What Martin Ford saw coming — and what 2025 taught us instead
In 2015, Martin Ford published Rise of the Robots. It hit the right nerves: automation, AI, inequality, a future where your job becomes a line of code. It was a mix of sober forecast and cold warning. The book sold well. The message spread. Some people panicked. Most shrugged.
Ten years later, let’s take a second look.
✅ He Was Right Where It Hurt
Automation didn’t just take factory jobs — it’s been clawing its way up the white-collar ladder.
Ford warned about radiologists, journalists, lawyers, even financial analysts. Back then it sounded bold. Now it’s boringly true. AI systems diagnose cancer, draft legal memos, summarize financial reports, and ghostwrite for CEOs. ChatGPT isn’t the future — it’s your intern. Or your replacement.
Education stopped being a guarantee.
Remember when college was your insurance policy? Ford was early in saying: not anymore. Today, graduates walk off the stage and into the void — no entry-level jobs, no “ladder.” The ladder’s been replaced by a touchscreen.
Productivity kept rising — wages didn’t.
Ford nailed the economic shift: profits moved from labor to capital. The middle class? Squeezed. The upper class? Leveraged. The system works great — unless you need a paycheck.
The job market polarized.
High-skill coders at the top. Low-wage service workers at the bottom. And the middle? Hollowed out. Exactly as predicted.
❌ But Reality Took a Different Route
The apocalypse was slower than expected.
Ford imagined a faster wipeout. Instead, human systems — law, medicine, education — proved sticky. Institutions resist change. People trust people. Bureaucracies move like glaciers. Yes, disruption came — but not in a straight line.
Politics didn’t sleep completely.
Ford underestimated one thing: backlash. Workers fought back. Unions re-emerged. Strikes flared. Policy debates reopened. Not everywhere — but enough to prove the system’s not running on autopilot.
Humans still matter in messy work.
Ford thought machines would steamroll most knowledge jobs. Reality: automation augments more than it replaces. The nurse, the teacher, the therapist — they’re still here. The algorithm is helping, not replacing. At least for now.
🔮 What’s Still in the Air
Will we decouple income from labor — or double down on digital feudalism?
Ford saw the problem: no jobs, no consumers. The question is whether governments find a new mechanism to put money in people’s hands — or whether Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet own the economy and rent it back to us.
Can the global middle class survive the squeeze?
Ford didn’t offer a fix. That’s not his fault. But now the pressure’s on: If consumption dries up, the engine stalls. We’re not there yet — but debt levels and economic precarity are flashing orange.
Will AI remain a tool — or become infrastructure?
In 2015, AI was clever. In 2025, it’s becoming foundational — invisible but everywhere. Ford anticipated this. The question now: who controls it, who shapes it, and who gets locked out.
🧠 Final Take
Martin Ford wasn’t an alarmist. He was a realist. And in many ways, a cautious one.
He saw the architecture of the future before it had walls. He pointed to the fracture lines before they widened. But he also assumed a more linear collapse — faster, cleaner, more deterministic.
Instead, 2025 gave us something messier:
A slow-motion upheaval. A system mutating rather than imploding.
Technology eating jobs selectively. Institutions reacting unevenly.
The middle class eroding gradually. Not an explosion. A controlled burn.
But make no mistake: the fuse is still lit.
– Christopher Angel
If you’re still asking “when will the future arrive?” — you’re late.