Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

Even with uncertainty around the future of work in an increasingly automated world, Airbnb will remain a way for women to achieve greater financial independence and social empowerment in the years ahead.

Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.

If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.

When you start to automate, you start to do the self-driving thing, you make it much more efficient. When these cars go into self-driving, you start to become a robotics company.

Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast and the impact of the change on society and technology is global not local.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

Recently I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.

Over the eons I've been a fan of and sucker for each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers and Actioneer for the early Palm.