Predictions of the Robocalypse are everywhere. "Robots Are Winning the Race for Jobs," headlines The New York Times, which linked workplace automation to the rise of despotic rulers around the world. Elon Musk warns "Robots will do everything better than us." On one hand, 72 percent of Americans are worried about an automated future (Pew). On the other hand, 94 percent of American workers don't think a robot will take their job (NPR).

In the debate about the impact of automation and robotics on the future of work, there is often a reductive push toward a Robocalypse, in which machines take all of the jobs. While a total displacement of humans is unlikely, a number of different types of jobs face an existential threat. This is typically low-skill, low-education, and low-income work that often includes significant manual labor and predictively repetitive tasks. According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, some sectors, such as manufacturing and transportation, have high technical potential for automation. But other sectors, such as education, management, professionals, information and health care, have much lower automation potential.

Robots' potential to take over the world is a commonly expressed fear in the world of AI, but at least one Turing Award winner doesn't see it happening that way. Rather than replacing mankind, technology will create a new kind of human that will coexist with its predecessors while taking advantage of new tech-enabled tools. So argued Raj Reddy, former founding director of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and 1994 winner of the Turing Award, at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany last week. "I could not have predicted much of what has happened in AI," Reddy told an audience of journalists at a press conference. "Four or five things happened in AI in the last decade that I didn't think would happen in my lifetime," including achievements in language translation and AI's triumph at the game of Go.