As we enter the second machine age — nearly 300 years after the first began with Europe’s industrial revolution — there are lots of questions to answer about the future of society, politics and economics. But in Europe, according to Peter Day, a host with the BBC World Service, people are still insulated from the changes taking place on the global market.

Although many are suspicious of machines, fearing that robots will one day take over their jobs, it’s “a slightly vaguer prospect here, cushioned as we are in welfare states,” at least, compared to the United States, Day said in an interview with theCUBE at the MIT IDE 2015 Conference in London.

Seismic shifts in media

Even in media, a topic near and dear to Day’s heart, seismic shifts are taking place. Younger generations don’t consume media the same way as their parents did. It’s often chopped up into small segments online and may not even be associated with the brand that created it. The problem is, nobody knows exactly where these trends are heading.

“This is really big, dynamic change, and it goes about once every 500 years or so.” Day isn’t entirely optimistic about this shift, however. If inequality continues to rise as the wealthy profit from robotic labor and the poor get poorer as a result, it could cause intense social unrest, leading to a bleak future.

Promising signs in ’emergent behavior’

Still, Day sees some promising signs, most notably in the idea of “emergent behavior,” which results from the combination of artificial intelligence, network effects and ubiquitous computing, a trifecta that could prove more revolutionary than the printing press. These innovations are “beginning to converge and change the relationship of human beings to the working world to society in general.”

Just as the printing press resulted in a “profound dislocation of the medieval world” — everything from religion to education was fundamentally altered — Day believes that “the Internet, connectivity and AI are going to do the same thing to us now. And that’s what … this phrase ‘emergent behavior’ is all about.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of MIT IDE 2015.