One of my favorite movies of 2016 was Hidden Figures. The main character, Katherine Johnson, and her team of colleagues had an interesting job title: Computer. Here's what Katherine said about her job: "On any given day, I analyze the binomial levels of air displacement, friction, and velocity. And compute over 10 thousand calculations by cosine, square root, and lately analytic geometry. It was amazing work, but work that took hours to complete – and something an in-memory computer could do in a fraction of a second today.

What will artificial intelligence's long-term impact on jobs be? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. There's no doubt that artificial intelligence will revolutionize the jobs picture. One technologist predicts robots will replace half of all jobs in the next decade. A PwC study says 38% of jobs in the U.S. are at high risk of being replaced by A.I. over the next fifteen years. But that doesn't mean there will be no work available for those who lose their jobs. Technology displaces and creates jobs.

Joy Buolamwini is a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League – an organisation that aims to challenge the biases in decision-making software. She grew up in Mississippi, gained a Rhodes scholarship, and she is also a Fulbright fellow, an Astronaut scholar and a Google Anita Borg scholar. Earlier this year she won a $50,000 scholarship funded by the makers of the film Hidden Figures for her work fighting coded discrimination. How did you become interested in that area? When I was a computer science undergraduate I was working on social robotics – the robots use computer vision to detect the humans they socialise with.

In the recent film "Hidden Figures," a group of women known as "computers," help mastermind NASA's effort to put a man into space and eventually on the moon. Without their hard work and brilliance, America's famed "moonshot" might never have succeeded. By the end of the film, their roles have largely been replaced by a computer that is capable of making millions of calculations per second -- a feat that far surpasses their abilities. Instead of despairing that they might find themselves without a job, these women adapted: they learned computer programming, thereby ensuring their ongoing relevance despite the growing role of computers at NASA. The advent of artificial intelligence, deep learning, and automation has everyone from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking worried about the consequences.

Lia Halloran's big, beautiful maps of stars and other astronomical phenomena at Luis De Jesus gallery pay tribute to a little-known group of female scientists dubbed the Harvard Computers. Annie Jump Cannon, Cecilia Payne, Henrietta Leavitt and others were predecessors of the female mathematicians lionized in the film "Hidden Figures." Beginning in the 1880s, the women worked at the Harvard College Observatory analyzing glass photographic plates of the night sky. They calculated the relative size and distance of the stars and developed a stellar classification system that is still in use today. Smithsonian magazine characterized their work as providing "the empirical foundations for larger astronomical theory," but they have been neglected by history.

"We didn't need dialogue," Norma Desmond tells a young screenwriter in "Sunset Boulevard," recalling her silent-film-era glory days. Screenwriters famously suffer all sorts of indignities--dumb studio notes, credit squabbles--but now and then they get to win Oscars. Norma's heyday was just fading when the first Academy Awards were held, in 1929; the three writing categories that year were Best Original Story, Best Adapted Story, and (for the first and last time) Best Title Writing. It took several decades for the categories to settle into the modern dichotomy of Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay, though the distinction can be tricky: originality, of course, is relative. This year's nominees draw on a wide range of sources, including the untold history of NASA, Jacques Demy musicals, science fiction, several lost mothers, and two plays about black life half a century apart.

"Hidden Figures," a movie about three African-American women pioneers at NASA, was slated for worldwide release Friday. The story of the women who calculated flight trajectories that helped John Glenn become the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth previously opened in a limited release on Christmas. The film, which has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 91 percent and will expand to 2,300 theaters Friday, is a historical comedy-drama based on a nonfiction book published by Margot Lee Shetterly in 2016. The characters' work with NASA aided in the launch of Project Mercury in the late 50s and early 60s, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight. Some who have watched the film said it accurately portrayed what happened in history, like Johnson, who said it "sounded very, very accurate" after watching the film's advance screening in November.