What to Do When Machines Do Everything

How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data

By: Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, Ben Pring

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

The essential playbook for the future of your business.

What to Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on artificial intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans, it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete. Illustrated with real-world cases, data, and insight, the authors provide clear strategic guidance and actionable steps to help you and your organization move ahead in a world where exponentially developing new technologies are changing how value is created.

Written by a team of business and technology expert practitioners - who also authored Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business - this book provides a clear path to the future of your work.

The first part of the book examines the once in a generation upheaval most every organization will soon face as systems of intelligence go mainstream. The authors argue that contrary to the doom and gloom that surrounds much of IT and business at the moment, we are in fact on the cusp of the biggest wave of opportunity creation since the Industrial Revolution. Next, the authors detail a clear-cut business model to help leaders take part in this coming boom. The AHEAD model outlines five strategic initiatives - Automate, Halos, Enhance, Abundance, and Discovery - that are central to competing in the next phase of global business by driving new levels of efficiency, customer intimacy and innovation.

Business leaders today have two options: be swallowed up by the ongoing technological evolution, or ride the crest of the wave to new profits and better business. This book shows you how to avoid your own extinction event, and will help you:

• Understand the untold full extent of technology's impact on the way we work and live
• Find out where we're headed, and how soon the future will arrive
• Leverage the new emerging paradigm into a sustainable business advantage
• Adopt a strategic model for winning in the new economy

The digital world is already transforming how we work, live, and shop, how we are governed and entertained, and how we manage our money, health, security, and relationships. Don't let your business - or your career - get left behind. What to Do When Machines Do Everything is your strategic roadmap to a future full of possibility and success. Or peril.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2017 Cognizant Technology Solutions U.S. Corporation (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Assumes that machine learning will grow very slow

As a founder of a robotics startup I work with and keep up to date with the bleeding edge of what we have accomplished in machine learning research.

At the core of this book it argues that machine learning will be narrow AI and will continue to be simple feed forward supervised neural networks for about 20 years.

This is very wrong. We have robust renforment learning, unsupervised learning, and models that integrate with memory. When just what we have working well in universities reaches buisness we will automate much more that what the author's predict. This also ignores that massive breakthroughs in ml are being discovered on the timescale of weeks not years.

They also say that some jobs will never be automated. Perhaps the author believes that there is something magical about the algorithm in the human brain which the physics of the universe prevents us from replicating.

Besides all that, this book is dumbed down and targeted at technically incompetent managers. It has a low information to fluff ratio and is afraid to go into much technical depth. This last point doesn't make it a bad book, just a bad book to me.

Lots of opinion but not much advice

After reading the reviews and the description I decided to give this book a shot but I'm rather disappointed. If you're an entrepreneur or manager looking to navigate the next few years while people still have jobs but the author seems to think mass unemployment won't happen because under educated people that are not good at reasoning or critical thinking or math will move up to "higher value" tasks. The author fails to understand all of the trends involved (Exponential growth, changes and disruption to a number of industries and the economic climate as well as peoples ability to learn or adapt) that will lead to a perfect storm.

Magazine material

Until hearing this book, I never knew that an utter lack of informative content could be so redundantly blended.

Boring

Just boring. Lots of generalities and little interesting or worthwhile. Keep your money and buy future crimes instead.

Interesting read

Good read for those who want to know how to automate processes. Sometimes I think the authors assume people with good character will always be there to shepherd AI into the future, and that people will trust corporations. So at times I found the assumption that AI will only be used to better humankind to be overly optimistic, as they assume a static political and social climate. But it provided a very good process and guiding principles for those looking to implement data collection, automation, apply business intelligence and create new business models.

A "Must Read"

I highly suggest this book for anyone in the RPA field! Help shape the future and have a better understanding of how your office job will transform over time.

Edit: This book helped me land a job in the RPA field within my financing department. I highly recommend on that alone.

Very realistic evaluation of what's coming next

Title could have been better as it may sound little superstitious. Enjoyed this very well researched content.

Good if not a bit repetitive

While I enjoyed this book, it suffers from (somewhat ironically) an old book problem. It repeats information multiple times to give the listener background context. This is usually done for those who start and stop listening at the end of chapters to give the reader an easy jump back into the book. When reading multiple chapters at once I found this annoying as it simply stretched the runtime from about 4 hours to 7.5.

industry optimism with blind spots

AI is here to stay, in that I agree with the authors. However, despite the book closing out on a balanced note, the bulk of the book takes an optimistic view. The authors choose to address the reader as a "future leader", implicitly an industry leader. It sheds little light though on what the average worker out of a job is to do or how political leaders are to react. The vision of the book predicts an economic boom but takes no stab at how social structures would be affected.

Very insightful android helpful

Very insightful android helpful. We may determine the way humankind will self destruct. Very interesting

A bunch of good ideas diluted in an annoying book

As mentioned, the book has a bunch of good ideas but really that's about it. They could have been stated and explained in 5 pages. The authors rarely bother with factual data to back their claims (apart from a bunch of companies used as anecdotal evidence and reiterated obsessively throughout), which is shocking for a book insisting so much on the value of data. The same ideas get repeated unnecessarily throughout the book. Also, I'm annoyed by the choice of target audience of this book. This book is really only written for high level managers of big corporations. That's it. Everyone else is collateral damage in the forecasted AI revolution. Even as a software engineer in one of the companies the book praises, I find myself very limited in what I can apply from this book. I recognize the ideas in it and I'm happy to see they're being applied, but realistically there's little I can do to apply these myself. If you're working for McDonald's and want to know what you can do, this book basically tells you that you'll get fired, but maybe if you don't fight the new technologies you don't. That's really the only takeaway from this. this This is fine, but at least make it obvious in the title that it's only for CEOs. For people that don't have the antrepreneur obsession, this book is completely useless.

Mocking Dystopia

Ok, maybe not completely mocking the dystopian view of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, but the authors do a solid job of presenting an alternative view of the doom mongering that often surrounds AI and our future. Sure, there are reasons to be concerned, but drawing on examples from industrialisation and automation that has been occurring across sectors for decades, the authors do a credible job of outlining how AI can lead to more jobs and better, more interesting work. We can choose whether we believe the predictions and there are credible arguments on both sides of the debate, but this book presents a strong argument for optimism.

A profound wakeup call

I have been reading (or listening to) a number of books to find my way around the rising digital landscape to work out what skillset should I work on for a 3 year horizon.
The obvious takeaway from this book is AI, but I had not thought threw is how impactful AI might become.
The book gives a framework to think about how AI will impact and what you can do on 'Monday morning' to start adapting now - I.e. It is quiet practical.
The tone is for corporate leaders, but I got a lot from it as an individual.

A great book

This is the most pragmatic and less frightful way of looking at how digital can be incorporated into our lives and companies. Loved every page