But history shows that employment usually recovers after a technological revolution — though the directions it can take may be unexpected. There is a lot of debate over how much disruption the AI Revolution will bring, but I am optimistic that new jobs will replace the old ones in areas we can’t even imagine yet, just as the working world evolved after the Industrial Revolution. We don’t blame the steam engine or tractors or sewing machines for unemployment now.

AI has already created new opportunities. Consider a service like Magic, an SMS-based delivery startup that serves customers anywhere in the U.S. Magic’s idea is that a user can get anything delivered on demand by text message, through the coordinated efforts of humans and AI. In China, similar startups employ hundreds of customer service staffers to cater to callers’ various needs — though it’s possible that digital assistants may one day take over from “manual intelligence.”

Many people may decide to return to school to gain new skills in these emerging fields. We may also see a surge of interest in jobs that require a broad range of abilities and human intuition, such as nursing, child care and sales. While massive open online courses like those offered on the platform I founded have already helped millions of people around the world to educate themselves, we can expect that working professionals will more routinely pursue further training as they try to stay ahead of the competition.

It seems likely that developed countries will undergo the most disruptive changes — in some economies, the service sector accounts for over 70% of gross domestic product. In developing countries, the impact on white-collar workers is unlikely to be immediate, due to slower adoption of AI technology, though such regions may experience a decline in outsourced manufacturing jobs with further advances in robotics. This sounds worrisome only because we can’t anticipate the new jobs that these technologies will bring and the new businesses that people will devise, as they always have. The future’s still bright, thanks to our creativity — our unique trait.

In July, an open letter from more than 1,000 AI and robotics researchers and other prominent figures — Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak among them — warned against using AI in warfare and called for a ban on autonomous weapons. Even that technology is not as advanced as the sentient robots envisioned in the 2015 movies “Ex Machina” or “Chappie.” These movies imagine “strong” AI, or AI that is generalized, and able to carry out most human activities, as opposed to “weak” or narrow AI, which is task-specific. No one can say whether strong AI will be created, and if so, when. I asked some Chinese AI scientists about it, and given their responses, I may as well have been asking about the possibility of alien life.

That would be a world in which perhaps even child care jobs are threatened, but thank goodness we have many years before the dawn of strong AI-directed robots. In that future, we may not need to work very hard to support ourselves. The robots will be doing most of the labor, while we will have the time and leisure to explore what it is to be human.