Forrester predicts that automation will cannibalise 17% of all jobs in the US economy by 2027. It forecasts that 2022 is the year when self-driving vehicles will begin to really take off, accelerating the dismantling of certain job categories entirely. But the research firm also notes that changes in how we work will create jobs equivalent to 10% of the current workforce.

What people must remember, cautions Craig Nel, mobile and cognitive experience leader at Oracle for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, is that this isn’t the first time in our history that we are feeling the impact of automation. At the start of the industrial revolution – which was really the first time machines took over the jobs of humans – mass unemployment was feared by most. And although many jobs were indeed lost, this automation of tasks created new and different jobs requiring new and different skills, he explains.