Long the prediction of futurists and philosophers, the lived reality of technology replacing human work has been a constant feature since the cotton gin, the assembly line and, more recently, the computer. What is very much up for debate in the imaginations of economists and Hollywood producers is whether the future will look like "The Terminator," with self-aware Schwarzenegger bots on the hunt, or "The Jetsons," with obedient robo-maids leaving us humans very little work and plenty of time for leisure and family. The most chilling future in film may be that in Disney's "Wall-E," where people are all too fat to stand, too busy staring at screens to talk to each other and too distracted to realize that the machines have taken over. We're deep into what-ifs with those representations, but the conversation about robots and work is increasingly paired with the debate over how to address growing income inequality -- a key issue in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. How should Americans deal with it?

"There's no simple answer," said Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at UC San Francisco and the author of a forthcoming book, "Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control." "But in the long run nearly all current jobs will go away, so we need fairly radical policy changes to prepare for a very different future economy. In his book, Russell writes, "One rapidly emerging picture is that of an economy where far fewer people work because work is unnecessary." That's either a very frightening or a tantalizing prospect, depending very much on whether and how much you (and/or society) think people ought to have to work and how society is going to put a price on human labor. There will be less work in manufacturing, less work in call centers, less work driving trucks, and more work in health care and home care and construction. MIT Technology Review tried to track all the different reports on the effect ...

If you feel like you've taken a beating after spending eight hours on a plane, try spending a shift on the assembly line that rolls out the flying metal tubes you so hate. It takes two humans to install each of the more than 60,000 rivets that hold a Boeing 777 together: one firing the rivet gun, the other holding the steel bucking bar that forces the fastener into place. The benefits of this tiring job include repetitive stress injuries to the arms, back, and shoulders. To improve life on the line, Boeing took a note from Kenny Chesney: no shoulders, no back, no problems. In other words, it brought in robots.