Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (46 page)

13
. This WorkFusion information is based on a telephone conversation between the author and Adam Devine, vice president of Product Marketing & Strategic Partnerships at WorkFusion, on May 14, 2014.

14
. This incident is recounted in Steven Baker,
Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 20. The story of the steakhouse dinner is also told in John E. Kelly III,
Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 27. However, Baker’s book indicates that some IBM employees believe the idea to build a
Jeopardy!
-playing computer predates the dinner.

15
. Rob High, “The Era of Cognitive Systems: An Inside Look at IBM Watson and How it Works,”
IBM Redbooks,
2012, p. 2,
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4955.pdf
.

16
. Baker,
Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything,
p. 30.

17
. Ibid., pp. 9 and 26.

18
. Ibid., p. 68.

19
. Ibid.

20
. Ibid., p. 78.

21
. David Ferrucci, Eric Brown, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, James Fan, David Gondek, Aditya A. Kalyanpur, Adam Lally, J. William Murdock, Eric Nyberg, John Prager, Nico Schlaefer, and Chris Welty, “Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project,”
AI Magazine,
Fall 2010,
http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php
.

22
. IBM Press Release: “IBM Research Unveils Two New Watson Related Projects from Cleveland Clinic Collaboration,” October 15, 2013,
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/42203.wss
.

23
. IBM Case Study: “IBM Watson/Fluid, Inc.,” November 4, 2013,
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/pdf/Fluid_case_study_11_4_2013.pdf
.

24
. “IBM Watson/MD Buyline, Inc.,” IBM Case Study, November 4, 2013,
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/pdf/MDB_case_study_11_4_2013.pdf
.

25
. IBM Press Release: “Citi and IBM Enter Exploratory Agreement on Use of Watson Technologies,” March 5, 2012,
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37029.wss
.

26
. IBM Press Release: “IBM Watson’s Next Venture: Fueling New Era of Cognitive Apps Built in the Cloud by Developers,” November 14, 2013,
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/42451.wss
.

27
. Quentin Hardy, “IBM to Announce More Powerful Watson via the Internet,”
New York Times,
November 13, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/technology/ibm-to-announce-more-powerful-watson-via-the-internet.html?_r=0
.

28
. Nick Heath, “‘Let’s Try and Not Have a Human Do It’: How One Facebook Techie Can Run 20,000 Servers,”
ZDNet,
November 25, 2013,
http://www.zdnet.com/lets-try-and-not-have-a-human-do-it-how-one-facebook-techie-can-run-20000-servers-7000023524
.

29
. Michael S. Rosenwald, “Cloud Centers Bring High-Tech Flash But Not Many Jobs to Beaten-Down Towns,”
Washington Post,
November 24, 2011,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/cloud-centers-bring-high-tech-flash-but-not-many-jobs-to-beaten-down-towns/2011/11/08/gIQAccTQtN_print.html
.

30
. Quentin Hardy, “Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing,”
New York Times,
August 27, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/technology/active-in-cloud-amazon-reshapes-computing.html
.

31
. Mark Stevenson,
An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer “What’s Next?”
(New York: Penguin Group, 2011), p. 101.

32
. Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson, “Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data,”
Science
324 (April 3, 2009),
http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/Science09_Schmidt.pdf
.

33
. Stevenson,
An Optimist’s Tour of the Future,
p. 104.

34
. National Science Foundation Press Release: “Maybe Robots Dream of Electric Sheep, But Can They Do Science?,” April 2, 2009,
http://www.nsf.gov/mobile/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114495
.

35
. Asaf Shtull-Trauring, “An Israeli Professor’s ‘Eureqa’ Moment,”
Haaretz,
February 3, 2012,
http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/an-israeli-professor-s-eureqa-moment-1.410881
.

36
. John R. Koza, “Human-Competitive Results Produced by Genetic Programming,”
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
11, nos. 3–4 (September 2010),
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1831232
.

37
. John Koza’s website,
http://www.genetic-programming.com/#_What_is_Genetic
, also:
http://eventful.com/events/john-r-koza-routine-human-competitive-machine-intelligence-/E0–001–000292572–0
.

38
. Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,”
Time,
February 10, 2011,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html
.

39
. As quoted in Sylvia Smith, “Iamus: Is This the 21st Century’s Answer to Mozart?,”
BBC News,
January 2, 2013,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20889644
.

40
. As quoted in Kadim Shubber, “Artificial Artists: When Computers Become Creative,”
Wired Magazine–UK,
August 13, 2007,
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013–08/07/can-computers-be-creative/viewgallery/306906
.

41
. Shubber, “Artificial Artists: When Computers Become Creative.”

42
. “Bloomberg Bolsters Machine-Readable News Offering,”
The Trade,
February 19, 2010,
http://www.thetradenews.com/News/Operations_Technology/Market_data/Bloomberg_bolsters_machine-readable_news_offering.aspx
.

43
. Neil Johnson, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Hong Qi, Nicholas Johnson, Jing Meng, and Brian Tivnan, “Abrupt Rise of New Machine Ecology Beyond Human Response Time,”
Nature,
September 11, 2013,
http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130911/srep02627/full/srep02627.html
.

44
. Christopher Steiner,
Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
(New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012), pp. 116–120.

45
. Max Raskin and Ilan Kolet, “Wall Street Jobs Plunge as Profits Soar: Chart of the Day,”
Bloomberg News,
April 23, 2013,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013–04–24/wall-street-jobs-plunge-as-profits-soar-chart-of-the-day.html
.

46
. Steve Lohr, “David Ferrucci: Life After Watson,”
New York Times
(Bits blog), May 6, 2013,
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/david-ferrucci-life-after-watson/?_r=1
.

47
. As quoted in Alan S. Blinder, “Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?,”
Foreign Affairs,
March/April 2006,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61514/alan-s-blinder/offshoring-the-next-industrial-revolution
.

48
. Alan S. Blinder, “Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me,”
Washington Post,
May 6, 2007,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050402555.html
.

49
. Blinder, “Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?”

50
. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Oxford Martin School, Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, September 17, 2013, p. 38,
http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf
.

51
. Alan S. Blinder, “On the Measurability of Offshorability,”
VOX,
October 9, 2009,
http://www.voxeu.org/article/twenty-five-percent-us-jobs-are-offshorable
.

52
. Keith Bradsher, “Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs,”
New York Times,
January 24, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/as-graduates-rise-in-china-office-jobs-fail-to-keep-up.html
; Keith Bradsher, “Faltering Economy in China Dims Job Prospects for Graduates,”
New York Times,
June 16, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/global/faltering-economy-in-china-dims-job-prospects-for-graduates.html?pagewanted=all
.

53
. Eric Mack, “Google Has a ‘Near Perfect’ Universal Translator—for Portuguese, at Least,”
CNET News,
July 28, 2013,
http://news.cnet.com/8301–17938_105–57595825–1/google-has-a-near-perfect-universal-translator-for-portuguese-at-least/
.

54
. Tyler Cowen,
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
(New York: Dutton, 2013), p. 79.

55
. John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,”
New York Times,
March 4, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html
.

56
. Arin Greenwood, “Attorney at Blah,”
Washington City Paper,
November 8, 2007,
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/34054/attorney-at-blah
.

57
. Erin Geiger Smith, “Shocking? Temp Attorneys Must Review 80 Documents Per Hour,”
Business Insider,
October 21, 2009,
http://www.businessinsider.com/temp-attorney-told-to-review-80-documents-per-hour-2009–10
.

58
. Ian Ayres,
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking in Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
(New York: Bantam Books, 2007), p. 117.

59
. “Peter Thiel’s Graph of the Year,”
Washington Post
(Wonkblog), December 30, 2013,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/30/peter-thiels-graph-of-the-year/
.

60
. Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand, “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks,” National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 18901, issued in March 2013,
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901
.

61
. Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell, “Guestworkers in the High-Skill U.S. Labor Market,” Economic Policy Institute, April 24, 2013,
http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/
.

62
. As quoted in Michael Fitzpatrick, “Computers Jump to the Head of the Class,”
New York Times,
December 29, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/world/asia/computers-jump-to-the-head-of-the-class.html
.

C
HAPTER
5

1
. This petition can be viewed at
http://humanreaders.org/petition/
.