I’ve always had a close relationship with robots — even a fondness for them. When I was a kid I had a Baby Alive doll, mass-produced in the 1970s by Kenner. The baby ate through its battery-operated mouth and subsequently pooped, a ridiculously simple simulation of the real-life care of a newborn. In the wake of an avalanche of news on the ethical implications of technology — whether that’s Google bowing out of the military’s Project Maven or a report questioning whether it’s emotionally healthy to have sex with robots (it’s probably not) — I connected the trail of my own attachment with AIs and their physical counterparts, robots.

Throughout my own career, I’ve thought a lot about robots replacing jobs. When I was 15 years old, my high school guidance counselor told me to join the military. For members of my working-class family, the armed services were both a viable career path and a noble calling. But not many teenage girls in the 1980s wanted to enlist, the film “Robocop” hadn’t been released yet, and I was asthmatic to boot. I liked computers and was fascinated by technology, but didn’t know how to get a job leveraging my interests, so my friend Christine and I instead volunteered for the summer at our local hospital. Because I spent time in the hospital as a kid, I wanted to work with children. But the children's ward was the most sought-after post for volunteers. I logged a few hours there, but the rest of the time I was assigned to the fourth-floor geriatric ward.

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Working with elderly patients as a 15-year-old forced me into situations that perplexed and often challenged me. My first week, a wiry gentleman with a shock of grey hair and wild blue eyes attacked me as I fixed his bedsheets. I managed to summon a nurse, who calmed him. The nurse explained dementia to me for the first time. The next week, a different elderly man refused to wear his hospital gown, or in fact, any clothing whatsoever. Another patient, a gentle bird of a woman in her 90s, snuck plastic-wrapped butter packets from the lunch tray into her mouth when I wasn’t looking. I had to fish out the plastic in a panic, trying not to be bitten, before she could swallow it. I had all kinds of uncomfortable situations in my job. I know that some of the elderly patients were grateful for the assistance, conversation and my awkward attempts at helping them eat. But most folks were too ill or disoriented to want the help. They just wanted to be left alone.

Long after our days as hospital volunteers were over, my friend and I joked that robots could have done our jobs better. Robots could take a punch and think nothing of it, reach into elderly patients’ mouths and not be, in typical teenage fashion, “weirded out.” Robots, I thought, were not only cool, but the future of healthcare.

Year later, the news that artificial intelligence-enhanced robots are taking over in spheres ranging from the military to the bedroom makes the front page. But, could we ever become accustomed to a robot caring for us? What about caring for our aging parents or even our children? After all, we now rely on technology for all sorts of tasks — from booking flights to ordering take-out — that previously required personal interaction. As a society, Americans have opted for a computer interface over a human time and time again.

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AI experts and economists say that over the course of the next decade several million jobs representing trillions in wages will disappear worldwide due to automation and AI. The numbers in the U.S. alone are staggering. A report from the global consulting firm McKinsey says that 51 percent of jobs, representing nearly $2.7 trillion in wages, have a high probability of being made irrelevant. We’ve known that this threat to our livelihoods is coming. After all, globalization has already offshored manufacturing jobs from the West. And, if Amazon’s checkout-less grocery store is any indication, automation is also coming for service industry positions like cashiers. Nearly 3.5 million people in the U.S. work as cashiers.

Massive numbers in the workforce will soon be made irrelevant, just as weavers were by the power loom during the First Industrial Revolution, and farm workers in the second. What’s interesting about this new wave of predicted job loss is that for the first time, experts see threats to white collar jobs as well. A study from the University of Oxford suggests that human resources assistants and medical and clinical laboratory techs, for example, have a 90 percent chance of being automated. Paralegal and legal assistants: 94 percent. Loan officers: 98 percent. Tax preparers: 99 percent.

Just as the prior industrial revolutions upended the economic and social orders of their centuries, the AI Revolution is poised to do the same in this one. AI is maturing, and advances in deep learning are driving this new wave of employment instability. We already use AI daily in our smartphones, for facial recognition, in tax preparation, and to play the piano. AI even helps a cucumber farmer in Japan. Smarter technology is assisting surgeons, fighting terrorism, and mapping flights around storms. Within the next decade, we’ll transition to driverless cars and pilotless planes, robot chefs, automated radiologists and pathologists, robo-cops, and computer-generated news stories.

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We are witnessing a transition in epochs: from the Anthropocene, in which human activities shaped our environment, to what I call the “Automacene” — the epoch in which machines will direct what we do and how we do it. The revolution will be complete when we no longer need humans in our daily activities or interactions. The infrastructure of our lives will be controlled by algorithms.

The Automacene raises important questions about what our societies will do when faced with such massive change. A core belief espoused by many AI experts and economists is that we should embrace what humans do best — at least better than machines — and create industries around those skills. They tell us that empathy, creativity and love are traits that are uniquely human. (Never mind the fact that technologists are designing “spiritual” and emotional machines). Social work is often mentioned as a type of irreplaceable human job that can’t be lost to automation because it requires empathy. The University of Oxford study noted that mental health and substance abuse social workers have only a 0.3 percent chance of experiencing job loss due to automation. But how many social workers does a community need? And how will we increase value for this work? Emergency medical technicians and nursing assistants are also occupations that require empathy, and both have incredibly low chances of becoming automated (4.9 percent and 0.009 percent, respectively). However, both jobs are also notoriously among the most underpaid, high-stress professions.

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Previous industrial revolutions have shown us that once groundbreaking technologies become fully absorbed into our lives, new jobs will appear. Amazon’s checkout-less store, for example, employs a handful of workers to assist customers and navigate the in-store experience. However, it’s not hard to imagine that after a few years, even those workers’ positions will be eliminated.

In fact, robots may be better for most of our very “human” jobs — jobs that we currently believe require the kindness, the empathy of a person. Once we live fully in the Automacene, will we even expect our social workers and other caregivers to be human? Once our rational intelligence is fully replicated by deep learning algorithms, will emotional intelligence — or at least the ability to fake it really well — be far off? Maybe even jobs that require empathy will be automated. What then for the future of work? What then for a future in which unprecedented unemployment is a norm?

What we will undoubtedly need is an educated populace. Mere training, or a college degree, is only the tip of the iceberg. Certainly a passion for learning will count — we undoubtedly will need an educated populace more than ever. But instead of focusing on particular disciplines like computer science, we need to instill flexible, critical skills combined with the ability to create. These are called 21st century skills, and they include critical thinking and problem solving, creativity, collaboration, initiative and self-direction, cross-disciplinary thinking, leadership, and flexibility.

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The pace of employment change in the Automacene will undoubtedly be quicker than in any previous era. We will need employees who can think systematically, but also have the ability to interconnect disparate ideas. After all, Steve Jobs was inspired not by computing hardware but by a Trappist monk’s college course in calligraphy.

This shift will first require us to rethink what it means to be educated and re-engineer our institutions to better prepare us. “Training” for new skills isn’t going to cut it. What if instead of college being a four-year gauntlet, we made it the center of a lifelong approach to learning? After all, these significant culture changes won’t just require new types of tasks. They will require us to restructure how we understand a livelihood and what work or an occupation can be.

We all like to think that our jobs are automation-proof — and as a professor, I’m no exception. I would like to believe that my expertise matters. With my students, I hold out hope that the magic that happens in a liberal arts classroom — the connection to curiosity, the insightful discussions, students’ individualized growth, and the personal connections we make — are irreplaceable even with advanced automation. I hope I’m right, because teaching is something I love. But I’ve learned from countless encounters in emerging fields that technologically infused solutions often take us by surprise and turn what we thought we knew on its head.

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In America, we will need to decouple our jobs from the meaning and identity we expect them to provide us. And while it sounds lofty, it is going to be essential to turn to philosophy and spirituality in order to reinvent what a meaningful life fundamentally is. If machines truly become better at many things than we are, what do Americans do with our days? If over half of the workforce won’t be filling our days with a 9-to-5 job, how do we spend our time? What is a meaningful life, and how can we all achieve it? Not simply for the gifted types who can creatively surf this tidal wave of change, but for all? And where do we encounter the human touch in our daily lives if we completely automate our social infrastructure?

We’ll only be able to navigate the upcoming tumultuous changes in society by embracing deep conversations on what it means to be human in the era of machines.