Hello, this is Chris Anderson.

You're about to hear a fascinating TED Talk by Andy McAfee.

It's about the impact of technology on the future of work, for better or possibly for worse.

If you're intrigued by what you hear, I invite you to a follow-up conversation.

It's in my podcast, the TED interview, which is devoted to much deeper dives into ideas.

In the episode featuring Andy, he and I discuss at length what's coming.

AI, robots, automation, job losses, and the interventions we might just need so that we can all actually enjoy technology's awesome potential as opposed to just being

swept away by it. So that's the TED interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

The writer George Elliott cautioned us that among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th century counterpart,

Yogi Berra, agreed. He said,

it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

I'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast.

In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more

things that look like science fiction and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. Our cars

are very quickly going to start driving themselves, which means we're going to need fewer truck

drivers. We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work

that's currently done by customer

service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers. And we're already taking R2D2, painting him

orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot

fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles.

Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you,

...