Every technology revolution has a unique inflection point. The spark that ignited the artificial intelligence movement was a statistical data analysis system developed by Jim Goodnight when he was a statistics professor at North Carolina State University 45 years ago. He never imagined that the technology he created to improve crop yields would evolve into sophisticated data analytics software, a precursor to modern day AI. Back then computers could only compute 300 instructions a second and had 8K of memory. Today they can execute 3 billion instructions a second and contain multiple terabytes of memory.

Artificial intelligence has replaced many skills in recent years – including the skills needed to do some human jobs. The tech revolution has not gone unnoticed by American workers. A 2018 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has sounded the alarm, raising the prospect that millions are at risk for long-term joblessness. I'm an expert on labor markets in the U.S., and I believe that AI will undoubtedly change the future of U.S. labor--but Yang is also exaggerating the impact AI will have on the workforce.

The Trump administration is taking steps to insulate the American workforce from the most severe effects of rapid technological development while maintaining a strong global position in artificial intelligence, according to senior Trump administration officials. President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order Monday launching the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative (AAII). "By driving technological breakthroughs in AI, breaking barriers to AI innovation, preparing our workforce for the jobs of the future, and protecting America's advantage in AI, we are ensuring that AI technologies continue to improve the lives of our people, create jobs, reflect our nation's values, and keep Americans safe at home and abroad," a senior Trump administration official told reporters Sunday. Since June 2017, the Trump administration has held a series of summits with tech giants such as Facebook and Amazon along with other businesses which are increasingly embracing technology provide more services and stay competitive, such as Ford, Mastercard and United Airlines. Monday's order is a culmination of a slew of previous, smaller actions on technology, as well as providing a more cohesive strategy for developing and regulating AI in the future.

There's no doubt technology is shaking up the American workplace. Amazon employs more than 100,000 robots in its US warehouses, alongside more than 125,000 human workers. Sears and Brookstone, icons of brick and mortar retailing, are both bankrupt. But as machines and software get ever smarter, how many more workers will they displace, and which ones? Economists who study employment have pushed back against recent predictions by Silicon Valley soothsayers like Elon Musk of an imminent tidal wave of algorithmic unemployment. The evidence indicates US workers will instead be lapped by the gentler swells of a gradual revolution, in which jobs are transformed piecemeal as machines grow more capable.

Do you believe AI and robots taking over jobs is, as Elon Musk recently put it, the "biggest risk that we face as a civilization?" There's probably a research-backed prediction that supports your view. We've ranked them here, in order from "certain doom" to "possible utopia," for your convenience. How they got there: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, researchers at Oxford University, asked machine-learning experts to assess whether a sample set of occupations were "automatable" or "not automatable," which helped to inform how the presence of "engineering bottlenecks" that couldn't be easily automated, such as creativity and social engineers, factored into whether an occupation could be automated. They created a machine-learning algorithm to estimate a probability of automation across each US occupation.

This downward trend in new job creation in new technology industries is particularly evident starting in the Computer Revolution of the 1980s. For example, a study by Jeffery Lin suggests that while about 8.2% of the US workforce shifted into new jobs during the 1980s which were associated with new technologies; during the 1990s this figured declined to 4.4%. Estimates by Thor Berger and Carl Benedikt Frey further suggest that less than 0.5% of the US workforce shifted into technology industries that emerged throughout the 2000s, including new industries such as online auctions, video and audio streaming, and web design.