‘I’ve taken the position of ‘job elimination denier’,” said Schmidt in a talk at MIT, “I’ve just decided I’m going to be contrarian, because the data supports me, and it’s more fun to be in opposition anyway.”

Recently, the World Economic Forum predicted that robotic automation will result in the net loss of more than five million jobs across 15 developed nations by 2020.

“There’s no question that there’s job dislocation. But they’re always new solutions,” added Schmidt, “the economic folks would say that you can see the job that’s lost, but you very seldom can see the job that’s created.”

Back in the 1980s it was predicted that microprocessors would create huge job losses but it created hundreds of thousands of  engineering and IT jobs that no one had foreseen.