Do you have a chess app on your iPad? (There are many available, and they are free.) Even if you are a chess club nerd this app regularly kicks your butt. Your parents can probably remember when IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue, beat the world champion of chess, Gary Kasparov, in 1997. It made for interesting talk around the office for a couple days. Deep Blue beat a world champion chess player largely by brute force. The computer could look ahead by as many as twenty moves in some circumstances. By the sixth game Kasparov was getting tired and, perhaps, feeling some anxiety. After all the match was close and his reputation was on the line. Kasparov made a small mistake. Deep Blue just kept chugging away.

Fast forward seventeen years. Marching to the beat of Moore’s Law computer power has increased by a factor of more than two thousand. Google has created an autonomous car. It drives itself. You took Driver’s Ed when you turned sixteen. It might have been a little nerve racking when you first started, but you got the hang of it. You are a capable human. Driving a car is no big deal. But creating an autonomous car is a very big deal. It is a lot harder than writing a program to play chess. The amount of computing power required is astronomical. Oh, remember that growth factor of two thousand. Astronomical computing power is here, and it is cheap. Your smartphone is many times more powerful than Deep Blue.

The roboticist, Hans Moravec, has observed that duplicating high level reasoning requires very little computational power (relatively speaking) while simulating low-level sensorimotor skills requires massive computing capabilities. Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, explains  that, “As the next generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts, petrochemical engineers, and the parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”

The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 propelled the economy into a deep recession which wiped out high-wage and middle-wage jobs. The recovery, at best, can be described as sluggish. But what makes it worse is that those high and middle wage jobs haven’t come back. Instead, if you look closely at the government’s jobs numbers, you will see that the highly touted growth in jobs is in low paying, part time, and service sector, e.g. The Gap and TGIFridays, positions. Not exactly the career choice of a college graduate.

Economists are worried that even if the recovery gains steam, continued offshoring and a new wave of automation may suppress the growth of the good jobs that have historically been the objective of the newly minted alum.

Science fiction is becoming today’s reality. If you don’t believe that, talk to your smartphone. The corporate earnings statements that appear on Forbes’ website are prepared by a computer. They are indistinguishable from those written by humans, except for the fact that they don’t contain any mistakes.

Seventeen years from now the computer will be 4,000,000 times more powerful than it was in 1997 when it first defeated a human world champion in the “game of kings.”