The fear of losing jobs to artificial intelligence

We all remember the scenes of the movie Terminator. Robots and drones equipped with artificial intelligence and machine guns went after humans who were running for their lives. This is perhaps worrisome and may happen in the future, but what is more imminent to humans appears to be the fear for human to lose jobs to artificial intelligence.   

The first time I came across such idea was ten years ago. I was working as a junior accountant when I and my colleagues were instructed to check payment reports generated from the computer system for a special project. The tasks were simple, one of them was to open soft-copies of those reports and re-do calculations using Microsoft Excel. Everyone hated repetitive tasks, so we just used the macro-recording function (I didn't know programming at that time) to make a little bot and have the computer do it by itself.   

Our productivity doubled because of this, and that was certainly not an isolated event. In March 2017, the media reported that JP Morgan had managed to cut the time spent by lawyers and loan officers down from 360,000 hours a year to matter of seconds by machine learning. It appears that many people are going to lose their jobs to the latest AI development.   

So what should we do to make a living? Some people believe that jobs that rely on creativity or face-to-face human interaction would be retained. Jobs met these criteria include designers, event planners, psychologists, writers, etc. Managers' job should also be safe from stealing by AI as leadership can hardly be automated (especially for dealing with humans with emotions).    

For other people like myself, may be now is the time to plan for the future. (Perhaps investing in Steem is a viable option as well!)