Robot Nation: Surviving the Greatest Socio-economic Upheaval of All Time

What will America do when robots render 50% of its human workforce obsolete? Accelerating progress in artificial intelligence and robotics ensures that mass human obsolescence will arrive sooner than we might expect. And it won’t stop there. Economic incentives will relentlessly drive advances in robotics until robots displace the entire human workforce. How will Americans survive? Who will support them? Can a human reasonably hope to control robots that are smarter than he is? Are Asimov’s laws adequate? Is a robot-human war inevitable? How can we smoothly transition from having no intelligent robots to being overrun by them? How do we avoid violence and privation on the way to becoming a robot nation? Tackling these questions head on, Robot Nation not only describes the stark consequences of mass human obsolescence, it lays out solutions and argues that these require unprecedented changes in the political, economic, social, and moral underpinnings of Western civilization.