It can't be denied. Robots are here to stay in our world. They make our lives easier with their functions, and with advancing technology, they are joining our labour force. Not just assembly lines with a human operator, but rather fully automated, multi-tasking machines that are all but human. Because of these robots, efficiency in the workplace is skyrocketing, and prices are plunging, thus disrupting every single market where digital and robotic technology are remotely involved. Sounds nice for humanity as consumers, but what about humanity as workers down the road? What does this mean for our human workforce? Will robots end up taking every single job available? Will humanity become idle and live only in leisure? The answer is difficult to say. We can say that many jobs of both high skill and low skill will disappear, while others will, to our current knowledge, be safe for some time.

For the most part, low skill jobs are the first to go. Self driving cars already exist, thanks to Google and Tesla, and their market is pushing manual cars out slowly but surely, with an added bonus as a crash rate near 0, and the crashes in which a self driving car was involved was due to another car, which happened to be manual. This means that the next time you call an Uber or Lyft, you'll be taking a self driving car, which has a near 0% crash rate, and most likely has a lower cost attached to it. And this potentially means transportation itself, whether it be moving humans or cargo over land, air, or sea. But it doesn't stop at transportation. Aeon Co. in Japan has released robots to cover all retail jobs. Not just the checkout and shelving/slicing/lifting robots (which are growing in the service industry), but also less "robotic" jobs like customer service. Aeon has also released babysitting and petsitting robots, which are doing a fine job. This proved especially useful in Japan, as both parents tend to have jobs, so the caretaking robot proves to be rather useful at a reasonable one-time cost. The list goes on, but it's not just low-skill jobs that are vulnerable, but high skill ones, too.

Some high skill jobs are being replaced now. Astronauts and deep sea explorers are perhaps one of the more obvious replacements, with robots being able to function normally in space and deep water while humans cannot yet, but it's more than just exploration. Soldiers and law enforcement's higher risk roles are becoming robot centred, slowly expanding to the most basic roles in the police and military. Even in the medical field, pharmacists and surgeons can perform more efficiently if they were roboticised. The University of California San Francisco Medical School, one of the top medical schools on the planet, is switching to robots, and urging the hospitals of the world to do so, as their error rate is much less than that of a human, and the rate of function is much faster. General health care robots are just around the corner. Yes, Baymax is not that far away. The rapid advance in robotic technology could mean that most jobs centered around repetition, strength, or extreme precision, will be lost to our physically and mathematically superior machines.

It's not just blue collar, white collar, and professional jobs that have a future made of metal. It's also the case for entertainment. Robots can play sports at the same level as (and even above) that of the top professional athletes, from table tennis to mixed martial arts. The British company called Engineering Arts has produced robots that can play a variety of instruments, sing, dance, act, and even respond to their audiences, reaching levels in all areas which most people do in only one or two skills. Robots which exist today can mix the same drinks and make the same food more efficiently than a human chef or bartender, and through a large database, even remember a particular person's preferences, almost as if it knows its patrons on a personal level. This writing platform is also not safe, as robots can take a story from a robotic reporter and use its database on linguistics and semantics to create a Pulitzer Prize level article in hours, as done by robots in Northwestern University. This extends to songwriting bots, playwright bots, and much much more. Even entertainment and a number of creative jobs are not safe.

At this point, some would start to get scared, and think that robots are taking every job available to us. And the bulk of people have every right to be. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, American unemployment peaked at 25 per cent, and European unemployment peaked at 30% during the Great Recession of 2008. If we continue "business as usual", unemployment in the industrial world will go to 45 percent due to robotisation alone. At this panic is in the air. What jobs ARE safe? There are quite a few, for now.

Science and engineering are perhaps some of the safest careers, especially those that contribute directly to robotic or software improvement. The safest fields are those centred around physics, chemistry, and computer science. Careers which require open ended thinking like being an educator or therapist are mostly safe (although Korea has developed robots which are eerily human, some to the point of not seeming robotic in the slightest). Robots definitely supplement these types of careers greatly, but it's dubious that they'll push humans out of the picture altogether. Out of fear of hacking, online security appears generally safe, as cyber warfare is the future of combat, therefore protecting the robotic workforce will prove to be important. Artisanry is a key component in almost every culture, so there's a slim chance of them dying out. We can also do the most human thing possible: be humanitarians. Helping fellow humans in poorer and less privileged areas around the world is something that benefits everyone. While the robots run the economy at home, humanitarian initiatives can offer even greater aid to those who need it. Even in all of these seemingly safe careers, robots and software do play important roles. At least they're still secure jobs available to future humans.

At the end of the day, it can be very scary to think that a bulk of our jobs will be lost to superior beings that we ourselves created. Everything mentioned above does exist (except for Baymax, yet). But this doesn't mean we should stop the robot revolution. Entrepreneurship is more valuable than ever, so it's up to startup companies to create jobs for the future. Some future jobs might be bizarre or unthinkable to previous generations, or perhaps even our own, but that's the purpose of entrepreneurs. It's them who will allow humans to be the best at something, finding something humans are better at than any programme or robot. And when a robot can beat out humans in that field, then it's back to search and do. The moral of the story is: When some doors close, and others don't open, it's time to build new ones.