We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.

The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

Machines already are much smarter than us at so many things. I mean, try to multiply two 10-digit numbers with each other or, you know, sift through a thousand documents. So there's lots of things that machines are better at including in mental task than us. There's many more that they're not as good at, but the direction is pretty obvious and the progress is clear.

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.