Analysis Will Smart Machines Kill Jobs or Create Better Ones?

History suggests that the worst fears of machines making humans obsolete don't come true. In some quarters, AI and robotics are considered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, following other big transformations in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. And while displacement of jobs occurred in each wave of new technology, new jobs emerged to balance out some of the pain. Concern about technology-driven mass unemployment "has proven to be exaggerated" throughout history, University of Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne wrote in an influential 2013 paper. Rather, technological progress "has vastly shifted the composition of employment, from agriculture and the artisan shop, to manufacturing and clerking, to service and management occupations," they wrote.