Author: 'Hundreds of millions of people' could lose their jobs to robots

As technology advances, robots are quickly starting to infringe on human jobs. Will they eventually take over the economy?

Author Yuval Noah Harari joined Wednesday’s “The Glenn Beck Radio Program” to talk about his new book, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” and a future where robots reign.

Harari detailed some of the ways that artificial intelligence could take over, such as when self-driving cars replace taxi drivers. Factory jobs, retail jobs and other vocations that don’t require education will disappear, but they're not the only jobs at risk, the author asserted. One of the next steps could be AI that can give patients physical exams and scan their medical history to diagnose diseases, using more data than a human would be able to comprehend.

“So you’re talking not just about manual labor, but even about doctors and teachers and lawyers,” Harari said. “Some of their jobs are at risk.”

In the past, new jobs would eventually appear in order to fill the gap after technology advanced. When agriculture and factories needed fewer workers, new jobs not requiring education cropped up. But that may run out as everything is automated.

“If the low-skill jobs are disappearing and you have new jobs, say in Silicon Valley … you’re not going to be able to make the transition because you don’t have the necessary training,” Harari explained. “Then we might see hundreds of millions of people being pushed out of the job market.”

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