The Globotics Upheaval by Richard Baldwin
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A very interesting book, if a little glib in places. The work addresses, at a high level: 1) the history of technology's effect on employment since the Industrial Revolution; 2) the current state of automation and telepresence technology; and 3) some common-sense projections about the job-related disruptions in store over the next fifty years or so. The book's premisses and conclusions are logically sound (if provocative), and are rooted in data to the extent there is data available, which I appreciate. One place where the book clearly excels prior books I've read on the subject (like The Second Machine Age) is in its detailed engagement with the specific strengths and weaknesses of current automation and telepresence technology. After laying out some of the likely directions of development and the current pros and cons, the author then maps those strengths and weaknesses onto different types of career fields to provide a really granular assessment of which jobs will be most vulnerable in the future. That type of analysis is, to my knowledge, unparalleled in a general circulation book.
To the extent the book wandered astray it was in the author's coining of a terribly awkward portmanteau ("globots" and "globotics") to try and encompass both the trend toward automating white collar service work and the separate globalization of labor markets through telepresence. However, when he talks about "globots" at a high level, he's only sometimes talking about both of those phenomena. Other time he's only really talking about one or the other without signaling which he means. So you get awkward sentences talking about how globots will not take jobs that can only be done by humans, ignoring the fact that half of the "globots" under discussion are just humans located somewhere else, etc. This happens over and over in the book. Where the author himself can't keep his weird coinage straight, one wonders if maybe grouping the two trends into a single word isn't very helpful as an organizing principle.
The main conceptual problem with the idea of "globots" (other than the fact that its doofy) is that the two categories don't have much in common other than that they'll both eliminate jobs for middle-class people in developed economies and are both possible due to new technology. To the extent the author is talking about the effects of significant job loss on developed countries, it may make sense to group the two ideas, but when the author gets down in the weeds, he readily acknowledges and quite thoroughly explains the significant differences between the two, e.g. what types of local jobs are likely to be replaced by automation as opposed to telepresent foreign nationals. The interesting thing is that the overlap between the types of jobs each will compete for isn't very high--they really represent more or less entirely different competitive threats, with different policy answers that might be implemented to address or slow the effects of each. Having a dumb-sounding word could be forgivable if it had extraordinary explanatory force, but the author's own evidence suggests that it's really not very useful to treat the two trends as one thing.
In short, its a very good book full of interesting data and ideas, laboring under a maladroit rubric. If you can get past the title and some mild synthetic confusion, it's worth a read.