After industrial robots and international trade put paid to many manufacturing jobs in the West, millions of white-collar workers could now be under threat from new technology such as artificial intelligence (AI).
The issue of how best to face up to this "Fourth Industrial Revolution" has been exercising politicians and business leaders this week at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos.
The progress of artificial intelligence has been "staggering" in recent years, said Vishal Sikka, chief executive of Indian IT services giant Infosys.
"But in many ways we are at the beginning of this evolution and we face the prospect of leaving a larger part of humanity behind than in any other (industrial) advance," he warned.
Public disquiet about technological change and globalisation has already sparked a populist backlash in Western countries, culminating in Donald Trump's inauguration as US president on Friday.
But much more dislocation could yet be coming, and both the public and Western governments need to wake up to the challenge, observers say.
New technologies are "going to completely disrupt and change the working place for a long time", and governments must put in place policies, skills training and safety nets to cope, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde said.
Education systems are failing to plug skills shortages, experts say.
Europe and the United States have hundreds of thousands of vacancies in IT and engineering which often get filled by immigrants, for want of homegrown talent, feeding in turn the anti-globalisation backlash.
And according to a survey of 18,000 employers in 43 countries by employment consultancy ManpowerGroup, up to 45 percent of tasks done daily in the workplace could be automated using current technology.
For its part, global consultancy McKinsey said more than 60 percent of jobs and 30 percent of business activities could be automated today.
"We can't rely on government to re-skill people in the face of rapid technological change and automation. Business will have to drive this," said McKinsey's global managing partner, Dominic Barton.
