National Geographic has just reported that large numbers of elephants are now being born without tusks. Poachers have killed off so many of those with tusks that only the 2-4 percent normally born without them are populating today’s herds. It is yet another tragic example of how human behavior can damage the natural order of things.

Will humans’ development of super-intelligent machines be equally as harmful to our own wellbeing? Maybe.

On the one hand, today’s research scientists and technologists are hardly in the same camp as poachers. What they’re doing is neither illegal nor unethical. Indeed, most assume that their advances will actually improve our quality of life. After all, who wouldn’t like a self-driving lawnmower to cut the grass or an intelligent cook to prepare dinner at the end of a long day?

On the other hand, however, there’s a growing realization that just as intelligent machines can perform household chores, they can also do more and more of our jobs. They can harvest crops, conduct legal research, manufacture electronic components, write news articles and perform surgeries. Even more problematic, they can (or will shortly be able to) do those jobs better and quicker than we can. So, how will employers react? They’ll stop hiring humans and employ those byte-collar workers instead.

If we aren’t careful, what is happening to elephants will also happen to us. Just as elephants without tusks are at risk because they are unable to protect themselves from predators or to forage effectively for food, so too will humans without jobs be at risk because they are unable to keep a roof over their head or food on the table. The situation will be a catastrophic and it will be permanent. Tusks never grow back, and the jobs that are lost will never return.

Today, that threat seems remote because only a small percentage of the population has lost their jobs to intelligent machines. Within a decade, however, millions of working men and women will be displaced by byte-collar workers. And within the next 100 years or circa 2118 – within the lifetime of our kids – computers and robots will fill every blue-and white-collar job in the workplace. For the first time in history, humans will face near universal unemployment.

How can we protect ourselves?

First, we need to wake up. We can no longer ignore the threat or assume it will happen so far in the future, it’s not something that concerns us. Machines are getting more and more intelligent every day, and as they do, there will be less and less paid work for humans to do. There’s no way to stop that advance, but the better informed we are, the less likely we will be caught off guard when it happens.

Second, we’ve got to put that situational awareness to work. We have to raise our individual and collective voices and demand that our political, economic, educational and social institutions address the disruption and prepare for it. Not a single political candidate in this year’s elections raised the specter of an economic and cultural crisis caused by the massive introduction of intelligent machines. And yet, that cataclysm poses just as great a threat to our national and economic security as anything the Russians, Chinese or North Koreans might do.

Sadly, elephants are unable to protect themselves from human behavior. We can. But only if we pay attention and act.