Dating back to the Industrial Revolution, people have speculated that machines would render human ... [ ] work obsolete. Unlike in earlier eras, artificial intelligence will prove this prophecy true. "When looms weave by themselves, man's slavery will end." Stanford is hosting an event next month named "Intelligence Augmentation: AI Empowering People to Solve Global Challenges." This title is telling and typical.

Many fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will one day replace huge swaths of the workforce. Last year The World Economic Forum predicted that AI and automation technologies will displace 5 million jobs by 2020, with healthcare, energy, and financial industries experiencing the greatest job losses. Some pundits predict that AI will also replace journalists. The theory is that as machines gain a more nuanced understanding of language, they will be able to produce the type of content that human journalists currently produce. The Washington Post, for example, uses an AI bot called Heliograph to produce news stories.

Games are uniquely human, or so we thought – Chess, Jeopardy, and now Go. Will robots take our jobs? Has web search made us dumb? We heard most of these same fears back in the 1990's, when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at the chessboard. But defeat is a better teacher than victory and this was certainly the case for Kasparov who has now developed a system called Centaur Chess where a human and computer play as a team with the human choosing from moves suggested by the computer.