Politicians Aren’t Talking About the Biggest Challenge to the Labor Market

Whenever Nigel Cameron gets into an Uber or Lyft, he says to the driver, “You do realize you’re just cannon fodder here, right?”

Cameron, the president and CEO of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET), isn’t trying to be rude—he’s trying to prepare them for an imminent reality. Jobs as drivers are among those at risk of becoming obsolete because of automation, and the ridesharing sector could be one of the first industries to see that evolution take place. Two years ago, Uber announced that it was partnering with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to create the Advanced Technologies Group Center. Since then, the company’s self-driving engineering team has, like Google and Apple, been working hard to make driverless cars a reality.

There are different theories as to how much automation will affect the workforce in the coming years. A , Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, concluded that 47 percent of today’s U.S. jobs are at risk of what they call “computerisation.” Yet a found that across countries, 9 percent of jobs are at high risk of being automated. Either way, what’s clear is