We don't kill off our retirees just because they're not working anymore, so don't worry about our future robot overlords killing off us humans when we're no longer working, either — which we won't be, because the robots will be doing everything faster and better than we can, the way machines have been taking over human jobs since the dawn of the industrial age.

That, my friends, was just part of the trippy argument going on a few weeks ago at a live debate series in New York City called The Soho Forum. The topic to resolve — yea or nay — was: "Robots will eventually dominate the world and eliminate human abilities to earn wages."

Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and author of "The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth," briskly insisted that in the future, we will see the ascendance of "ems" — remarkably human robots that will emulate us, because they'll be modeled on our own brains. Or at least they'll be modeled on the people who are the very best workers.

Those aren't the ones we'd choose, said the "robots will not take over" debater, Bryan Caplan, also an author and econ professor at George Mason. If we were to get around to creating worker robots from human brain scans, he said, we would scan only the most docile, efficient workers, to create docile, non-human-killing ems.

And this is where it started getting weird(er). Hanson believes that when we make ems, CEOs will still want to hire the most brilliant workers, which means they'll end up cloning (or replicating or whatever the word is) the cutthroats. And being cutthroats, they'll eventually cut our throats. Although, "it may very well be that the first five generations of robots will be happy to keep humanity around because they feel some residual gratitude towards us," Caplan said as he was painting a picture of Hanson's scenario.

How comforting.

Caplan was having none of it. He brought up the question, Why on earth would we clone the very people who want to kill us? Over the eons, we've already had quite a lot of experience breeding new beings to do our bidding — namely, pets and farm animals. We have, for instance, bred lovable dogs out of fierce wolves. We'd do the same if we were to clone humans.

The moderator, Gene Epstein, economics editor at Barron's, tried to make peace. "You'll tweak it," he nodded to both.

Caplan was not convinced that the day of the ems will ever come, because who would volunteer to become one? "In Robin's first scenario, actually you're dead because they have to actually slice your brain into pieces. So, I think very few people actually would like to have biological death in order for there to be a computer simulation of them going around," he said.

Today we can't conceive of it, agreed Hanson. But humans in the future, "once lots of other people are doing it" — that is, agree to become an em — and they see that the ems talk like real people and look like them and act like them (except they never die), then the prospect may become attractive. Hanson made it sound as normal as wearing glasses, another biological enhancement people eons ago could not have conceived of.

And that was Hanson's big point. Of course this stuff sounds bizarre to us. But think back a thousand years to the subsistence farmers. If you'd told them that someday we'd be able to talk to people an ocean away and see them, too, there's no way they would have understood, much less believed you.

Will the ems own property? Fight? Fall in love? Those issues were not resolved. In fact, nothing really was. A before-and-after poll of the audience found that the exact same number had changed their minds from negative to positive as had changed their minds from positive to negative.

It was the least strange moment in a very strange night.

Lenore Skenazy is author of the book and blog "Free-Range Kids" and a keynote speaker at conferences, companies and schools. Her TV show, "World's Worst Mom," airs on Discovery Life. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy ([email protected]) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.