Will you be replaced by a machine? There's nearly a 50-50 chance, according to a recent study by Oxford University researchers who found that 47% of the labor market in the US alone is at risk of being mechanized out of existence. Approximately 702 jobs thus far held by humans are now threatened by non-humans, as we were reminded by a widely shared report on the study this week.

It’s not hard to see why. Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence are bringing robots into more and more workplaces. For example:

Autonomous vehicles now in development by just about every major automaker threaten the jobs of truckers and cabbies.

The Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics is designed to work side-by-side with human factory supervisors, learning new tasks on the go – something only human workers could do previously.

Robotic surgeons such as those made by Intuitive Surgical and the open-source Raven project currently require human surgeons in the loop, but inroads have already been made into giving these machines autonomy as well.

Unmanned aerial vehicles – as in, drones – are getting set for integration into the US national airspace next year, potentially replacing the jobs of many human pilots.

My profession isn't immune to robotic outsourcing either. The Quill robotic journalist digests facts from raw data, and spits out fully formed sports and business stories.

Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now backing "a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep". So there's that.

There’s even a robotic burger flipper in the works. The website of Momentum Machines boasts that its slicing, grinding, frying robot can do "everything employees can do except better", and that it will "democratize access to high-quality food, making it available to the masses".

All of which begs the question: will there be anyone left who can afford those better burgers, or will everyone be out of work? And what the hell are we supposed to do about the inevitable rise of the machines?



The march of the worker drones does seem inevitable, and not just into specialized job functions. The Pentagon's mad-science research arm, Darpa, is currently hosting the Darpa Robotics Challenge for the creation of humanoid robots capable of working in disaster areas that are too dangerous for humans. These all-purpose machines are designed to let themselves into buildings and pick up and use whatever tools are at hand there – indeed, to do the things we cannot.

At the Darpa trials in Miami a few months ago, I watched one of the 16 struggling 'bots stare for 10 minutes at a door handle, apparently uncertain what to do with it. The machine looked capable enough: two arms, two legs, about six feet tall, a head studded with sensors. But it was definitely lacking in the brains department. Still, the program manager at Darpa in charge of the operation imagines future versions serving as in-home aides for the elderly or disabled. The robots are in the primitive, baby-step stages right now, but things can move quickly when it comes to Darpa robotics programs.

Autonomous vehicles, for example, went from being unable to complete a course through open desert in the Darpa Grand Challenge, to deftly navigating simulated city streets – complete with human-driven traffic – in three short years. Three US states and the District of Columbia have already passed legislation regulating robotic cars on public roads.

Sooner or later, it seems, robots will have staged a takeover not only of our workplaces, and streets, but also of our homes. What then?

As early as the 1960s, Arthur C Clarke, professional visionary and inventor of the communications satellite, predicted the end of menial labor (mental as well as manual), due to mechanization (and, more disturbingly, bio-engineered apes). In his essay The World of 2001, originally published in Vogue and reprinted in his book The View from Serendip, Clarke wrote: "the main result of all these developments will be to eliminate 99 percent of human activity … if we look at humanity as it is constituted today."

Our salvation, in Clarke's view, will lie in our looking toward loftier pursuits than all those kinds of jobs that machines will take over:

In the day-after-tomorrow society there will be no place for anyone as ignorant as the average mid-twentieth-century college graduate. If it seems an impossible goal to bring the whole population of the planet up to superuniversity levels, remember that a few centuries ago it would have seemed equally unthinkable that everybody would be able to read. Today we have to set our sights much higher, and it is not unrealistic to do so.

Of course this depends on our valuing, as a society, individual knowledge, creating thinking, curiosity and all the other things that elevate us above the level of machines. It depends on our fostering the kind of society that not only frees people from menial labor, but also enables them to reach their full human potential – not just go begging for want of a lousy job.

How many ways can a cook contribute to society other than flipping burgers? What can a sportswriter do beyond coming up with endless variations on "beat," topped", "outshot" and "defeated"? It's about time to find out.