In August, Elon Musk announced that he was developing a humanoid robot called "Tesla Bot" -- a prototype of which will supposedly be ready in 2022. The presentation itself was slightly bizarre, both because the bot was represented on stage by a dancing human in a bodysuit, and because Musk has warned for years about the dangers of artificial intelligence. But he was right about one thing: AI and robotics could eventually lead to a future where technology is so advanced that our role, much of our work and even our purpose in life could fundamentally change. As someone who has studied and worked in AI for the better part of four decades, my contention is that this change will likely come faster and go further than many of us anticipate -- even if it's driven more by AI-powered software than dancing robots. The question is how we're going to prepare.

When she calls me, she can immediately tell if something is wrong, simply from the way I say "Hello" or "I'm fine". Like many relationships with those we hold close, my mom and I have built a level of trust to the point that she knows how I'm feeling from a simple word or phrase. But unfortunately, I, like many others in the world today, spend as much (if not more) time interacting with technology as I do with the people close to me. Yet unlike talking to my mom or a friend, the way we interact with devices is completely transactional. My cell phone can't read between the lines and understand what's really going on with me.

Another year has passed and humanity, for better or worse, remains in charge of the planet. Unfortunately for the robots, TNW has it on good authority they won't take over next year either. In the meantime, here's what the experts think will happen in 2019: Dialpad, an AI startup created by the original founders of Google Voice, tells TNW that all the hype over robot assistants that can make calls on your behalf may be a bit premature. Etienne Manderscheid, VP AI, Machine Learning, for the company says "robots may attempt to sound human next year, but this will work for few domains in 2019." Despite the hype brought on by Google Duplex and resulting conversations around speech synthesis, true text-to-speech technology will not be able to carry on conversations outside of the specific domains they're built around for at least another few years.

The reality is that it's neither one. The fear is that automation is sweeping all before it, gobbling up jobs; displacing millions of workers and leaving them unemployed and, worse, unemployable; and exacerbating the income gap. It's reviled by many as a greater threat than jobs shipped overseas, even prompting some to suggest taxing robots to slow their spread. The counterview is that automation is not replacing jobs nearly fast enough. We don't have enough workers to do the jobs available now, and this will get worse as demographic trends play out.

WASHINGTON – Across their three presidential debates last year, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump uttered the word "jobs" 86 times – but the word "automation" never came up. And by all accounts, nothing is going to transform the American labor market more dramatically, and likely for the worse, than the increasing trend toward automation: on assembly lines, in self-driving cars, even clerical and white-collar positions once considered unthinkable for robots to occupy. Credible projections now forecast that 40 percent of all jobs in the United States today could be eliminated by 2030, just 13 years from now, have led futurists, labor market analysts, and leading CEOs to ask what will become of all the workers soon to be displaced by technology, and whether industrialized democratic societies, seeking stability in such a radically reshaped economic environment, might benefit from some orderly redistribution of wealth. And leading the charge are two of America's most prominent titans of the digital age. In a commencement address to graduates at Harvard University last month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the coming wave of automation and displacement will require "a new social contract" between the government and the governed.