Since the advent of improved artificial intelligence a lot has been said about a future of mass unemployment, often under the perhaps hyperbolic umbrella threat of ‘The Robots are Coming!’. The robots might be coming to take your job, but there are limits to what occupations a computer can handle.

Nonetheless, the automobile industry is sure to be redefined by AI in the not-too-distant future.  If driving is how you make your money, what are you going to do once you’ve been replaced by a machine – retire?

According to a recent report called Payday in America released by Hyperwallet, a company that handles payments for nearly eight million contract workers globally, nearly half of Americans don’t have retirement savings. Hyperwallet told SiliconANGLE, “And this number reaches 70% among freelancers/gig workers, a category that includes many workers in the sharing economy, such as Uber drivers.”

According to various reports Uber had around 330,000 active drivers in the U.S. alone in 2015, double the number Uber reported in 2014. That number will likely be much bigger now. A spokesperson for Uber told Business Insider in October last year, “Each week, tens of thousands of drivers across the U.S. begin using the Uber app to make money on their own time.”

So after Uber’s recent announcement that it’s launching a fleet of driverless cars in the U.S., the company’s workforce were understandably talking about job security. Go over to the UberPeople forum and you’ll find posts relating to Uber “Killing your job” or questions posed such as “When machines can do all of the work, what do you imagine they will do with all of the surplus people?”

First of all, it’s probably a little early in the game to be thinking about hanging up your gloves if you’re an Uber driver. The company’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, tweeted earlier this year:

Drivers on @uber_nyc making $90k/yr Driverless car is a multi-decade transition. Let’s take a breath and I’ll see you in the year 2035

— travis kalanick (@travisk) May 28, 2014

When asked recently when his company’s cars will be fully autonomous Kalanick didn’t give a date, but did say there are “literally things that haven’t been invented yet.”

This hasn’t stopped Uber from bringing up the subject of retirement this week. The company just announced a partnership with financial planning and investment experts Betterment to offer “flexible retirement accounts with no fees for the first year” to its drivers in selected U.S. cities.

Uber didn’t expressly mention job security, but given the timeframe of this announcement and its self-driving fleet news, drivers might wonder if this is a hint. If Kalanick’s assumption that we’ll be waiting until 2035 to see fully self-driving cars is right, that should just about give drivers enough time to accrue a supportive nest egg.

photo credit: steering via photopin (license)