Why it's different this time: computers are so cheap and so general-purpose.<p>For decades, there have been many jobs that could be automated, but weren't, because the machinery wasn't cost-effective. It might have to be custom-engineered for the job, and if you didn't have the volume, it didn't pay. An automated hamburger outlet was built in the 1960s by AMF. There are machines for almost every picking job in agriculture, but much picking is still done by hand. There are still hand car washes.<p>Now, if a computer can do it, the computer will be far, far cheaper than a human doing it. The computer can also provide 24/7 operation, and, even better, once one computer knows how to do something, a million computers can be doing it tomorrow. Deployment is very fast in this area.<p>The list of things humans can do and machines can't keeps getting shorter. That's not going to reverse. But what gets checked off next? More desk jobs.<p>Actual physical robots are still rather inept. That's getting better, but progress is slow. What makes robots work? Money. For decades, robotics R&D was under 100 people in the US, mostly at CMU, MIT, and Stanford. Then came the DARPA Grand Challenge, when DARPA told the universities to get results or robotics funding would be cut off. Suddenly entire CS departments were devoted to automatic driving. After that success, DARPA tried throwing money at Boston Dynamics. It took about $125 million to get the fieldable version of BigDog working. Now Google is in the game, spending who knows how much.<p>A key point in robotics, and AI generally, is that there's now enough known that spending money gets results. There was a false dawn in the 1980s; look up the Fifth Generation project and the NASA Flight Telerobotic Servicer, notable failures. This time, though, many of the old ideas work, powered by four or five orders of magnitude more compute power, and lead to new ideas which also work.<p>Advanced robotics right now is about at the Xerox Alto level - there are impressive prototypes that work, but they're not cost-effective yet. Robotics has not yet had its Apple II or IBM PC. (The Roomba is too dumb. The Dyson robot vacuum, though...) It's going to take a while to break through the cost barrier, even once the smarts are there.<p>The implication for jobs is that manual labor is, in the near term, less at risk than intellectual labor. If your job is to do something where the inputs and outputs are through phone or computer, be afraid.