The end of the world as we know it is near. And that's a good thing, according to many of the futurists who are predicting the imminent arrival of what's been called the technological singularity. The technological singularity is the idea that technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, will reach a tipping point to where machines are exponentially smarter than humans. It has been a hot topic of late. Well-known futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil (co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University) reiterated his bold prediction at Austin's South by Southwest (SXSW) festival this month that machines will match human intelligence by 2029 (and has said previously the Singularity itself will occur by 2045).

The end of the world as we know it is near. And that's a good thing, according to many of the futurists who are predicting the imminent arrival of what's been called the technological singularity. The technological singularity is the idea that technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, will reach a tipping point to where machines are exponentially smarter than humans. It has been a hot topic of late. Well-known futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil (co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University) reiterated his bold prediction at Austin's South by Southwest (SXSW) festival this month that machines will match human intelligence by 2029 (and has said previously the Singularity itself will occur by 2045).

Dormehl examines the pending social and economic impact of artificial intelligence, for example on employment. He recounts the positive history of automation. In 1900, about 40 percent of American workers were employed on farms and over 20 percent in factories. By 2015, these figures had fallen to 2 percent on farms and 8.7 percent in factories. Yet for every job that was eliminated, we invented several new ones, with the work force growing from 24 million people (31 percent of the population in 1900) to 142 million (44 percent of the population in 2015). The average job today pays 11 times as much per hour in constant dollars as it did a century ago.