Computers get better, faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic.

It's most useful to think about not jobs but tasks. And within any given job, there are lots of different tasks. If you're a radiologist maybe reading the images machines can be able to do that better, maybe making the broader diagnosis and communicating it to the patients.

Going a little further into the future, we'll start literally connecting to machines. Some of my colleagues at MIT here - some of them are working on a neural mesh that connects directly to your brain, and they've already done it with some disabled people and allowed them to move objects just by thinking.

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.

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs.

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.

Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.