Some law firms now use artificial intelligence software to scan and read mountains of legal documents, work that previously was performed by highly paid human lawyers.

NBC Universal has created a role called 'talent branding specialist' - a marketer whose job is essentially to put the company on the radars of the most sought-after candidates.

I was working at 'Forbes,' and I covered big enterprise companies - IBM, Sun, and EMC - and it was kind of boring. 'Forbes' only came out every other week, so it was not the most fast-paced job in the world. It was very nice, comfortable.

To be sure, robotics are not the only job killers out there, with outsourcing stealing far more gigs than automation.

I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

Everything that works on the Internet depends on a lot of people collaborating, but there's also these rules that you see across all the really successful platforms. Many, many, many more people consume the information or benefit from the information than actually contribute the information.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.