Recent advances make it clear that ever more powerful AI is destined to become commoditized, cheap and ubiquitous. It is inevitable that this machine intelligence will be directed toward automating jobs
The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future was self-published on Amazon’s platform in 2009—16 years ago and 3 years before the first deep learning algorithms powered by Nvidia chips caught the world’s attention by proving to be remarkably adept at identifying the objects in digital images. The book argues that artificial intelligence will eventually lead to widespread job automation and technological unemployment, and that this will be a threat not just to individual livelihoods but to the economy as a whole. It does this by employing a visual thought experiment, or imaginary simulation, involving “lights in a tunnel” to illustrate the impact of automation. The book goes beyond simply proposing a set of policy prescriptions and instead uses its imaginary simulation to propose the framework for an entirely new economic paradigm that could lead to long term prosperity in the new age of artificial intelligence.
In spite of its self-published status and a non-existent marketing budget, the book sold over 10,000 copies. The book was mentioned, reviewed or excerpted in The Economist, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Slate, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The Globe and Mail. The success of The Lights in the Tunnel was certainly an important factor in convincing Basic Books to take a chance on my subsequent book, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which went on the become a New York Times bestseller and to win the 2015 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.
The release of the Chinese AI-startup DeepSeek’s powerful but highly efficient ChatGPT competitor in January 2025, offers clear evidence that ever more powerful AI is destined to become commoditized, cheap and ubiquitous. It is inevitable that this machine intelligence will be directed toward automating jobs, and the impact of this may come much sooner and more suddenly than we expect. Given this, I am releasing this free version of The Lights in the Tunnel in the hope that it will lead to increased awareness and discussion of the potential risks we face.
While the book was written in the context of technology as it existed in 2009, I believe it has proved to be quite prescient. For example, I wrote 16 years ago that “…Microsoft and hundreds of other software companies are actively seeking the next killer app—something that will fully leverage the vastly increased computer power that will be available in the coming years and decades. I think that there are good reasons to believe that this next killer app is going to turn out to be artificial intelligence (AI). AI applications are highly compute intensive and will take full advantage of all the computational power that new processors can offer.”
More importantly, the thought experiment that I presented in 2009 is completely independent of the details of the technology and is clearly far more relevant to the world today than it was 16 years ago. I wrote the book because I believed the impact of AI of the job market would be one of the most critical forces to shape the future. The advances we have seen in AI beginning with the release of ChatGPT a few years ago—as well as the dramatic progress that is also occurring in the field of robotics—strongly reinforces this belief.
I hope you will enjoy this book and also consider sharing it with others. If you prefer a paperback or Kindle version, you can find these on Amazon.
My more recent books are also available:
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
Architects of Intelligence: The Truth about AI from the People Building It
Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
Martin Ford 