For only the seventh time since the Great Recession ended, the U.S. added more than 300,000 jobs in February. Across sectors ranging from retail to construction to health care, America’s labor market exhibited the strength that was the envy of the world in the 20th century.

If only the future looked as bright. The reality is that the next 12 years are likely to experience more disruption driven by technology and globalization than the past three decades have. Financial advisors and their clients may or may not prosper, but they and their families won’t be spared.

How this plays out is anyone’s guess. Right now the U.S. economy is near full employment, according to most standard metrics, though skeptics have argued government statistics are understating labor force slack.

Karen Harris, managing director of Bain & Co.’s Macro Trends Group, told attendees at Mauldin Economics’ Strategic Investment Conference (SIC) that 20% to 25% of American workers could find themselves displaced between now and 2030. That translates into 30 million people or more.

If that strikes you as absurdly apocalyptic, consider this minor factoid: U.S. oil production currently exceeds its 2015 peak. Yet the energy industry is producing more oil with 50,000 fewer oil fieldworkers, down 25% from 200,000 in late 2014, thanks to autonomous rigs, drones and other gadgetry. Many of those jobs paid six-figure salaries.

Progress is unrelenting and, as Mauldin himself noted, dishwashers are basically robots. Civilization survived. That said, there is a pervasive sense that socioeconomic change is creating widespread unease.

Offering some context to the coming labor market displacement, Harris pointed out America has experienced similar transitions several times in its history. Over the 40 years starting early in the 20th century, “we lost 1.2 million jobs over 40 years [scaled in today’s terms for the sake of comparison].” During that same period, there were also two world wars and a Great Depression, so there were other factors at work.

Fast-forward to the postwar era. Harris cited the shift between 1970 and 1990 from a manufacturing to a service economy, when “we lost about 0.8 million jobs a year.” Another more recent micro-example is “construction, that boom-bust we saw leading into the financial crisis—about 0.6 million jobs a year.”

Both these transitions were relatively easy to manage for American society. Unfortunately, Harris thinks service sector automation will be a different story, “twice as big, twice as fast,” costing 2.5 million jobs a year.

New professions people can’t imagine now could emerge to fill much of this void. Today, there are more than 1 million software programmers developing applications for iPhones. Their jobs didn’t exist a decade ago.

The problem, in Harris’s view, is the rapid change of displacement. If past labor market disruptions are any indicator, “what we’ve seen in the past is we can absorb about 700,000 jobs [a year],” or slightly more than 25% of the 2.5 million she predicts will be displaced.

Reversals in various segments of the labor market remain uncertain. At present, there is a shortage of truck drivers estimated at 50,000 and some think that gap could triple in the next 10 years.

Driverless trucks to the rescue? A study by the Commerce Department last year estimated that autonomous vehicles would ultimately displace about 4 million workers who drive for a living, but many think it could take decades. However, there is a fear that all the talk about different jobs becoming obsolete could result in self-fulfilling prophecies. If many people avoid certain industries, businesses will be compelled to invent robotic alternatives.

Moving up the skills ladder, tests have shown robots allow doctors to perform certain types of surgery better than humans. But the entire procedure still requires a skilled physician to supervise it.

As in any upheaval, there will be winners who develop intelligent machines or profit from them—and losers. Sadly, Harris predicts the latter group will represent about 80% of the workforce, many of whom ultimately will either “see suppressed wages, because to have a job, you’ll have to be cheaper than the alternative,” or find themselves displaced.

All this is occurring at a time of “historically high levels of income inequality,” she continued, and it’s not a U.S.-only phenomenon. Even socialist Sweden is seeing income gaps widen.

The news isn’t all bad. Building out a global automation infrastructure will require a massive capital spending investment. Sensing this impending trend, capital goods manufacturers have seen their stocks soar in recent years.

Around the world, labor force growth is slowing or, in the case of China, actually shrinking by 40 million over the next decade. So artificial intelligence and robotics can compensate for some of this slack.

Japan, faced with actual population decline (not just labor force shrinkage), has been forced to invent robotic nurses to care for its mushrooming cohort of senior citizens. In the process, the Japanese are several steps ahead of the U.S. and China. If one wants to see cutting edge AI at work, they should look at what Japanese companies are doing with manufacturing facilities in India, said Louis Gave, of Gavekal, at the SIC event.

It’s the long-term implications that remain worrisome. “Decelerating workforce growth, in the short term, will be great for wages,” Harris said. But by the end of the build-out, some people will have “built away” their own jobs. Think about Microsoft employees who received generous severance packages to stay around and help train lower-paid foreigners to do their jobs. This time, it’s machines, not foreigners.

The advance of robotics opens a Pandora’s box of other issues. Employers may like robots because they don’t take vacations or ask for raises. But as Mauldin reminded Harris, individuals pay half of all tax receipts and robots don’t pay income taxes. Harris countered that Bill Gates has wondered if the U.S. should start taxing robots.

One issue with the scenario Harris depicts is that it will unfold very fast. If she’s wrong and the great displacement takes until 2040 instead of 2030, that means 1.3 million workers (not 2.5 million) would find themselves obsolete every year, giving the U.S. economy more time to absorb workers.

The best economists admit they don’t know the answers. “The best bet is that AI and other new technologies will eventually come to have a larger impact on growth than they have up to now,” wrote Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff recently at Project Syndicate. “It is well known that it can take a very long time for businesses to reimagine productive processes to exploit new technologies: railroads and electricity are two leading examples.”

That might be wishful thinking. Today’s world is exponentially more connected than it was a century ago.

Rogoff, who predicted the financial crisis would be followed by seven years of subpar growth as the world deleveraged, acknowledges this. “The bottom line is that neither policy makers nor markets should be betting on the slow growth of the past decade carrying over to the next,” he continued. “But that might not be entirely welcome news. If the scientists are right, we may come to regret the growth we get.”

Harris admitted to attendees at the SIC she doesn’t know who the winners will be. However, she fears the great displacement will coincide with the wave of baby boomer retirees, dramatically expanding the number of Americans who aren’t participating in the labor market. “Expect a much more interventionist government,” she warned.

Another conference speaker, DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach, predicted a universal income for Americans who choose not to work would become a major issue in the 2020 election cycle. In 2006, only 12% of Americans supported that concept. Today, the figure is 48%.

For the next decade, resiliency is necessary and it will be rewarded in Harris’s view. Why? “Because when things change this quickly, we’re going to screw up,” she predicted.

Over the long term, individuals’ quality of life is likely to improve. “Do I believe this is a permanent state of a downturn? Of course not,” Harris said. “I can even stipulate that maybe in 2050, everyone will get dropped at their emotionally fulfilling job and, no matter what, you’ll get a trophy just like our kids today, just for showing up. That doesn’t make it any easier between now and 2030.”