By now you’re probably aware that a robot is standing right behind you, ready to take your job. Go ahead and look, just don’t make eye contact, because robots, like baboons, don’t appreciate that one bit. That’ll just make them want your job all the more.

In reality, reports of the death of the job are greatly exaggerated. There are just too few things that robots and artificial intelligences can do better than humans at this point. We fleshy beings remain more creative, more dexterous, and more empathetic—a particularly important skill in health care and law enforcement. What is happening is that the machines are taking parts of jobs, which isn’t anything new in the history of human labor: Humans no longer harvest wheat by hand, but with combines; we no longer write everything by hand, but with highly efficient word processors.

Courtesy Erik Brynjolfsson

Still, this new wave of automation could hurt real bad if we’re not careful. Which is where people like Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, come in: He’s thinking hard about the past, present, and future of work, so you don’t soon have a robot in your cubicle breathing down your neck. WIRED sat down with Brynjolfsson to talk about why the Westworld dystopia is (hopefully) far off, why our human creativity and empathy are so important, and why you should never use a telepresence robot to tell someone they’re dying.

(This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Matt Simon: So, be honest. How worried should I be about an AI stealing my job?

Erik Brynjolfsson: I subscribe to the narrative that mass job replacement isn't here. What is imminent is the replacement of parts of jobs through AI but also through robotics. I think discussion in the press tends to fall into two overly simplistic camps. One is, "Oh, all the jobs are going to be automated away," which is very incorrect. Or it's, "Oh, there's nothing happening, it’s all hype." Those are both incorrect. The right understanding based on our research and many others’ is that certain tasks are being automated.

Let's take one example. There are 27 distinct tasks that a radiologist does. One of them is reading medical images. A machine-learning algorithm might be 97 percent accurate, and a human might be 95 percent accurate, and you might think, OK, have the machine do it. Actually, that would be wrong. You're better off having the machine do it and then have a human check it afterward. Then you go from 97 percent to 99 percent accuracy, because humans and machines make different kinds of mistakes.

But radiologists also consult with patients, coordinate care with other doctors, do all sorts of other things. Machine learning is pretty good at some of those tasks, like reading medical images; it's not much help at all in comforting a patient or explaining the diagnosis to them.

MS: Which reminds me of the fiasco a while back where a hospital used a teleoperated robot to tell someone they were going to die. The family was upset. Well, duh. I don't know why more roboticists aren't warning about this. There's certain jobs that humans will probably always do, which are those that require the empathy that machines don’t have.

EB: Our brains are wired to react emotionally to other humans. Humans just have a comparative advantage at connecting with each other. We're very far from Westworld, and even there the robots weren't always that convincing. That's not where we are or will be anytime soon. I think this is great news, because for most of us, the parts of our job that involve creativity and connecting with others are the parts we like best. The part we don't like is repetitively lifting heavy boxes, and that's exactly what machines are really good at. It's a pretty good division of labor.