So where are the jobs?

Dan Burstein, reporter, novelist and successful venture capitalist, declared Wednesday night at RobotLab's winter forum on Autonomous Transportation & SmartCities that within one hundred years the majority of jobs in the USA (and the world) could disappear, transferring the mantle of work from humans to machines. Burstein cautioned the audience that unless governments address the threat of millions of unemployable humans with a wider safety net, democracy could fail. The wisdom of one of the world's most successful venture investors did not fall on deaf ears. In their book, Only Humans Need Apply, Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby also warn that that humans are too easily ceding their future to machines. "Many knowledge workers are fearful. We should be concerned, given the potential for these unprecedented tools to make us redundant. But we should not feel helpless in the midst of the large-scale change unfolding around us," states Davenport and Kirby.