Future of Automation: Robots Are Coming But Wont Take Jobs

At the start of the first Terminator movie, Sarah Connor, unknowingly the future mother of Earth's resistance movement, is working as a waitress when Arnold Schwarzenegger's Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Terminator is sent back through time to kill her. But what if, instead of attempting to murder her, Skynet's android assassin instead approached the owner of Big Jeff's family restaurant, where Sarah worked, and offered to do her shifts for lower wages, while working faster and making fewer mistakes? The newly jobless Sarah, unable to support herself, drops out of college and decides that maybe starting a family in this economic climate just isn't smart. This, in a somewhat cyberbolic nutshell, is the biggest immediate threat many fear when it comes to automation: Not a robopocalypse brought on by superintelligence, but rather one that ushers in an age of technological unemployment. Some very smart people have been sounding the alarm for years. A 2013 study carried out by the Oxford Martin School suggested that some 47% of jobs in the U.S. could be automated within the next two decades -- only 12 years of which now remain following the publishing of the study.