As a pandemic grips the world, a person could be forgiven if they had forgotten about another threat to humanity's way of life - the rise of robots. For better or worse the robots are going to replace many humans in their jobs, analysts say, and the coronavirus outbreak is speeding up the process. "People usually say they want a human element to their interactions but Covid-19 has changed that," says Martin Ford, a futurist who has written about the ways robots will be integrated into the economy in the coming decades. "[Covid-19] is going to change consumer preference and really open up new opportunities for automation." Companies large and small are expanding how they use robots to increase social distancing and reduce the number of staff that have to physically come to work.

Make sure you're following these industry leaders on Twitter. The world of AI and robotics is evolving all the time, with job opportunities and new products springing up constantly. It's never been a better time for someone interested in building a career in AI. While the jobs, companies and skills may vary, the wider industry trends are always worth keeping an eye on if you're serious about an AI career. One of the best ways to keep yourself immersed in the AI world is by following the leaders, experts and influencers in the field.

Welcome, dear readers, to Engadget's newest series, Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought-provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories. Artificial intelligence is the technology of tomorrow made manifest today. Thinking machines hold the promise of revolutionizing modern society from transportation and telecommunications to medicine and life sciences. But for all its upsides, AI has the potential to upend economies, disrupt job markets and incur unanticipated consequences at all levels of society.

Martin Ford is a futurist and the author of two books: The New York Times Bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (winner of the 2015 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and translated into more than 20 languages) and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, as well as the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm. His TED Talk on the impact of AI and robotics on the economy and society, given on the main stage at the 2017 TED Conference, has been viewed more than 2 million times. Martin is also the consulting artificial intelligence expert for the new "Rise of the Robots Index" from Societe Generale, underlying the Lyxor Robotics & AI ETF, which is focused specifically on investing in companies that will be significant participants in the AI and robotics revolution. He holds a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a graduate business degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written about future technology and its implications for publications including The New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian, and The Financial Times.

How will AI evolve and what major innovations are on the horizon? What will its impact be on the job market, economy, and society? What is the path toward human-level machine intelligence? What should we be concerned about as artificial intelligence advances? The Architects of Intelligence contains a series of in-depth, one-to-one interviews where New York Times bestselling author, Martin Ford, looks for the truth about AI and what we need to know and prepare for with the coming impact of AI on our lives.

Martin Ford made waves with his 2015 book, Rise of the Robots, which details the many accelerating trends in automation and how they're slated to impact business and, especially, employment. For his next book, Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building It, he, well, attempts to hone in on precisely what that subtitle describes. It's stuffed with in-depth interviews with the biggest names in AI. One of those is Geoffrey Hinton. Currently a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto and a part of the Google Brain project, Hinton is considered by many in his field to be the'godfather of deep learning,' due to his pioneering work in artificial neural networks.

Artificial intelligence seems to be the go-to solution to every problem there is (technological in nature or otherwise), and it's only getting worse. A staggering number of both startups and established companies are loudly proclaiming how AI, or machine learning, or deep learning, or whatever is absolutely going to make everything faster, better, cheaper, fairer, and so on. The reason that this sort of breathless and inevitably shallow media-driven enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is effective is because there's just enough of a general understanding of AI for people to know that it can do some cool things, but not so much of an understanding for people to question what it's actually capable of, or whether applying to to a specific problem is a good idea. This is not to say that a lack of understanding is anyone's fault, really: it's hard to define what AI even is, much less communicate how it works. And without the proper context, there's no way to make an informed judgement about the future potential of artificial intelligence.

This post has been updated since it was originally published. The AI-hype would have you believing that we'll soon be enslaved by super-intelligent beings or hunted by killer robots. Before building that Soviet-era bunker to survive the AIpocalypse, consider more immediate issues which are already affecting society today. According to 23 AI experts Martin Ford interviewed for his new book, Architects Of Intelligence, the real imminent AI-threats relate to politics, security, privacy, and the weaponization of AI. To understand how these problems affect society today, it's helpful to see them from the perspective of leaders which have helped shape the current AI revolution.

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Manhattan Institute writer Oren Cass bears the title quoted above. It echoes futurist Martin Ford's 2015 book title Rise of the Robots, and invites you to consider their overall effects on the future of work. How are you reckoning with the rise of robots in the future of your work? Below are some questions to consider. Over 1,000 participants from 16 countries demonstrated state-of-the-art robotics in competitions such as soccer, rescue and services.

He is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; and co-founder and CEO of Neuralink He was ranked the No. 1 global FinTech influencer and the No. 2 InsurTech influencer by Onalytica. He is a senior advisor at Arbidex, Glance Technologies, Datametrex AI, kapilendo.de, She is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab. Since age 15, the main goal of professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire. His lab's Deep Learning Neural Networks (since 1991) such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) have revolutionised machine learning, and are now available to billions of users through the world's most valuable public companies, e.g., for greatly improved speech recognition on over 2 billion Android phones, greatly improved machine translation through Google (since 2016) and Facebook (over 4 billion LSTM-based translations per day as of 2017), Apple's Siri and Quicktype on almost 1 billion iPhones (since 2016), the answers of Amazon's Alexa, and numerous other applications.