AI and machine learning are now undeniably part of our everyday lives. We encounter it more often than we may realize. What was once a seemingly advanced technology is even gaining prominence even in places we take for granted, like grocery stores and on our own personal devices. You've probably seen reports of increasingly more popular in-store robots that detect spills and other hazards, check store inventory, and help with gathering online orders. Perhaps you've even seen it at your own local grocery store.

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori -- an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. "It doesn't call sick," says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby's franchise this year in Ontario, California. And the reliability of it is great." The pandemic didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe. If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn't have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it's gone smoothly, he says: "Basically, there's less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas." Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe.

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori -- an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. "It doesn't call sick," says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby's franchise this year in Ontario, California. And the reliability of it is great." The pandemic didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe. If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn't have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it's gone smoothly, he says: "Basically, there's less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas." Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe.

Artificial intelligence has changed the way we roam the internet, buy things, and in many cases, navigate the world. At the same time, AI can be incredibly weird, such as when an algorithm suggests "Butty Brlomy" as a name for a guinea pig or "Brother Panty Tripel" as a beer name. Few people are more familiar with the quirks of AI than Janelle Shane, a scientist and neural network tamer who lets AI be weird in her spare time and runs the aptly named blog AI Weirdness. She also built an AI astrologer for Gizmodo. Janelle Shane released a book this month titled You Look Like a Thing And I Love You.