As we reach the middle of the 21st Century, half the population of the world will lose their job to a machine.
Yes, this is another ‘robots will take our jobs’ story, and we saw a few of those last year. This latest comes from Moshe Vardi, professor at Rice University, Houston, who delivered a talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s exploring one central question: “If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?”
(He also previously gave this talk back in December at the University of Oxford’s Ada Lovelace Symposium).
Vardi reckons that half of workers across the globe will be replaced by machines within the next 30 years, wiping out middle-class jobs and “exacerbating inequality”. He noted that robots would take over in many spheres of life, including almost fully automated driving (which he predicts will arrive in the next 25 years) and sex robots.
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