What are you telling people about at Davos?

Well we're telling them we're in the midst of what Andrew McAfee and I are calling "the second machine age." Just as the first industrial revolution automated and augmented muscle work, we're now doing the same with mental and cognitive tasks. There are some similarities in terms of the potential growth and disruption, but there are also some big differences.

Who is getting hit hardest by the rise of robots?

The data say that routine information processing tasks have been especially hard hit. Think of bookkeepers or travel agents or tax preparers. That has been some of the first wave of how the "second machine age" has been affecting work, but what Andy and I talk about is just this whole wave of new technologies that is affecting all sorts of professional tasks like diagnosing diseases, legal briefs, affecting tasks that require mobility and fine motor control. We recently rode in Google's driverless car, we visited Rodney Brooks' "Rethink" factory where they are making Baxter robots that can do a lot of precision tasks. So there's a whole set of categories that previously weren't affected that now are being affected.

What are the skills that a human can have that won't be replaced?

That's a really tough question actually, because Andy and I have been playing that game for a couple of years, and every time we think we have a task that can't be done, we find out shortly thereafter that there's somebody in a lab at MIT or Silicon Valley that's working on a prototype 0.1 of exactly a machine to do that task.

...every time we think we have a task that can't be done, we find out shortly thereafter that there's somebody in a lab at MIT or Silicon Valley that's working on a prototype 0.1 of exactly a machine to do that task.

So it is a little scary.