We have nothing to fear from the robot takeover

The driverless car is close to production. Robot vacuum cleaners are going mainstream. New programs are hitting the market to do fairly repetitive tasks, such as para-legal work, accounting, or diagnosing a medical condition and prescribing the right medication.

After decades in which robots were the stuff of science fiction, advances in computing and artificial intelligence are now making them reality.

We are near a tipping point where robots become mass-market products. They won't be cheerful C-3PO-type metal butlers. Instead, they will be task-specific. The driverless car is a good example. Instead of a robot chauffeur, we will buy cars with so much computing power that most of the time they drive themselves whilewe sit in the front seat with even more time to check our work email.

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Likewise, household appliances will increasingly control themselves,and smarter computers will take over much of the routine white-collar work done by accountants, para-legals and medical assistants. We won't have single robots instead there will be dozens of specialists.

Inevitably, that is going to have an impact on employment. And already many people expect robots to destroy millions of jobs. In a world where well-paid work is scarcer than it used to be, that's going to be an issue. "Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of the skill set," argued Microsoft founder Bill Gates this year.

Meanwhile, Race Against the Machine, a book by two professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has forecast that many workers will be locked into a battle for work with more intelligent machines and it's not a battle that they are necessarily going to win.

You can see the problem. Driving cars is a huge industry, from taxi services to buses to white van delivery services. Many of those jobs will disappear. So might many cleaning jobs. And higher up the income scale, lots of accountants and lawyers might be replaced, along withdental assistants, laboratory analysts, and insurance claims processors.

If robots can do that work more efficiently and more cheaply, then companies will use them. But that does not have to mean we end up with mass unemployment. The fact is, we have been round this track at least once before.

Back in 1961, President JF Kennedy established an Office of Automation and Manpower in the Department of Labor to address what he described as "the major domestic challenge of the Sixties: to maintain full employment at a time when automation, of course, is replacing men".

Kennedy was referring to the waytyping pools, accounts offices, and telephone exchange staff who once manually routed calls from place to place, were being swept away by the first big mainframe computers.

These huge machines, made by IBM and a few others, were pathetically underpowered compared with the average smartphone of today. But at the time they were revolutionary, and companies were buying them in order to replace lots of expensive workers with far cheaper machines. Whole professions were swept away.

There weren't many clerks or telephone operators after the 1970s. But, as it happened, Kennedy needn't have worried about the impact on employment, and nor did anyone else need to. The unemployment rate in America, and in most other developed economies, remained very stable all through the 1960s.

When Kennedy launched his office to tackle the automation crisis', the US unemployment rate was just above 6%. By the end of the decade, it was down to 4%. Meanwhile, the employment rate had gone up, mainly as more women joined the labour force.

The percentage of Americans over 16 in work went from 59.4% in 1960, to 60.4% in 1970, andthen 63.8% in 1980. Not much sign of jobs being wiped out there, despite the worries over the impact of computers.

The same thing is happening today as it did in the 1960s people are working with the robots and computers to do new things. Two points are generally missed in this debate.

The first is that while new technologies destroy some jobs, they create others. We wouldn't have lots of app designers if phone calls still had to be routed through exchanges manually.

The second is that people work alongside machines. Robots may get rid of a lot of medical staff, but that may simply mean we spend more time with specialists who can show us how to stay in better shape. If routine legal work is automated, the lawyers can give us more specialist advice tailored to our own needs.

So, while some jobs will be destroyed, others will be created and the net impact is likely to be more people working, not fewer. We can't say what those jobs will be precisely. But we can hazard a few guesses.

Building and maintaining robots will be a huge industry. And the leisure time created by driverless cars and automated appliances will create fresh demand for creative products.

So, while you can expect dire warnings, and even calls for the spread of robotics to be controlled, the historical record shows that these kinds of scares have always been wrong in the past and they will be this time around as well.