Of all the changes that sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) will bring, the biggest may be changing the job market as we know it.
A 2013 Oxford study projected that an estimated 47% of all employment in the United States is at risk of being automated.
But Toby Walsh, a professor in AI at the National Information and Communications Technology Australia told Tech Insider that in the foreseeable future, that number could be much much worse.
"It's hard to think of a job that a computer ultimately won't be able to do as well if not better than we can do," Walsh told Tech Insider.
Armed with machine learning, a method that allows AI to "learn" from its mistakes, AI systems are getting better at tasks they previously struggled with — vision, translation, and language.
Combined with increasing computing capacity and cheaper costs, Walsh said future AI might be part of a perfect storm of technologies that have the capability to completely transform society.
"There are various forces in play, and one of those forces is technology, and technology is actually a force that is tending to concentrate and widen the inequality gaps," Walsh said. "This is a challenge not for scientists but one for society to address, of how are we going to work through these changes."
While we've bounced back from shifts in labor before, like the machination of physical work during the industrial revolution, he said a future automated revolution is likely to happen much more rapidly.
"The changes that we see precipitated by changes in computing are ones that tend to happen very, very quickly." Walsh said. "The challenge there is that society tends to change rather slowly."
Jerry Kaplan, author of "Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," agrees. He told Tech Insider that even in the near-future of automation, even white-collar jobs like lawyers won't be robot proof.
Any job that requires many routine and structured tasks are at risk of automation, Kaplan said: "Even for what you think of as highly-trained, highly-skilled, intuitive personable professions, it is still true that the vast majority of the work is routine."
While there isn't one secret key to unlocking success in the workplace alongside robotic colleagues, Walsh recommends turning to artistic and creative work, which he considers the last stand for human jobs as we know them.
"Go into the most people-facing, artistic, creative places that you can think of," Walsh told Tech Insider. "The artists of the world are, for a long time, still going to be real physical people. The people who are in most people-facing, sociological, empathetic jobs are going to be people."
But creative jobs won't be completely safe from the robotic workforce.
"Even there, you're not completely safe," Walsh said. "But I think you'll be safer for longer, at least."
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