Robots are after our jobs: what can we do?

Will smart automation, intelligent software bots and brainy robots take away our jobs anytime soon? Pose this question to any Indian working in a company where unions are strong, or to any Indian who has a government job, or to the majority of Indians who work in the unorganized sector--those who drive taxis, trucks pull handcarts, hawk goods on footpaths or are employed as maids--and you will, in all probability, be looked at askance or even dismissed as an uninformed prophet of doom. The reaction may not be surprising in emerging countries like India, given that a majority of such employees would never have heard about the Industrial Revolution, or terms like disguised unemployment, cloud computing, machine learning, deep learning, automation or artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software bots. They would perhaps have also never heard of drones taking photographs and doing surveillance; of robots delivering pizzas and packages; of assistive robots taking care of the elderly; of robots making hamburgers and others like the Roomba robots that mop floors; of software bots writing articles and movie scripts; of three-dimensional or 3D printing revolutionizing the manufacturing sector; of driverless cars and trucks--all of which would make it very hard for them to imagine the future impact of these technologies that have not yet directly touched their lives or their jobs. They would have surely seen humanoid robots in sci-fi films like actor Rajnikant's Enthiran in Tamil or Robot in English, or a movie like Terminator or Transformers.