How will automation affect the global workforce?

Predicting the course of technological progress is extremely difficult. Just because worries about human obsolescence ultimately turned out to be misplaced in the Industrial Revolution doesn't mean that the same happy result must necessarily prevail this time around. So the persistent question about artificial intelligence - or "robots" in common parlance - is whether they will make human workers obsolete. Already, occupations that employ very large numbers of people, such as commercial trucking, are under threat. Workers displaced by machine learning may be able to find new, even more valuable, things to do, as happened when industrial technology displaced craft manufacturers over a century ago, or they may not - and even if they do, getting there may involve a long and bumpy road. It's a rich topic, as I was reminded this week at a Bloomberg Ideas conference, where I sat on a panel discussing the economics of artificial intelligence.