Will a robot steal your job?

The safest fields are science, engineering, the arts, education, health care, and business management — disciplines that require high-level cognitive and emotional skills

Robot
(Image credit: (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images))

The robots are coming, said Claire Cain Miller at The New York Times. Machines have already "progressed from displacing factory workers to personal assistants and even lawyers," and over the next decade, we'll see them more and more behind counters from the coffee shop to the airport. But on the question of "whether we're heading toward a robot-led coup or a leisure-filled utopia," Silicon Valley is "evenly split." According to a survey of nearly 2,000 technology experts by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent believe that robots won't displace more jobs than they create by 2025. But 48 percent of those polled had a much bleaker, almost dystopian view of how robots will probably affect society. They believe that many blue- and white-collar jobs will vanish over the next decade, and "they are not convinced that new ones will take their place," resulting in "a future of widespread unemployment, deep inequality," and even "violent uprisings."

Those fears are probably overblown, said Sarah Gray at Salon. Robots and new technologies will still need to be serviced, after all, and as new technologies emerge, so will the demand for the people who develop and improve upon them. And though driverless cars might replace the need for taxi drivers, and self-checkout kiosks make cashiers obsolete, new, "completely unimaginable" jobs could soon take their place. That's how progress works. In other industries — health care, for example — "human compassion, empathy, creativity, and judgment will be irreplaceable."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Sergio Hernandez is business editor of The Week's print edition. He has previously worked for The DailyProPublica, the Village Voice, and Gawker.