If there is one thing the boosters and cynics agree on about artificial intelligence, it's that the tech is coming for white-collar jobs. This is not speculation of a far-off future--it's happening now. It makes sense, from a cold business perspective, that text-based media would want to adopt A.I. in order to cut costs (humans, expensive) and speed up output (humans, slow). Just look at how BuzzFeed's rock-bottom stock value jumped when it said last month that the site would use services from buzzy startup OpenAI to spiff up the site's famed quizzes. As Damon Beres wrote in the Atlantic shortly after the announcement: "The bleak future of media is human-owned websites profiting from automated banner ads placed on bot-written content, crawled by search-engine bots, and occasionally served to bot visitors."

Michael Karpf flew earlier this month to the Tesla Motors factory in Fremont, Calif., to pick up his new Model X electric sport-utility vehicle--known for a 200-plus mile battery range and Tesla CEO Elon Musk's claim that it's "the fastest SUV in history." The 75-year-old retiree planned to drive it across the country with his wife and son to their home in New Rochelle, N.Y. But the new-car gleam of Karpf's 138,000 titanium-on-beige P90D Model X faded with a string of problems as soon as he left the factory--delaying his journey. One of the wildly designed, upswinging "falcon wing" rear doors failed to close. The other falcon wing door failed to open, except from the inside.