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The report concludes 60 million U.S. jobs face some automation and predicts a change as drastic as the shift from an agriculture-based economy into the 20th century.

In the last shift, jobs moved to manufacturing. It’s not clear yet what employment might pick up the slack next time.

Here are examples from different fields:

The Arts: A symphony composed by a computer was performed by London’s Symphony Orchestra. Programmers from Spain created software that composed a piece in just eight minutes. It might sound gratingly atonal to some ears; a BBC reviewer called it delightful. There’s also painting. With a bit of code and a 3D printer, computers can produce masterpieces. They can’t create their own style — yet. But they can imitate Van Gogh or Rembrandt’s style. They draw, too — a program called AARON has had pieces in museums around the world. They are amazing book editors: Wired magazine recently ran a piece about how algorithms can predict with 80 per cent accuracy whether a book will be a mega-bestseller, based on textual data like the age and sex of the protagonist; how many times the word “need,” appears; how few exclamation marks appear; and the ratio of dogs-versus-cats. Wired’s piece was titled “Algorithms Could Save Book Publishing, But Ruin Novels.”

Painters — the other kind: Artificial intelligence researcher, tech entrepreneur, and Stanford lecturer Jerry Kaplan says technology already exists to paint houses with drones. It’s like a snapshot of the overall labour challenge. Many painting jobs might disappear; but an individual entrepreneur could get rich dropping off robot-workers at multiple job sites. “The technologies required to do this are available now. It’s simply a matter of some resourceful entrepreneur making it happen,” Kaplan writes in his book “Humans Need Not Apply.”