Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said technological advances have placed a wide variety jobs at risk of being eliminated, the Financial Times reported. Schmidt gave his warning at a briefing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying that the rapid pace of innovation in technology has made this one of the largest problems that the world will have to contend with in the next two to three decades, the report said.
Schmidt said, "The race is between computers and people and the people need to win. I am clearly on that side. In this fight, it is very important that we find the things that humans are really good at."
Some economist had already made similar warnings regarding how the spread of information technology is beginning to have a deeper effect compared to technological change that has occurred before. They had also warned that employment levels could be permanently affected, the report said.
The search giant which Schmidt heads has also made big bets on automation as evidenced by the purchases it made of robot startups late in 2013. Its widely publicized development of driverless cars has also prompted a race for the creation of vehicles that would be able to operate without people. This has added to the worries that even some types of manual labor that were once believed to be out of the reach of machines would eventually become automated. Google has 46,000 employees, the report said.
There are also fears that machines could also replace entire classes of clerical and research jobs due to the advances made in artificial intelligence and mobile communications. Although new kinds of jobs have been created in the past to cope with such change, there are some economists who caution that today's rate of change is happening too fast for the employment levels to adjust, the report said.
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