ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out the motivation for and mission of the book, elaborates on terms such as ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) and ‘robots’, and provides a brief history of robots. A chapter outline is provided.
The book is motivated by the fears humans have always had about the job-destroying impact of automation. These fears have been tempered by the lack of historical evidence of such impact but at the same time kept alive by the observation that robotization is different from traditional automation. As a result, the mission of the book is of significant importance: to look at the tendencies generated by AI in regard to human employment, poverty and inequality, per capita income and quality of life, and economic growth, and in the light of these tendencies come up with recommendations for policy.
