“For the United Kingdom, that would suggest up to 15 million jobs could be at risk of automation”, Haldane said at the Trades Union Congress in London.
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The Bank of England has done some sums and worked out that 15 million United Kingdom jobs will be done by robots in a few decades’ time. By multiplying these probabilities by the number of people employed in each sector Mr Haldane came up with the aggregate figure of 15 million.
Putting that in context, there are around 31.21 million people in work in the United Kingdom today, out of a total population of 64 million.
As machines are becoming smarter, more jobs are becoming at risk of automation, especially low-skilled ones, although mid-skilled positions were going to be affected too, according to Haldane.
The economist, reiterating his stance that a rate cut was as plausible as a rate rise, said that a hike in the cost of borrowing now would ‘increase unnecessarily the chances of the economy falling below critical velocity’.
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.
Those most at risk, he said, are those performing menial administrative, clerical and production jobs.
According to the bank’s study, jobs with high probability of automation are sales and customer service workers.
The Bank’s chief economist said technological advances since the 18th century had always had the effect of widening the gap between the skilled and unskilled, but that there were signs that this process was speeding up.
In America up to 80m jobs could be at risk of being taken over by robots.
The Bank’s official forecast is for inflation to return to 2% in two years’ time, but Haldane said this assumed that labour’s share of national income recovered to its pre-crisis trend.
Mr Haldane added: “The driverless vehicle was science fiction no more than a decade ago”.
The questions below are based on research by Michael Osborne and Carl Frey from Oxford University called ‘The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to automation?’
“Those most at risk from automation tend, on average, to have the lowest wage”, he added.
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The newly robotic, or at least augmented workforce could lead to wide scale unemployment and a widening of the wage gap, Hardlane continued. Because 20th century machines have substituted not just for manual human tasks, but cognitive ones too.
