The closure of the Toyota, General Motors Holden and Ford manufacturing plants are adding to growing alarm about the future of work.

We need to start a debate about how the education system serves us. Cramming education into the early years of increasingly long lives makes no sense. With a shifting work landscape and skill demands, we must seriously embrace lifelong learning.

There needs to be a conversation about our taxation model. If we move the means of value creation in organisations from humans to machines what happens to our income tax base and how will we fund the retraining and transition of our existing working population?

Retirement savings need to be looked at as we re-evaluate the length of an individual's working life and the notion of fluctuating rather than steadily increasing incomes as jobs and careers change.

Our high levels of home ownership and the mortgage burden that comes with that are a barrier to career change and reskilling, as people cannot afford to step off the current career treadmill to retrain.

We also need to think about the jobs and skills that we value highly. The cognitive complexity of the lawyer and accountant is easily coded, the empathy of the aged care worker or the innovation of the designer much less so. Will we change our societal model of income distribution?

Organisations need to think about whether they take the efficiency dividend and release the people that machines have made redundant or tap into their much more human skills of intuition, empathy, innovation and creativity to provide better products and services? What kinds of leaders will organisations need in this new world? A model of dispersed rather than centralised leadership is likely to emerge.

As individuals the secret for a bright future seems to me to lie in flexibility and in the ability to reinvent oneself.

The future of work is decidedly uncertain. Whichever viewpoint proves most accurate – dystopian, humanist or historical – they all involve a significant degree of change.

I choose to believe in the middle route. Humanity will find a way to create a new modelwhere people find meaningful ways to contribute to society and create purpose in their own lives by doing so. This will not come without some transitional pain for many individuals, organisations and indeed society at large.

This pain will be shorter, and less deeply felt, if we take actions now to prepare ourselves.

The goal cannot be to resist or defeat the machines, it must be to adapt so that by living and working alongside them we create a better future for all humanity.Jon Williams is Partner, People and Organisation, PwC