The biggest threat to our jobs is technology

Technology taking all our jobs!! We need out of the EU and close our borders!

Technology taking all our jobs!! We need out of the EU and close our borders!

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As automation takes over, there'll be new jobs as our capabilities to do bigger things expand. Of course, a lot of new work will be skilled work. I'm not a fan of basic income but it seems inevitable.

That's why it's important to learn and possess skills/qualifications that will keep you in demand.

The link for the source seems to have died but...

"We have developed a technique for extracting the laws of nature from experimental data by identifying invariant and conservation equations. We demonstrated this approach by automatically searching motion-tracking data captured from various physical systems, ranging from simple harmonic oscillators to chaotic double-pendula. Without any prior knowledge about physics, kinematics or geometry, the algorithm discovered Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, and other laws of geometric and momentum conservation."

http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/natural_laws

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/154284/the-use-of-artificial-intelligence-in-physics-resarch

AI is coming for the types of jobs that require more qualifications. Also not everyone can be a programmer. Programming requires a good ability at Maths. You can't expect everyone to be able to do that and you can't expect someone who left school at 16 and has spend all their life being a steel worker to just switch over to being a physicist...

Increasing the only other jobs for these people is picking/packing type jobs that are completely unskilled, pay terribly, awful working conditions, poorly unionised and they are jobs that should be automated but are kept alive by cheep labour.

I'm of the same opinion.Basic income seems absurd, proposed only by the most out their leftists or Milton Friedman. But if automation continues to ebb away at jobs, it will be inevitable. We can try hold the tide back, by keeping a large amount of people in low paid non-jobs, but the resulting productivity loses will seriously harm our economy. The jobs simply won't be there, and to have a really large amount of people on the dole, living on the breadline, will be impractical and absurd given that they'll never be enough job supply to employ those people. It will also harm demand as people simply won't be able to consume. In ways we have seen similar situation in many post-industrial areas of the UK, although on a much smaller scale. We could have an extremely over bloated public sector, but that would be probably be more costly than basic income. I think for the large part this will be a problem that will define the later half of this century.

Although I agree that AI will be able to do a lot of the things that mathematicians and physicists have devoted their lives to uncovering, I think a lot of people miss out on the application. Can a computer take what it has learnt and apply it to completely new fields, to innovate? To take a risk? Can a computer take what it has learned in physics or mathematics to physically create new technologies of its own? People will still have to understand a lot of the heavy-mathematics and be able to take it and use it to make the world better.

And you are going to be able to sustain a capitalist consumer driven economy on a the back of boffins, who make up tiny percentage of the population, steering the AI?

Yes that is the plan. But we will increase the number of scientists and engineers over time AND we will increase the number of creative positions (the economy will adjust for itself) - creative industries is the one thing that AI cannot touch. It cannot act, make films, make impactful video games, write novels, tell jokes. So in the future, we're all happy.