the fundamental forms of social inequality and social power. Some see class as a narrow economic phenomenon whilst others adopt an expansive conception that includes cultural dimensions as well as economic conditions. This 2005 book explores the theoretical foundations of six major perspectives of class with each chapter written by an expert in the field. It concludes with a conceptual map of these alternative approaches by posing the question: 'If class is the answer, what is the question?'
Download or read book Autonomous Vehicle Technology written by James M. Anderson and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The automotive industry appears close to substantial change engendered by “self-driving” technologies. This technology offers the possibility of significant benefits to social welfare—saving lives; reducing crashes, congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution; increasing mobility for the disabled; and ultimately improving land use. This report is intended as a guide for state and federal policymakers on the many issues that this technology raises.
Download or read book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism written by Shoshana Zuboff and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Download or read book How s Life in the Digital Age Opportunities and Risks of the Digital Transformation for People s Well being written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report documents how the ongoing digital transformation is affecting people’s lives across the 11 key dimensions that make up the How’s Life? Well-being Framework (Income and wealth, Jobs and earnings, Housing, Health status, Education and skills, Work-life balance, Civic engagement and ...
Download or read book The Structuring of Organizations written by Henry Mintzberg and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synthesizes the empirical literature on organizationalstructuring to answer the question of how organizations structure themselves --how they resolve needed coordination and division of labor. Organizationalstructuring is defined as the sum total of the ways in which an organizationdivides and coordinates its labor into distinct tasks. Further analysis of theresearch literature is neededin order to builda conceptualframework that will fill in the significant gap left by not connecting adescription of structure to its context: how an organization actuallyfunctions. The results of the synthesis are five basic configurations (the SimpleStructure, the Machine Bureaucracy, the Professional Bureaucracy, theDivisionalized Form, and the Adhocracy) that serve as the fundamental elementsof structure in an organization. Five basic parts of the contemporaryorganization (the operating core, the strategic apex, the middle line, thetechnostructure, and the support staff), and five theories of how it functions(i.e., as a system characterized by formal authority, regulated flows, informalcommunication, work constellations, and ad hoc decision processes) aretheorized. Organizations function in complex and varying ways, due to differing flows -including flows of authority, work material, information, and decisionprocesses. These flows depend on the age, size, and environment of theorganization; additionally, technology plays a key role because of itsimportance in structuring the operating core. Finally, design parameters aredescribed - based on the above five basic parts and five theories - that areused as a means of coordination and division of labor in designingorganizational structures, in order to establish stable patterns of behavior.(CJC).
Download or read book New Laws of Robotics written by Frank Pasquale and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AI is poised to disrupt our work and our lives. We can harness these technologies rather than fall captive to them—but only through wise regulation. Too many CEOs tell a simple story about the future of work: if a machine can do what you do, your job will be automated. They envision everyone from doctors to soldiers rendered superfluous by ever-more-powerful AI. They offer stark alternatives: make robots or be replaced by them. Another story is possible. In virtually every walk of life, robotic systems can make labor more valuable, not less. Frank Pasquale tells the story of nurses, teachers, designers, and others who partner with technologists, rather than meekly serving as data sources for their computerized replacements. This cooperation reveals the kind of technological advance that could bring us all better health care, education, and more, while maintaining meaningful work. These partnerships also show how law and regulation can promote prosperity for all, rather than a zero-sum race of humans against machines. How far should AI be entrusted to assume tasks once performed by humans? What is gained and lost when it does? What is the optimal mix of robotic and human interaction? New Laws of Robotics makes the case that policymakers must not allow corporations or engineers to answer these questions alone. The kind of automation we get—and who it benefits—will depend on myriad small decisions about how to develop AI. Pasquale proposes ways to democratize that decision making, rather than centralize it in unaccountable firms. Sober yet optimistic, New Laws of Robotics offers an inspiring vision of technological progress, in which human capacities and expertise are the irreplaceable center of an inclusive economy.
Download or read book Understanding Media written by Marshall McLuhan and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-09-04 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Digital Person written by Daniel J Solove and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Solove presents a startling revelation of how digital dossiers are created, usually without the knowledge of the subject, & argues that we must rethink our understanding of what privacy is & what it means in the digital age before addressing the need to reform the laws that regulate it.
Download or read book Digital Roots written by Gabriele Balbi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.