Robots taking jobs from manufacturing workers is a trend dating back decades, but rapidly advancing software has spread the threat of job-killing automation to nearly every occupation.

The technological advances, while helping businesses boost productivity dramatically, have cost the U.S. economy millions of jobs.

An investigation by the Associated Press found that most of the millions of jobs lost to the Great Recession did not migrate overseas, but simply disappeared - victims of smart robots and improvements to software that have made many jobs obsolete.

"The jobs that are going away aren't coming back," Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of "Race Against the Machine," told the Associated Press. ''I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years."

But while many have blamed the bulk of the job losses on the bad economy, the impact of automation on the U.S. workforce will just keep getting worse.

According to a story in Wired, 70% of the jobs that exist today will vanish by the end of the century.

"Everything that humans can do, a machine can do," Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University, told the Associated Press. "Things are happening that look like science fiction."

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