According to the president of a global research and consulting firm, about ten million manufacturing jobs involving physical labor and repetitive activities worldwide were lost due to machines replacing humans.

In other words, the greatest threat to jobs is not IT outsourcing to India, it is rather that increasingly "smart" systems will lead to the replacement of more and more knowledge workers by smart applications.

Harvey Cohen, president of Strategy Analytics, believes that higher value-added jobs - involving identification, assessment, conclusions, decisions, and recommendations - will continue to be lost to systems with increasingly intelligent capabilities, creating what he describes as as "a $100 billion opportunity."

"In the next wave," of this trend, Cohen continues, "there will be an employment threat involving the substitution of emerging systems with embedded intelligence for many first-level jobs in service industries, resulting in a net loss of customer service, help desk, directory assistance, and related support function positions."

Research from the Strategy Analytics Emerging Frontiers (EF) program indicates that the capabilities of smart systems will continue to expand. "Although today politicians and workers are worried about job outsourcing due to globalization, the real future challenge to policy makers -and strategic opportunities for business investments - will come from machines with an increasing degree of embedded intelligence," added Cohen.

Research by the US Military's research agency, DARPA, (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and NASA, the National Aviation and Space Administration, is leading to smarter applications which will provide first-stage functions that leverage human capabilities, keeping military personnel out of danger. As these capabilities advance and become more cost-effective, they will inevitably find attractive applications in the commercial workplace.