One of Silicon Valley’s worst kept secrets is that Uber wants to eventually replace all of their drivers with self-driving cars. What might not be obvious to other members of the burgeoning gig economy is that many more of these new jobs will also be replaced by robots.

For example, both Postmates and DoorDash recently partnered with Starship Technologies to pilot robot-delivered munchies to customers in Redwood City and Washington DC.

While there isn’t much data available on the number of people dependent on gig economy jobs, the phenomenon has been recognized by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and analyzed relentlessly by both technologists and economists.

Wired published a piece by Micha Kaufman, the CEO of service marketplace Fiverr, hailing the gig economy as our savior from the growing discrepancy between upper and lower class employment rates.

It could be the force that saves the American worker

McKinsey conducted a survey which found that up to 162 million people in Europe and the United States count independent work as a portion of their income stream.

20 to 30 percent of the working-age population engage in some form of independent work

While the app-based work that garners much of the attention comprises a relatively small percentage of the overall freelance economy (Uber had around 160K drivers in 2015, Lyft 100K), its growth motivated much of the optimism around the gig employment source.

Many of these newly created jobs will be replaced by deep learning enabled robotics and software in the next five years.

Lyft’s autonomous partner, Cruise, recently showed off their self-driving technology operating in San Francisco

Many of the low skill level jobs such as on-demand delivery that services like TaskRabbit provide could see heavy competition from the same Starship Technologies food delivery robots or the type of drones that Amazon is working on.

Even many of the white collar roles that are available through freelancing sites like Upwork will see competition from AI-enabled software tools. Facebook’s Messenger platform is enabling businesses to service customer requests for information and assistance that might previously have been handled by freelancing customer service reps. Admin assistant gigs could be replaced by digital assistants like x.ai that perform schedule management and email filtering tasks.

At my own company, Auro, we are actively working to replace our safety driver, Eric, with a fully autonomous driving system that doesn’t need a chaperone.

Don’t feel too bad for Eric though. He’s become skilled with hardware and robotics. His experience working in cooperation with a robot can enable him to build better systems that don’t need explicit instructions.

Eric’s journey could be a shadow of what’s to come for the those in the freelance economy. First, we learn a skill like driving. Then we learn how to perform that skill in tandem with an autonomous system. Finally, we contribute our uniquely human ingenuity to building future iterations of that system to better service people.

While Uber isn’t likely to employ all of their current drivers as robotic engineers, you can envision sales reps focusing on creative product pitches and writing exciting email templates while software handles the daily grind of sending template-based emails, scheduling meetings, and analyzing which customers to focus on. The neighborhood pizza delivery job might be replaced by a local marketing gig, designing Snapchat filters and new pizza flavors to celebrate events in the city.

There is hope in our autonomous future, but expect a rocky road to get there.