Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is futurist and author Martin Ford. His most recent book is Rise of the Robots,

technology and the threat of a jobless future, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the

2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

I read a lot of books about policy and technology, and this one is definitely one of my all-time

favorites. I've been practically evangelizing about it to my friends, and so I was incredibly

pleased when Mr. Ford graciously agreed to talk with me about his work. Mr. Ford, welcome

to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So, you know, my copy of Rise of the Robots right now, it's just full of underlines and comments.

It kind of looks like a red pen more or less exploded on it.

And so in preparing for this, I had a hard time figuring out where to start.

And so I thought maybe to start with you could just tell us a little bit about what led you to write this book in the first place.

Well, I ran a software company here in Silicon Valley for quite a while.

And I started that back in the 1990s when Microsoft Windows was the big thing that was happening then.

And of course, back then, software was shipped on CD-ROMs and someone had to put all

of that in a box and send it to the customer.

So there was work there for, you know, for average people.

And what I found was even in my own little business, I saw how rapidly that evaporated

as the whole business went digital.

And of course, we've seen the same kinds of things in the music industry and even with e-books

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