Is Artificial Intelligence a Threat to Our Lives?

Most of the fears that people express about artificial intelligence are quite simple. They're the fear that AI might threaten our livelihoods and our quality of life by making many of our activities obsolete. It's easy to imagine AI as being like a mechanical employee where an employer rolls in a new robot and walks an obsolete worker to the door. Thinking of automation this way obscures the most important economic effect, which is how automation changes the nature of the work that we do.