Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there has been fear that machines, from automatic looms to microchips, will “steal” jobs from people, making them redundant. “At the moment, people are mostly dominant. But now that Artificial intelligence will spread to almost all industries, the threat, according to some experts, is being realized: robots will indeed take part of the jobs.

According to a March 2023 Goldman Sachs report, artificial intelligence can take over 25% of all the work that people do today. In the European Union and the US, 300 million jobs could be lost due to automation. “And that can be awful,” says Martin Ford, author of The Robot Rule: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything.

“It won’t necessarily happen to individuals, it can be systemic,” he says. “It could have happened to many people, perhaps all of a sudden, perhaps all at once. And this will affect not only the laid-off, but the entire economy.”

But this is not just bad news. According to experts, with the proviso that there are still things that AI is not capable of – tasks that require human skillssuch as emotional intelligence and lateral thinking. And shifting to roles focused on those skills could help reduce a worker’s chances of being replaced by an AI system.

“I see three categories that will be relatively protected for the foreseeable future,” says Ford. “The first is about creative work: when you’re not doing standard tasks, you’re also not ‘rearranging things’, but actually coming up with new ideas and doing something new.”