Rise of the Machines: The Future has Lots of Robots, Few Jobs for Humans

The robots haven't just landed in the workplace--they're expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts. One multi-tasker bot, from Momentum Machines, can make (and flip) a gourmet hamburger in 10 seconds and could soon replace an entire McDonalds crew. A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn't just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp--it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust. And just this week, Google won a patent to start building worker robots with personalities. As intelligent machines begin their march on labor and become more sophisticated and specialized than first-generation cousins like Roomba or Siri, they have an outspoken champion in their corner: author and entrepreneur Martin Ford.