We need to get smarter about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robotics and blockchain. What triggered this thought was a visit to an industrial factory last week. We all know that something is happening. And everyone seems to agree that our future will be automated. But, we tend to believe that it will only -- or mainly -- affect repetitive "manual labor".

Add to this the geopolitical implications, recently outlined in an important op-ed by Kai Fu Lee, and even weak AI can be seen as something scary. We need to be proactive and create alternative career paths for people as AI impacts jobs and takes away many employment opportunities. But as autonomous vehicles run by AI take over for taxi drivers (and make transportation more reliable and faster while opening up spaces currently occupied by parking garages) and robots with AI take over all but the most specialized work on factory floors (reducing production costs, which will hopefully translate into less-expensive goods), blue collar workers will have few alternatives positions to pivot to. Added to all of this are the foreign policy implications of AI, which Kai Fu Lee addresses insightfully in his recent piece.

While industrial robots are predicted to replace millions of U.S. workers and suppress wage growth in the next decade, reforms in education and social safety net largely lag behind, said a renowned U.S. economist. "There's a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board," Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Axios Media, an American news website, in an interview published on Sunday night. Industrial robots have taken over routine work from human hands in the past several decades. A paper published in March by Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University, estimated that the U.S. had already lost between 360,000 and 670,000 jobs to robots since 1990. "Economists are trained to think of technology as always increasing employment and raising wages," said Acemoglu, "but there's no theoretical justification for believing this."

A Baxter robot of Rethink Robotics picks up a business card as it performs during a display at the World Economic Forum, in China's port city Dalian Thomson Reuters "There's just doesn't seem to be many blacksmith jobs these days." At first glance, this would be a ridiculous thing to say. We live in a modern society and machines do a way better job of making things from metal anyways. What if machines are better at driving long-haul trucks? What if machines are better servers at McDonald's?