Are we preparing our children for the workplaces of the future?

Up to 40 per cent of current Australian jobs could disappear within the next 10 to 15 years as robots and computers continue their unstoppable advance. They have already replaced humans in workplaces such as factories, supermarkets and airline check-in counters. Hugh Durrant-Whyte, director at the Centre for Translational Data Science at the University of Sydney, said technology was taking on middle-class professions once thought safe from automation -- professions such as law, accountancy and banking. "We always used to think of automation as moving everybody up," he said. "The big difference now is machine learning and artificial intelligence are solving jobs that we thought traditionally were very highly qualified jobs … it's eating out the middle of the job market, rather than the bottom end."