Are Engineers Designing Their Robotic Replacements?

"The robots are coming for your jobs!" That was the gist of numerous news reports following the release of the 2016 U.S. Economic Report of the President. My first thought on reading this was that anyone who saw the videos of clumsy robots falling helplessly during the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge must have been incredulous: "That's what's coming after my job!?" My second thought was more sobering. Robots are, after all, only a subset of the computerization leading to the automation of traditional jobs. As engineers we can see steady progress in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data.