AT&T was the largest U.S. firm for most of the 20th century. Telephone operators once comprised over 50% of its workforce, but in the late 1910s it initiated a decades-long process of automating telephone operation with mechanical call switching--a technology first invented in the 1880s. We...

"This book shows that the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is a natural consequence of the development of human society. It examines the history of production from the Stone Age to the present, progressing from the manual age to the machine age and then to the...