Over the next 15 to 20 years, up to 47 percent of U.S. jobs may be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. Here’s what you need to know.
The job-stealing robots are not the clunky, blue-collar machines of the past. Rather, reports The New Yorker magazine, they are white-collar robots (aka globots) that will come in the form of algorithms and remote intelligence. In fact, says economist Richard Baldwin, they will come for the “good, stable jobs that have been the foundation of middle-class prosperity” in the U.S. and abroad.
So, how can you tell if your job is one of the endangered? “If your job can be easily explained, it can be automated,” says Anders Sandberg of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “If it can’t, it won’t.” Meanwhile, economist Richard Baldwin advises workers to 1) avoid competing with artificial intelligence, 2) build skills in things that only humans can do, in person, and 3) realize that humanity is an edge, not a handicap.
What human skills can save you from being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence?