The future of work will be far less scary when there's more women in AI

While scholarship on the topic is getting increasingly nuanced, you're still likely to confront dire warnings about how smart machines are coming to take our jobs. Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk says mass automation is "the scariest problem" facing society because "what's going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us … I mean all of us." AI pioneer and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee believes that the technology could potentially eliminate 40% of existing jobs within the next 15 years. Beyond their inherent pessimism, these kinds predictions have something in common: almost all of them come from men. The vast majority of people funding AI, working on AI, commenting on AI, teaching AI, and starting businesses involving AI are men, what Google researcher Margaret Mitchell calls "a sea of dudes."