5% of America’s employees may be replaced by robots, and transitioning them to become software developers seems to be a popular solution. Here’s why it might be misguided.

Arms spread and a smile on his face, Elon Musk welcomed the crowd to the Tesla semi truck unveiling. “I hope you like what you see,” he said, to cheers from the audience. Though innovations like Tesla’s promise increased safety and efficiency for the industries they inhabit, these advances in automation and AI promise uncertainty, and potential displacement, for the workers in their way.

While many are calling for the government to step in, in this piece we are going to focus on the workers themselves. Specifically, we want to ask how workers should train and be trained to most effectively switch jobs. In this context, discussions often focus on the somewhat drastic example of switching from blue-collar work to computer programming. While there are organizations doing great work to facilitate this switch, we wanted to use this example to ask: Is it necessary for workers to move that far across the job landscape to avoid automation?