LONG BEACH, CA—Andrew McAfee of MIT says that, sooner or later, our world is going to be heavily populated with robots and androids. “Our machines are demonstrating skills that they have never, ever had before,” he noted onstage at the TED2013 conference on Wednesday. "The day is not too far off that androids are going to be doing a lot of the work we do now.” This is the new machine age.

McAfee, a management theorist at MIT's Center for Digital Business, proclaimed that “this is the best economic news on the planet these days,” for two main reasons. First, he explained, “technological progress allows us to continue this amazing run we are on” in which prices go down and products and quality explode. “This is abundance!” he said. Second, McAfee believes that once the androids take on a large number of job functions, we won’t have drudgery and toil any longer. We will have a new society.

“What could possibly go wrong?” he asks. The future won’t be Skynet. "I'll worry about robots becoming aware and taking over when my computer becomes aware of my printer," he joked.

The economic challenges are perhaps more obvious, McAfee admitted. Machines make it tough to “offer labor to your economy,” and jobs vanish. “Returns to capital are at all time high while wages as percentage of GDP are at an all time low,” he said to the audience. This is ultimately not sustainable, as mass unemployment destroys economies. According to McAfee, we're already seeing that “the middle class is under huge threat” as medium incomes have decreased over the last 15 years.

McAfee suggested that the societal challenges that could result from more androids taking the places of workers are significant. We need only look at the past to see what could happen in the future. Consider two stereotypical American workers and their fates over the last 50 years. First, let’s think about a guy named “Ted,” who is a college-educated professional. He’s at the top of the middle class. The second guy, “Bill,” is a high school graduate and a lower-middle class, blue-collar worker. Since the 1960s, the fortunes of these two workers have diverged significantly, even though they were once quite close. The Teds of the world, according to McAfee, now have significantly higher wages, happier marriages, and lower incarceration rates. Bill’s fate, McAfee said, is nearly the complete opposite. Many “Bills” are unemployed. Their wages are moving them out of the middle class, and no matter which ethnic group of Bills you look at, their incarceration rates are higher. This is where things stand today, McAfee said.

So as we move into a world where technology and androids are ubiquitous, what can we do to address this over the long term? "It's tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines,” he notes. McAfee thinks we will eventually need a guaranteed minimum income for workers. Without this, we lose social mobility and consumers lose the ability to purchase goods. McAfee joked that “socialists” like Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon also believed this was inevitable.

“The plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear,” McAfee told the audience, and that includes the reality that androids won’t be taking our jobs tomorrow. We have time to prepare, and that preparation needs to include increased attention to education and the fostering of entrepreneurship to create new jobs, products, and services. In other words, we need to create more “Teds” and revamp our educational system so that it is no longer satisfied with producing “Bills.” This, McAfee claimed, is the only way to avoid a “world of glittering technology, in a shabby society, with great inequalities.”