In recent months, the continuing development of technology utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) has made the news quite frequently. This mainly takes the form of censoring bots monitoring the comments on social media or, alternatively, AI replacing tasks or professions in the near future. Things such as self-driving cars come to mind with regards to the latter, seeing as they are perhaps the most flashy to come out of the pursuit. But what many don’t know is that this is only a small part of the potential automated workforce we may see working alongside or even in place of human workers within our lifetimes.

The concept of machines replacing our jobs is not a new concept, every time a new technology is able to do a job better than a person can, that person is out of the job. It's just practical. But for most of recent history, most jobs that aren’t on an assembly line were safe from this. But AI makes it so that smarter machines can do more complicated tasks like drive and cook.

With regards to self-driving cars, the fear most people have often seems to revolve around a fear of sharing the road with them. This likely stems from the fact that the image most people have of the cars themselves is the single-person-sized vehicles being used to test the technology. On the practical level, self-driving cars will be far too expensive for private citizens to afford for many years to come simply because of the technology and logistics. The ones who will be able to afford and implement the technology are companies who need to transport goods or people. So in point of fact, the first self-driving vehicles we are likely to see are driverless buses and semis, which most people already hate sharing the road with so very little will change. It should also be mentioned that the entire point of implementing self-driving vehicles is that they will be better drivers than people due to a lack of human error. A lack of a driver means that the central computer driving a semi of the future will be able to be attached to several cameras around the sides of the vehicle and therefore not have any blind spots. If any accidents are caused by them, it will almost certainly be due to the human driver.

More interesting, a similar form of conscious AI, or cobot; a robot designed to work alongside humans in the workplace, is being implemented in some restaurants to replace chefs or, alternatively, mimic the food preparation habits of some of them. For instance, several restaurants now employ a form of cobot called Flippy to flip burgers. Moreover, it is able to do its job more reliably, cleanly, and efficiently than the majority of human laborers. It is attached to the grill it works on and is able to monitor the internal and external temperature of all of the burgers it's flipping at once as well as being able to tell the difference between a hamburger patty, a vegetable, and a human hand (for safety). If this technology already exists, it is not at all hard to imagine that soon most restaurants will use Flippy or something like it for the less creative tasks in the kitchen.

While the benefits of both of these cannot be ignored, neither can the massive implications for the blue collar workforce that would lose their jobs to the AI, once again, simply out compete them in every way. For how this technological advancement will affect the people it replaces, let us look to the last time something like this happened: the industrial revolution. The machines that replaced many artisans in the early 1800s and the assembly line workers they became in the early 1900s did in fact replace a lot of jobs. But in doing so they created new jobs. The machines that replaced many factory workers required engineers and maintenance workers to run them as well as an increase is budget space to hire more sails men to sell them and the products they made. Similarly, the new AI will require technicians and programmers to keep them running and tend to any issues they may have. As is the case, only time will tell which new niches are opened by the

cobot workers of the future. What is certain is that it will happen.