On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." Snow declared that a gulf of mutual incomprehension divided literary intellectuals and scientists. "The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man's condition," Snow said. "On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment." Snow didn't expect much of his talk.

Reject it or embrace it. Either way, artificial intelligence is here to stay. Nobody can predict the future with absolute precision. But when it comes to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on people's careers, the recent past provides some intriguing clues. Rhonda Scharf's book Alexa Is Stealing Your Job: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Your Future offers some insights and predictions that are well worth our consideration.

The smart use of AI requires thoughtful choices. Our lives are full of trade-offs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents us with yet another round of trade-offs. And are the benefits worth the price? For some thoughtful insights we can turn to Rhonda Scharf's book Alexa Is Stealing Your Job: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Your Future.

The role AI plays in your life is a matter of choice (but only to a certain extent). It doesn't seem too long ago that artificial intelligence (AI) was mostly the stuff of science fiction. Today it seems to be everywhere: in our home appliances, in our cars, in the workplace, even on our wrists. To some extent, our use of AI is still a matter of personal choice. But because AI is becoming increasing ubiquitous, we need to make a lot of conscious decisions.

You might expect scientists to heap scorn on Hollywood's depiction of aliens, but they're generally forgiving. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin, remarks that most science-fiction aliens are either riffs off the weird life we see in Earth's deep ocean, such as the squid-like creatures of Arrival, or versions of now-extinct animals from earlier in our planet's history, such as the adult trilobite in Prometheus. "If you want to study a lot of different body shapes or forms, look at the Cambrian Explosion," he says. "If you look at a museum exhibit of life from 500 million years ago, you see trilobites and other unique types of life. What irritates him and others isn't what movie aliens look like, but the magical things they do. Leave aside their physics-defying technology and consider just their most basic attributes, such as metabolism. "Prometheus was especially terrible this way," says Caleb Scharf, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University. "[That movie had] the idea that a little thing can grow into an enormous thing when you're not looking, even though there's nothing to eat.

Over at Aeon, Caleb Scharf, director of Columbia's Astrobiology Center, has written an essay contemplating the substrate of minds. Technological progress has spurred many futurists to predict a singularity, a moment when machine intelligence, or AI, overtakes humanity (see also the recent development of our Go overlord). This line of thought has found its way into astrobiology (Dr. When we look for extraterrestrial life, several people have proposed that it might be worthwhile to look for machines rather than the typical little green men. The squishy nature of most biological life does not necessarily lend itself well to interstellar travel.