The robots are coming for your job. New research suggests that 10 million British roles could be taken over by technology in the next 20 years, with one in three at risk.
Low-paid, repetitive positions are most likely to disappear and people earning less than £30,000 per year are five times more likely to lose their job to a machine than those paid £100,000, according to a joint report from Deloitte and the University of Oxford.
“Technological advances are likely to cause a major shift in the UK labour market in the coming decades,” Angus Knowles-Cutler, London senior partner at Deloitte, said.
“Unless these changes are fully understood and anticipated, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment
Unless these changes are fully understood and anticipated, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment. A widening gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is also a risk as lower skill jobs continue to disappear.”
The report’s authors have flagged the sectors they see as most at risk. Those that work in administration, sales, transportation, construction, or mining have good reason to fear the automatons. If you spend your working day in computing, engineering, science, arts and media, law, education, healthcare or financial services, you probably don’t need to worry for now.
Workers in London are safer than those in the rest of the UK, the authors say, because the capital has fewer manufacturing jobs and a higher proportion of creative or highly-skilled roles which can’t be taken on by machines.
However, some jobs in the city have already started disappearing. “In London we found that since 2001 65% of librarians have gone, almost half of all PAs and secretaries, it’s incredible,” Mr Knowles-Cutler said.
The authors of the report, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, released a similar paper in 2013 covering the U.S. market. Entitled “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?”, it estimated that 47% of US employment is at risk of automation.
Source: mashable.com