'Robots are Coming For Our Jobs,' yelled the Huffington Post. 'Robots will destroy our jobs – and we're not ready for it,' The Guardian calmly announced. And according to the Daily Mail, 'Robots taking human jobs is causing a "hellish dystopia"'. These headlines may seem over the top, but, like the scariest nightmares, they're rooted in reality. From factory line jobs to professions like accounting and medicine, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies mean that more and more tasks can now be automated and completed by machines or algorithms. A recent report by think tank Centre for Cities estimates that 1 in 5, or 3.6 million, British jobs will probably be'displaced' by 2030 due to automation and globalisation.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding artificial intelligence is that the technology will eliminate jobs as it becomes increasingly more sophisticated. According to a new report from Forrester Research, "intelligent agents and related robots" will eliminate 6 percent of U.S. jobs by 2021, wiping out, as The New York Post points out, 8.6 million jobs, or the equivalent of Florida's entire workforce, in just five years. And that's only the beginning of a "disruptive tidal wave" that will swallow up millions more jobs in the coming decades. "By 2021, AI within intelligent agents will evolve significantly beyond today's relatively simple machine learning and natural language processing (NLP)," reads the report. "Emerging applications will feature improved self-learning and more complex scenarios. As basic agents gain consumer adoption, next-generation AI will not power intelligent agents until 2020 or beyond."