Facing the Future of Work

In the last few years, it has felt like every big election has focused on jobs and the threats they (supposedly) face: from trade, from immigrants, and, most accurately, from technology. Until recently, the forecasts were almost unanimously grim: The robots were coming, we were told, and they'd soon make us humans redundant. In the summer of 2015, the Atlantic captured the panic with a cover story titled "A World Without Work," which warned that the moment when machines make workers obsolete "may finally be arriving." Then, on March 18 of this year, a self-driving car hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona -- and the conversation began to shift. Suddenly the fear that humans would soon be superfluous started to seem a little less likely.