Plan and Act in case AI or something else kills your job

Ray Kurzweil discusses the potential for Artificial Intelligence to eliminate jobs.

a prescient futurist in 1900 would say 38% of you work on farms; 25% of you work in factories. That’s two-thirds of the population. I predict that by the year 2015, that will be 2% on farms and 9% in factories. … everybody would go, “Oh, my God, we’re going to be out of work.” I would say, “Well, don’t worry, for every job we eliminate, we’re going to create more jobs at the top of the skill ladder.” And people would say, “What new jobs?” And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know. We haven’t invented them yet.”

I would argue that you should be worried about your job but not just because of AI but because mergers and other business activity could kill your job. The concern is the speed of any potential transition. But do not just worry plan and act.

If we assume that there will be vastly higher risks of job loss, then individuals should not assume that policies will not be created in time to properly buffer people from the job loss.

Faster retraining would help but if we cannot identify the new work there would be a large lag for the right training to be created.

– reduce personal debt as fast as possible
– have more than one income stream or job
– have a backup career
– work in a career that is less prone to automation
– have personal awareness of developments that are threats to your job or career

There has been growth in the gig-economy. Getting contracts or non-permanent employment.

Longer term people might be in a more resilient situation if they had their own business or had more stock ownership.

The rate of new entrepreneurs in the United States has been steadily growing in 2014-2016. In the USA there are around 550,000 new entrepreneurs across the national, state and metro level every month.