In the Industrial Revolution, new technologies displaced manual jobs while also creating demands for new skills. Will smart machines replace knowledge work–and create demand for a new kind of workforce–in the same way? The smart machine era will blossom through 2020, with the spread of technologies such as intelligent personal assistants, smart advisers and advanced global industrial systems making the smart machine era the most disruptive in the history of IT, predicts the Gartner Group's Top 10 Technology Trends for 2014. In addition, advances in artificial intelligence, speech recognition and machine learning are making it possible to automate knowledge worker tasks once seen as impossible for machines to perform, reports Mckinsey & Company. So, how will this affect the nation's 230 million knowledge workers?

The other day, my 13-year old brought home a not-so-great report card. I wanted to motivate him to do better, so I asked, "What do you want to do with your life?" Then, he looked down at our dog, sleeping contentedly on the floor. He looked back at me, and said, "Dad, I want to be a pet of the robot overlords." Then I realized…throughout history, those who do best leverage the technology of the day.