There’s a black door at street level. Open the door, go down the stairs, and take a left down the hallway. At the end of the hallway, you’ll pass through heavy red drapes and emerge into Caveat, an event space. A library runs along the wall across from the bar, and the room between is filled with round tables facing a stage set with three leather armchairs, a rug, and a table with an improbable houseplant. This is where I host Convergence: A Show about the Future. The live show is new, as is the space. It’s all an experiment.

Convergence brings together two people from vastly different fields to explore how an emerging science or technology will affect culture, policy, and politics in the near future: not five hundred or one thousand years from now, but five, twenty, fifty years from now. Our lifetimes and those of the next generation. Each show is centered around a question, and often the guests know very little about each other’s fields, which tends to make them nervous, which I sort of love. One evening last fall, we brought together labor journalist Jessica Bruder and machine learning researcher David Blei to ask: how is machine learning (really) going to affect labor?

Jessica has written about labor and economic justice for publications such as The New York Times, Harper’s, Wired Magazine and The Nation, and she has just published a book about the new American labor force of transient workers and the dark underbelly of the American economy called Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. When we first started emailing she was driving a camper across the country, busy getting the windshield fixed and finding new tires while also on deadline at Wired. Her messages crackled with wit and energy, as she does in person. David is a professor of statistics and computer science at Columbia University, and a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, whose mission is to train the next generation of data scientists and develop tech that serves society. He has a wonderfully gentle, self-deprecating affect that runs counter to every cultural stereotype of computer programmers and algorithmic thinkers you could possibly imagine.

I wanted to do this show because recently there has been a lot of panic and no small amount of hype about how the robots are coming for our jobs. There’s a 2013 study by a team at Oxford on “how susceptible jobs are to computerization” that gets cited a lot, and it estimates that “about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk.” So that’s a...