IMO
anyone who feels safe from what is going to happen (already happening, really) in the labor market over the next decade is ignorant or is heavily in denial.
I'm not saying we're surely all doomed here, but there are going to be a lot of changes that none of us can imagine every aspect of, and they are going to happen at a surprising speed, and there are a vast number of cascading impacts that people aren't thinking much about.
eg. if you're in the trades, yes you're safer than a knowledge worker for now, but if all the knowledge workers get wiped out you're both going to have vastly decreased demand for your work (far less individuals will have the disposable income to hire you, companies will have less need for facilities to house employees, so you'll also see a retrenchment on the corporate side) and you'll start getting a labor supply glut as the knowledge workers all desperately attempt to retrain for the 'safe' jobs. And this is just the short term problem, without getting into the robotics threat.
If we don't get ahead of this problem politically (spoiler alert: we won't, at least in the US, it is unclear if we even have a functioning democracy), things are going to get very messy for virtually everyone who relies on labor income.
I'm not saying we're surely all doomed here, but there are going to be a lot of changes that none of us can imagine every aspect of, and they are going to happen at a surprising speed, and there are a vast number of cascading impacts that people aren't thinking much about.
eg. if you're in the trades, yes you're safer than a knowledge worker for now, but if all the knowledge workers get wiped out you're both going to have vastly decreased demand for your work (far less individuals will have the disposable income to hire you, companies will have less need for facilities to house employees, so you'll also see a retrenchment on the corporate side) and you'll start getting a labor supply glut as the knowledge workers all desperately attempt to retrain for the 'safe' jobs. And this is just the short term problem, without getting into the robotics threat.
If we don't get ahead of this problem politically (spoiler alert: we won't, at least in the US, it is unclear if we even have a functioning democracy), things are going to get very messy for virtually everyone who relies on labor income.