Rise of the Machines

“Now, where did I put my pen?”
Photo: Fortune – AP Photo/The Christian Science Monitor, Ann Hermes

Jobs board Monster.com ran an online poll recently, asking people how threatened they feel by robots. Namely, how likely they find it that a robot will be doing their work in a few years’ time.

Most people are in “robot overlord denial,” it turns out, thinking that computers could never replace them at work. Sadly, most are probably wrong.

According to this Fortune article, University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne estimated in 2013 that 47% of total U.S. jobs could be automated by 2033. The combination of robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning is so powerful that some white collar workers are already being replaced — and we’re talking journalists, lawyers, doctors, and financial analysts, not the person who used to perform data…