The workplace is changing, and Americans have to prepare. Doing so requires having a realistic vision of what the future holds: just how many jobs will robots replace, and what will displaced workers do?
“In the long run, nearly all current jobs will go away,” says UC Berkeley computer scientist Stuart Russell. Russell envisions “an economy where far fewer people work because work is unnecessary.”
Expect to see less work in manufacturing, less work in call centers, and less work driving trucks, reports CNN. In fact, study after study reveals that automation will have an enormous effect on the workforce—from moderate displacement to a total workforce overhaul. One such study predicts that hundreds of millions of people worldwide will have to find new jobs or learn new skills.
But AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler isn’t caving to the dystopia. “The scare tactics are a little extreme,” she argues. “Every time a technological shift has taken place in this country, there have been those doomsday scenarios.”
Perhaps. But automation has sped up, making it harder for workers, employers, and the government to adjust. So, ideally, workers will have to meet the robots in the middle. “We’re going to work alongside technology as it evolves,” says Shuler. “New work is going to emerge.”
While Shuler works on the here and now, others are envisioning the long term. “We need a radical rethinking of our educational system and our scientific enterprise to focus more attention on the human rather than the physical world,” writes Russell. “It sounds odd to say that happiness should be an engineering discipline, but that seems to be the inevitable conclusion.”
How are you preparing for the robots’ arrival?