9 Big Problems With Future Scientific Breakthroughs

5. Robots

The future is looking more and more robotic as time goes by, but the good news is that robots stealing our jobs isn't a totally foregone conclusion.

It is, however, a possibility.

With robots creeping into a huge range of industries, in the form of everything from warehouse drones to robotic valets, the job landscape is set to change in the future.

Whilst it would be lovely if we could all sit back and let robots do everything for us, our economies have mostly been built on the system of exchanging money for goods and services. From our position now, it seems almost impossible to imagine what a society with unlimited leisure time and no income would look like. We'll have to keep working, but with robots taking our jobs, we'll have to come up with new ones.

Some particularly gloomy forecasts estimate that as much as nearly 50% of human jobs could be automated within the next few decades, with 70 million lost is the US alone. Others think that, if we got our act together and poured our now surplus human resources into innovation rather than labour, the net job loss would be a more manageable 9 million.