In his final speech as US president, Barack Obama warned of the “relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.” Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has said that governments will need to tax robots to replace forgone revenue when human workers lose their jobs.

If the past is prologue, these concerns are warranted.

In a recent study (pdf), economists Daren Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University try to quantify how worried we should be about robots. They examine the impact of industrial automation on the US labor market from 1990 to 2007. They conclude that each additional robot reduced employment in a given commuting area by 3–6 workers, and lowered overall wages by 0.25–0.5%.

For centuries, humans have been fretting over “technological unemployment” or the loss of jobs caused by technological change. Never has this sentiment been accentuated more than it is today, at the cusp of the next industrial revolution.

With developments in artificial intelligence continuing at a chaotic pace, fears of robots ultimately replacing humans are increasing.

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Accounting firm PwC says nearly a third of British jobs might be threatened by robots.

I did a 10-min interview on Radio Columbia today, one of the largest stations in Latin America. We talked about robots taking jobs and the possibility of #robot politicians. It’s a combo of English and Spanish.

Aunque expertos advierten que las máquinas podrían dejar sin empleo a la mitad de la población en 30 años, Zoltan Istvan explica los beneficios de esta iniciativa.

Robot encuentro. Foto: Getty Images.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s prediction for the future of the workforce includes more robots and less human workers.

“We’re about to go into a period with artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, those things where we literally are going to see a change in the nature of employment,” Cuban said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

In that same interview, he criticized President Trump’s leadership skills before calling Trump “technologically illiterate.”