That's the sad reality of life. How many have we read or seen that with automation comes with the lay offs of workers? This is why if your job seems to be replaced by robots or with automation, better think of alternative sources of income. So in case you lost your job, you have contingencies already in place. In this world, everything changes, so prepare yourself for the worst case scenarios.
In my current job, we are already preparing for automation of a lot of things. With it comes the fact that there will be no need for workers to man these automated workstations. The good thing is, in our company, we are asked what we really want to contribute on, or take participation into, and we are trained to be ready to handle these tasks. Ironically, I am currently helping our team to automate customer service concerns and a lot of data stuff, and these tasks are currently being handled by 6-8 people. Our target is to reduce the required heads need to answer customer concerns to only one or two people, mainly focusing on edge case scenarios that only a human can help with. The rest of the team will go to other projects that still improve our services without the need to lay off people.
I get the general anxiety the workforce are getting when they see that automation and AI is improving everyday, as this might spell an end to their careers. Then again, these AI stuff reduce human toil by A LOT, and push people to get creative and explore what other things they can do and be good at it. In my case it's building an AI, and tinkering with stuff that I knew nothing about back then given my entirely different background.
With the internet being easily accessible nowadays, it's hard to believe that people won't learn anything new unless they really want to. The dilemma of the workforce being replaced by AIs is a completely understandable thing, but the human mind is extremely hard to replace, as we learn not only by patterns--unlike our AI counterparts--but also with our creative minds.