Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots , this year’s business book of the year, is in some ways the dystopian bookend to Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat , which won the first Financial Times prize for compelling business books 10 years ago.
Where Mr Friedman was breathlessly optimistic about the prospects for a working world connected, lubricated and energised by technology, Mr Ford, a software entrepreneur, is much more pessimistic.
He envisages a world of fewer jobs and relentless pressure on both manufacturing and professional workers, as machines take over an increasing range of tasks. If action is not taken, inequality will increase (a phenomenon also addressed by Thomas Piketty in last year’s award-winning book Capital in the Twenty-First Century ) and economic growth could stall.