Author Talk with Martin Ford of Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything

Martin Ford is a futurist and the author of four books, including Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything (2021), the New York Times Bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (winner of the 2015 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and translated into more than 20 languages), Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it (2018), and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (2009). He is also the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm.

His TED Talk on the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics on the economy and society, given on the main stage at the 2017 TED Conference, has been viewed over 3 million times. Martin is also the consulting artificial intelligence expert for the Rise of the Robots equity index from Societe Generale, which is focused specifically on investing in companies that will be significant participants in the AI and robotics revolution. He holds a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a graduate business degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

He has written about future technology and its implications for publications including The New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian and The Financial Times. He has also appeared on numerous radio and television shows, including NPR, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC and PBS. Martin is a frequent keynote speaker on the subject of accelerating progress in robotics and artificial intelligence—and what these advances mean for the economy, job market and society of the future.

Martin continues to focus on entrepreneurship and is an active board member of Genesis Systems, a startup company that has developed a revolutionary atmospheric water generation (AWG) technology. Genesis will soon deploy automated, self powered systems that will generate water directly from the air at industrial scale in the world’s most arid regions.

The New York Times–bestselling author of Rise of the Robots shows what happens as AI takes over our lives 

If you have a smartphone, you have AI in your pocket. AI is impossible to avoid online. And it has already changed everything from how doctors diagnose disease to how you interact with friends or read the news. But in Rule of the Robots, Martin Ford argues that the true revolution is yet to come. 

In this sequel to his prescient New York Times bestseller Rise of the Robots, Ford presents us with a striking vision of the very near future. He argues that AI is a uniquely powerful technology that is altering every dimension of human life, often for the better. For example, advanced science is being done by machines, solving devilish problems in molecular biology that humans could not, and AI can help us fight climate change or the next pandemic. It also has a capacity for profound harm. Deep fakes—AI-generated audio or video of events that never happened—are poised to cause havoc throughout society. AI empowers authoritarian regimes like China with unprecedented mechanisms for social control. And AI can be deeply biased, learning bigoted attitudes from us and perpetuating them. 

In short, this is not a technology to simply embrace, or let others worry about. The machines are coming, and they won’t stop, and each of us needs to know what that means if we are to thrive in the twenty-first century. And Rule of the Robots is the essential guide to all of it: both AI and the future of our economy, our politics, our lives.