The productivity gains, the medical advances

"From the way your brain and heart and hormones and sweat glands work, Multivac can judge exactly how intensely you feel about the matter," the machine operators tell him. "It will understand your feelings better than you yourself."Nearly 60 years after Asimov anticipated a decidedly dramatic intrusion of machines into our politics, we may not be offloading our democratic responsibilities to computers, but we are empowering them to reshape our economy and society in ways that could be just as profound. The rise of smart machines—An exoskeleton essentially does the walking technologies that encompass everything from artificial intelligence to industrial robots to the smartphones in our pockets—is changing how we live, work and play. Less acknowledged, perhaps, is what all this technological change portends: nothing short of a new political order.

The productivity gains, the medical advances, the workplace reorganizations and the myriad other upheavals that will define the coming automation age will create new economic winners and losers; it will reorient our demographics; and undoubtedly, it will transform what we demand from our government.The rise of the machines builds on deeper economic trends that are already roiling American society, including stagnant growth since 2001 and a greater openness to trade and foreign outsourcing. But it's the rapid increase in machines' ability to substitute for intelligent human labor that presages the greater disruption. We're on the verge of having computer systems that understand the entirety of human "natural language," a problem that was considered a very tough one only a few years ago.

Whether you are a factory worker or an accountant, a waitress or a doctor, this is the wave that will lift you or dump you.Even the robots so familiar from vintage science fiction are now really making their mark. Worldwide annual shipments of industrial robots have more than doubled in the past decade, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Taiwan's Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, announced in 2011 that it would increase the use of robots in its factories one hundredfold, bringing its total to 1 million robots by 2014.