Recent memoirs by the retired bookie Art Manteris and the storied gambler Billy Walters provide a glimpse of an industry in its fledgling form--and a preview of the DraftKings era to come. Las Vegas is no longer the seat of the sportsbook gods. In most states, it's now legal, and extremely popular, to place bets using apps or websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. From your couch, you can wager on everything from the results of snooker championships to the color of the Gatorade poured over the victorious coach after the Super Bowl. The N.F.L., along with the other major-league American sports associations, has officially partnered with sports-betting sites, and their alliance has proved so lucrative that other industries want in on the action; last month, the Golden Globes made a deal with Polymarket, a predictions-market platform, to encourage wagering (or "trading," if you prefer) on the outcomes of its awards race.

The doomsday headlines about automation and job displacement continue to pile up. Nearly half of all jobs are at risk, one report said. Another found that white-collar jobs once thought safe are in the crosshairs. "I fundamentally don't believe that," Mader said of automation displacing huge swaths of workers during a recent speech at Seattle University's Albers School of Business and Economics. "There is so much unstructured work for which you can't actually program the robot to do that work."

AI is trying to decide if you get a job, AI is deciding if you get access to medical treatment -- and if we get that wrong, you have real world consequences. Those were funny cases you mentioned. I just hope that I never have to go through it. By the way, how far do you think we are from something Hollywood-ish in terms of AI? The tech is far from advanced, at least in the US and in Europe where 24/7 public surveillance isn't (yet) a thing.

They are coming and they will completely alter our economic reality. However, instead of planning for this revolutionary change, America's politicians -- from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders on down -- continue to cling to the illusion that, with the right tinkering, there can be enough jobs enough for everyone, just like in the good old days. Well, the good old days are gone, and a story on the Futurism website demonstrates why: Changying Precision Technology Co.'s cellphone factory in China recently replaced 90% of its workers with machines and saw productivity increase by 250% while the number of product defects fell by 80%. This is great news for the company, not so great news for the now-unemployed workers. Because free-market capitalism moves relentlessly toward innovation and efficiency, this is a phenomenon that will be repeated in small steps and big leaps in every industrialized society.

In this guest post, regular B&T contributor and industry veteran Robert Strohfeldt harks back to the good old days of marketing and tells us why artificial intelligence will never replace real-life creative intelligence. After seeing a recent report that Think TV is planning to use Artificial Intelligence for ratings, I tried to think back to when this "digital" madness stated. Only an idiot would deny that technology has added both quality and quantity to our lives. To those who hanker for the "good old days", I will give you one word to make you realise how much better things are in 2016 compared to 1916 – Dentist. But is technology now increasing at a rate which can be overwhelming?