What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month, on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

It's week two of Rico Daley's look at the future of work. I'm Adam Clark Estes.

Today is all about automation.

You've heard the horror stories before, restaurant jobs, factory jobs, office jobs, all the jobs are in danger because the robots are coming.

We've been told about this version of automation for years, but the reality is, as the technology gets better, automation is changing.

We now have a much broader swath of human activities that can potentially be replaced by machines.

And so that's what we're seeing now is the end of the era of machines doing manual labor and the start of the era of machines doing cognitive labor.

Kevin Rus is a tech columnist for the New York Times and the author of Future Proof, nine rules for humans in the age of automation.

Hey, Kevin.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here. So when people hear the term automation, they might think of robots.

The enforcement droids series 209 is a self-sufficient law enforcement robot.

209 is currently programmed for urban pacification, but that is only the beginning.

But automation in the real world can look pretty different.

It probably involves some combination of apps, algorithms and AI.

Could you describe how these tools work?

So what we've been talking about mostly up until the last decade or so is machines doing manual labor,

hulking factory apparatuses that are moving car parts around and working with heavy metals and things like that.

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