THE SPECULIST: When The Machines Take Over. “It sounds shocking: we turn some activities over to the machines altogether; others we swap off with them, back and forth. Actually, there’s nothing shocking about that. This is exactly the world we live in now. I let a computer take over most of the heavy lifting involved in an archaic process called ‘balancing my checkbook’ years ago. A closely related task, paying bills, is one I swap off with the computer.”