2017 could very well be the year of the robot -- not the T-1000 or even the real-life anthropomorphic monstrosities that garner viral headlines every few months, but rather stand-alone living-room devices imbued with AI smarts. Google Home and Amazon's Echo are the most famous, but a whole raft of these gadgets is preparing to flood the market. One of the most advanced will likely come from Baidu, the Chinese tech giant that, like Google, began as a search engine and now has its tendrils in all sorts of digital and physical spaces. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief AI scientist, calls these devices "conversational computers," and he's a key reason any of them have learned to talk in the first place.

A former AI researcher at Stanford, Ng is best known for spearheading the Google Brain initiative, an ambitious artificial-intelligence project that helped advance Silicon Valley's understanding of deep-learning techniques. Instead of being programmed to respond to specific actions, a deep learning system is fed massive amounts of data from which it is able to discern patterns over time, loosely mimicking how the human mind absorbs information. Ng's system at Google famously figured out what a cat looks like after scanning millions of online images. [...]

There's a lot of anxiety right now in the general public about AI-powered automation putting people out of work. Is there a way to avoid that outcome? How can we face that challenge?

I'm so glad you raised jobs as the issue, because I think that's a real issue, and not the specter of evil AI killer robots or Terminator or whatever. Jobs is a real problem. I don't think there is a way, nor do we want to stop AI from getting much better. I think over the long term AI will free humanity up from a lot of routine, repetitive work so we can all spend our time doing higher-level things. Just as the Industrial Revolution freed up humanity from a lot of repetitive physical drudgery, I think AI will free up humanity from a lot of mental drudgery. For example, if you're driving your car in a traffic jam -- no one likes that, hopefully AI will do it for you.

Personally, I'm not worried about us not having jobs. Each wave of disruption has created a lot of new jobs. I am worried about the mismatch. I think we need new ways to educate people for these new jobs that are being created. I think MOOCs [massive open online courses] will be part of the solution, but I do think we need more. For example, I support basic income, but even a version of basic income where we don't pay you to "do nothing." We pay you with the expectation that you will keep studying to increase the odds that you can get into the workforce and contribute to the tax base that is paying for basic income. I think that there will still be a need for us to figure out a new New Deal, I guess. Just as we build our current educational system to be focused on this economy, we'll need a new [system] that is better structured to help people engage in lifelong learning ... so that people feel refreshed for the constantly changing jobs that the economy creates and that we actually need people to do.