It is estimated that AI will replace half of all jobs in the next decade. Self-driving cars, are cheaper than human drivers. Manufacturing robots are replacing human workers by the thousands. From a company's perspective, machines yield a much higher productivity and have lower financial costs.
While we are currently witnessing the new Industrial Revolution, jobs in every field are at risk of being reassigned to robots or AI, regardless of whether they're blue-collar jobs or white-collar jobs.
But it's not for the worse. People won't have to do tedious or dangerous kinds of jobs. Productivity would increase dramatically, thus possibly leading to cheaper goods. What we would see, is perhaps a complete restructuring of the job market, with demands in jobs that AIs can't temporarily replicate.
While the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence would greatly enhance human civilization as a whole, there are still certainly a lot of societal factors to consider. The key social question that we should ask ourselves is, how will there be social stability as AI/automation displaces workers. Keep in mind that this isn't something that happens overnight. It's something that happens slowly over time, in a span of a decade or so.
There is, without a doubt, that the income and wealth disparity between the rich and the poor would be much, much greater in the future. Here's a picture to demonstrate this:
The top 0.1% of families already own as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Since the data is from 2012, it has definitely gotten worse.
Very nice post, keep it up!
In my opinion, wealth inequality is not related to technological advance but to economical politics. Artifical intelligence and job automation is reducing the workers wealth and increasing the wealth of the corporations shareholders, but it can be easily avoided without the proper labor and tax regulations.
Of course politicians are not interested at doing that because political parties are funded by major corporations.