In the future, the steel industry could be higher tech, with more robots and fewer workers.

Industry leaders see the steel business evolving over the coming decade. Change could come fast and it could be painful.

U.S. Steel Chief Executive Officer Mario Longhi chaired a panel discussion on Manufacturing the Future: The Next Era of Global Growth at the World Steel Association's annual conference at the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park Hotel Sunday. Panelists talked extensively about robots taking over manufacturing jobs, but said technological advances could also create new positions such as for digital mechanical engineers, data scientists and business operations data analysts.

“You said we will have three billion people that will be deriving their income in the future in some shape or form,” Longhi said. “The advancement of technology to a very high degree has inhibited job creation. How could countries figure out a way to bridge that gap, which could lead to a very significant social change?”

Speakers envisioned a rapid transformation that could include more automation displacing traditional production jobs, 3-D printing and plastic cars eating away at demand for steel, and pencil lead-based graphene potentially replacing steel altogether.

"I'll give you fair warning that you will be provoked and challenged and maybe a little frightened," World Steel Association President Charles Schmitt said.

Longhi said the steel industry has “all the bricks for smart manufacturing, but not the connectivity.” Historically, steelmakers haven’t been as nimble or as influenced by new technological developments as companies in other sectors, he said.

“As we’ve seen the speed of transformation due to new technologies is very, very fast,” Longhi said. “Most of our businesses require on a regular basis billions of dollars to be invested that will have to last for two or three decades.”

Technology is advancing exponentially and threatening to disrupt many industries including medical testing, finance, automaking, pizza delivery and even steelmaking, said Vivek Wadhwa, a futurist and the director of research at Duke University. An iPhone 6, for instance, has seven times the computing power of the NASA Curiosity Rover on Mars.

Such breakneck advances will soon change everything from where energy comes from, how we pay for consumer goods and how we test for disease, Wadhwa said.

"You need to start thinking differently," Wadhwa said. "Your industry is going to be disrupted like every other industry on the planet."

Over the last few decades, automation has led to thousands of job losses in Northwest Indiana mills. It’s possible to walk a full mile while a thin sheet of steel whizzes by without seeing a single worker. Train cars drive around on their own, with no conductors.

Technology today is advancing exponentially, faster than people appreciate because they typically only think linearly, Wadhwa said. As computing power increases and costs come down, advanced robotics are becoming more practical in industrial applications.

As of this year, manufacturing in the United States is now cheaper than in Europe and China because of robots, Wadhwa said.

“(The Chinese manufacturer) Foxconn announced three years ago they were going to replace a million workers with robots. It never happened, so we thought this was a hoax also,” Wadhwa said. “The reason it didn’t happen was because those robots were not dextrous enough to assemble circuit boards. Guess what? We have those now. The robots are now dextrous enough to thread needles. We’re going to have robots everywhere serving us, doing our chores.”

Robots can just do some jobs more efficiently, Wadhwa said. Drones for instance likely will take over pizza delivery, he said.

“We send a human being in a two-ton vehicle to deliver two pounds of flour with some ketchup on it. We could just drone that over,” he said.

They’re also cheaper than employing people, he said.

“Robots don’t join labor unions,” Wadhwa said.

Technological advances have made manufacturing more vastly more productive -- but stunted job growth in the sector -- and the downward trend in manufacturing employment is only likely to continue, said Jaana Remes, an economist and partner at the McKinsey Global Institute. However, society has generally been good about creating new jobs in other areas as outmoded positions like horse drivers disappear, she said.

“That has to be the main worry about manufacturing for the last 100 years,” she said. “Already in the 1920s, we were worried what we’d do with all the free time when we only had to work two days a week."

She said innovation has been creating new jobs as quickly as the country has lost them from the change in technology.

"In the U.S. over the past 25 years, fully a third of the rise in new net jobs came from occupations that didn’t exist or barely existed 25 years. Computer programmers, analysts, even fitness instructors: those we didn’t really need at this scale 25 years ago.”