Robots taking our jobs? Yeah, but only the crap ones

Whether you define artificial intelligence as a sophisticated being that is convincingly "human" and can pass a Turing Test, or simply an algorithm that dictates which stories you see in your Facebook feed, the rise of smart machines will see more and more of the jobs we do today transformed and even replaced. Where mechanisation replaced a large swathe of manual labour jobs, now we're going to see more and more white-collar jobs overtaken by algorithms. "In the past we were removed from the limitations of our muscles; now we'll be removed from some of the limitations of our brains," says Toby Walsh, a prominent Australian AI expert who has taken a global campaign against the development of autonomous weapons (aka "killer robots") to the United Nations. As with previous cycles of technological advancement, the rise in productivity is expected to bring a rise in living standards. But there will be pain, too, at least in the short term.