Report: Robots Will Take Over More Jobs Than They Create

ELON, N.C. (CBS Charlotte) – What will our future with robots be like? Will we live side by side, humans and mechanicals engaged in productive economic activity? Or will today’s work helpers be tomorrow’s electronic overlords?

That’s the question posed to about 1,800 industry experts by the Pew Research Internet Project and the Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center.

Half the experts predicted robotic technology will create more jobs that it takes away with the other half warning that many more of the tasks we perform today will be taken over by artificial intelligence, reports Live Science.

“There was obviously no clear consensus at all among the folks surveyed,” said Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and lead author of the report.

Nearly all the experts said things like driverless cars, robotic doctors and nurses and intelligent digital agents would be a part of daily life by 2025.

But they were evenly divided over whether this would be a boon or a curse for human beings.

52 percent of respondents said that historically technology has ultimately created more jobs than it has displaced. They said people will find other forms of work that only human beings can perform; that the technological advances will give us all more time and energy to do more meaningful work.

But the other 48 percent fear that the roll of artificial workers will be unstoppable and that humans will not be able to adjust in time to avoid massive unemployment and social disruption.

A majority of the respondents did agree that the best way to make future technologies work for us is to improve education and training for all people.

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