Hi, it's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Whether we're factory workers, doctors, or journalists, our jobs are changing fast because the age of AI and machine learning is here. And a lot of people are worried about our robot overlord someday. In his talk from TED at BCG in 2020,

tech journalist Kevin Ruse says we've been preparing for the age of automation

in exactly the wrong ways.

Instead of trying to compete with machines,

we should be doubling down on what makes us human,

compassion, moral courage, and creativity.

I was in my mid-20s the first time I realized that I could be replaced by a robot.

At the time, I was working as a financial reporter covering Wall Street in the stock market,

and one day I heard about this new AI reporting app.

Basically, you just feed in some data like a corporate financial report or a

database of real estate listings, and the app would automatically strip out all the important parts,

plug it into a news story, and publish it with no human input required. Now, these AI reporting apps,

they weren't going to win any polls or prizes, but they were shockingly effective.

Major news organizations were already starting to use them, and one company said that its AI reporting app had been used to write 300 million news stories in a single year, which is slightly more than me and probably more than every human journalist

on earth combined. For the last few years, I've been researching this coming wave of

AI and automation, and I've learned that what happened to me that day is happening to workers

in all kinds of industries, no matter how seemingly prestigious or high-paid

their jobs are. Doctors are learning that machine learning algorithms can now diagnose certain

types of cancers more accurately than they can. Lawyers are going up against legal AIs that

can spot issues in contracts with better precision in them.

Recently at Google, they ran an experiment with an AI that trains neural networks,

essentially a robot that makes other robots.

...