Booklife Review

Forecasting an incipient fourth industrial revolution with “the potential to transform all industries,” Uechi’s thorough, clear-eyed guide for leaders, managers, and business owners to the opportunities and challenges of automation surveys the changes expected to come in the next 25 years in eight industries. Uechi offers a forecast on new technologies and their impact on health care, agriculture, transportation, and other key sectors, examining which traditional workforce roles will likely be eliminated, which will likely be retained, and what new roles will become urgent. While the focus is on workplace practicalities, including assessing what parts of a business can be automated, Uechi also addresses common misconceptions about the coming tech, examines the impact of automation on the broader labor force, and offers theoretical scenarios inviting readers to game out how to find a winning mix of human and mechanical workers.

IT expert Uechi (author of Public Service Information Technology) lays this all out with welcome clarity, insight, and organizational coherence. The book is free of fat and the tendency toward overstatement that often afflicts discussions of automation. Pointing out that robots will tend to be “precision machines” designed for specific tasks, he notes that the concern about an “existential threat to humanity” is purely speculative and driven by “science fiction.” His examination of automation’s impact on the labor force forecasts the loss of up to 21.3 million jobs, savings for businesses of over 2 billion dollars, and the creation of new positions for humans plus a shift in the role of first-line supervisors in most industries toward managing the work of machines rather than people.

The bulk of this illuminating and perceptive book, though, is analysis of different industries, the changes they’re facing, and what people in those sectors need to know. The industry Uechi expects to lose the least human jobs: health care. The industry slowest to automate: construction. The conclusions are persuasive, and the advice clear.

Takeaway: This pragmatic guide for businesses to the age of automation illuminates the road ahead.

Great for fans of: Andrés Oppenheimer’s The Robots are Coming!, Darrell M. West’s The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A