IT’S a defining anxiety in an age of rapid technological change that increasingly we will be competing against machines for our jobs.

And those concerns could be justified by growing inequality and political discontent, according to a soon-to-be published book by two Australians.

The political fracturing has been seen in the US, where displaced manufacturing workers have blamed machines and the political mainstream for their plight, and moved to Donald Trump.

The rapid growth in artificial intelligence, robotics, automation and machine learning are also worrying Australian families, according to former NBN chief executive Mike Quigley, and Labor’s federal finance spokesman Jim Chalmers.

A draft precis for their book, Changing Jobs: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age — due out in September — says technology can benefit people.

But those benefits will not flow to everyone unless they are harnessed. You might not just lose your job to new technological hardware; you could miss out on the tech dividend others will prosper from.

“Our point is that there is no such thing as technological trickle-down,” says a draft precis to the book. “The economic gains achieved by artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning and robotics will not simply share themselves. Even when machines bring us new sources of prosperity and wealth, there is no guarantee that we will all benefit together.”

There were “real fears that people have about where, or whether, they fit in a workforce increasingly dominated by machines.”

“For many Australians, the rapid growth in artificial intelligence, robotics, automation and machine learning is the defining and dominant anxiety they face today,” says the draft.

“What will it mean for their jobs, now and in years to come? What will it mean for their kids’ future? This anxiety is feeding much of the current discontent with the political system, which in turn fuels a search for extreme, simplistic and backward-looking ‘solutions’.”

Mr Chalmers said his community in the seat of Rankin south of Brisbane was, like most, worried about where jobs will come from.

“We are writing this book because we don’t want to see bursts of technology accompanied by bursts of inequality or immobility,” he said.

The authors say there are three basic ways to respond. “One is that taken by the ‘let-it-rip’ crowd, who cheer on technological change without regard for wealth concentration or transitional impacts on real people,” they write.

“This group wrongly believes, as Prime Minister Turnbull does, that these are ‘exciting times’, whatever the consequences for those disrupted.

“Equally wrong is another group which argues we can resist technological change or hold it back. This is about as likely as offices rediscovering a preference for the fax machine.

“The third believes in intelligent, meaningful interventions, correcting market failures, investing in lifelong learning, rethinking industrial relations, restitching the social safety net and caring enough about the distribution of economic power and opportunity to act.

“This path is the one we recommend for Australia in the pages that follow. What differentiates our approach is the conviction that we can attack the worst consequences of technological change without denying ourselves the broader benefits of that change.”