I live in the Wilmington, Delaware, area which, according to this article, is the East Coast hotbed of robots-replacing-workers. Our liabilities, in terms of i

I live in the Wilmington, Delaware, area which, according to this article, is the East Coast hotbed of robots-replacing-workers. Our liabilities, in terms of industries ripe for automation, include the chemicals sector (DuPont is headquartered here and is our largest for-profit employer) and the pharmaceuticals sector (AstraZeneca is our third largest for-profit employer). We also used to have several large auto manufacturing plants, but they all shut down during the study period, and those displaced workers struggled to find new jobs. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate has more or less reflected the larger U.S. rate, which has slowly dropped since the Great Recession. Obviously, a lot of people in the software industry are worried about what will happen if their jobs become automatable. I just heard a talk at the Open Data Science Conference that addressed this worry, and the speaker's basic point was that the people who are most at risk are those who are resistant to change, or who can't cope well with change. Robots and automated processes are still very much in the "highly capable of performing task X" stage. So, while you can construct a specialized robot that's very good at doing one particular thing, we humans remain the supreme generalists. That may one day change, but for now, automation, by and large, replaces tasks, not people. Granted, if you're a person who only knows how to do a handful of tasks, then you're at risk. But if you are able to change and adapt to new tasks that aren't (or aren't yet) automatable, then you'll be able to continue to stay ahead of the automation wave. At least, for a good long while.