South African billionaire Johann Rupert has warned that the country has to prepare for more civil unrest with technology advances set to cost more jobs and fuel unemployment.
“Tension between the rich and poor is set to escalate as robots and artificial intelligence fuel mass unemployment, Bloomberg cited Rupert as saying.
While many people may feel that your jobs are safe, David Tuffley from the Griffith University warned that most jobs are vulnerable.
“Almost any job that can be described as a process could be done by a computer, whether that computer is housed in a robot or embedded somewhere out of sight,” said Tuffley.
That means that intelligent machines can already take over many of the jobs of today, and people need to reskill to ensure future employment.
This increased automation is good news for the ultra-rich, but bad news for workers. Rupert said that this income inequality is a challenge.
“We cannot have 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent taking all the spoils. It’s unfair and it is not sustainable.”
Rupert questioned how society is going to cope with the envy, hatred and the social warfare which stems from structural unemployment in the country. He said that we are destroying the middle classes, and it will affect us.
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