Robots could cannibalise 15 mn UK jobs: Bank of England

13 Nov 2015

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Around 15 million jobs in the UK are at risk of being taken over by robots over the coming decades, according to Bank of England projetions.

Speaking at the Trades Union Congress in London, Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, unveiled the bank research estimating the probability of automation of a range of jobs in the next few decades.

Haldane arrived at the aggregate figure of 15 million, by multiplying these probabilities with the number of people employed in each sector.

Putting that in context, there are around 31.21 million people in work in the UK today, out of a total population of 64 million.

Haldane however pointed out that the estimates of the number of jobs that could be automated were ''broad brush'' and ''may be far too pessimistic''.

He further stressed that fears of the damaging impact of technological developments on employment had proven misplaced many times since the industrial revolution.

According to commentators, his comments reflect an increasing concern among some economists over the impact of the ''rise of the robots'' and other technological advances on employment levels.

''If these visions were to be realised, however futuristic this sounds, the labour market patterns of the past three centuries would shift to warp speed'' he said.

The Bank of England came to the conclusion after studying how automation could affect existing jobs.

The bank classified the jobs into three categories - those where the probability of automation was higher than 66 per cent, those in the probability range of 33-66 per cent and those with probability of automation lower than 33 per cent.

"For the UK, roughly a third of jobs by employment fall into each category, with those occupations most at risk including administrative, clerical and production tasks. Taking the probabilities of automation, and multiplying them by the numbers employed, gives a broad-brush estimate of the number of jobs that are potentially automatable.

For the UK, that would suggest up to 15 million jobs could be at risk of automation," Haldane said at the Trades Union Congress in London.

Haldane said, "Technology appears to be resulting in faster, wider and deeper degrees of hollowing-out than in the past. Why? Because 20th-century machines have substituted not just for manual human tasks but cognitive ones too. The set of human skills machines could reproduce, at lower cost, has both widened and deepened."

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