A two-year study from McKinsey Global Institute suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate as much as 30 percent of the world’s human labor, displacing the jobs of as many as 800 million people
There will assuredly be an increasing number of jobs related to programming, robotics, engineering, etc.. After all, these skills will be needed to improve and maintain the AI and automation being used around us.
But will the people who lost their middle-skilled jobs be able to move into these high-skill roles instead? Certainly not without significant training and education. What about moving into low-skill jobs? Well, the number of these jobs is unlikely to increase, particularly because the middle-class loses jobs and stops spending money on food ,health, etc.
The transition could be very painful. It’s no secret that rising unemployment has a negative impact on society. A period of high unemployment, in which tens of millions of people are incapable of getting a job because they simply don’t have the necessary skills, will be our reality if we don’t adequately prepare.
So how do we prepare? At the minimum, by overhauling our entire education system and providing means for people to re-skill.