The Bank of England warning about robots.
Production lines are already highly automated and the next step will be administrative, clerical and production jobs. Repetitive tasks whether in a workshop or office are going to disappear. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. The employee of tomorrow will need intelligence, education or proper skill. There will be a need for creative artists (website designers for example), actuaries (probably), artisan bakers and sales people (whose role is to persuade). On the plus side it should mean that those in work have more interesting jobs.
Whether the future is full of doom and gloom depends entirely on your perspective. It could free humanity from the mundane or it could render individuals unemployable. What is absolutely undeniable is that the future will be profoundly different and it's coming sooner than you think. Adapt or die.
The Bank of England has warned that up to 15m jobs in Britain are at risk of being lost to an age of robots where increasingly sophisticated machines do work that was previously the preserve of humans.
Andy Haldane, the bank’s chief economist, said automation posed a risk to almost half those employed in the UK and that a “third machine age” would hollow out the labour market, widening the gap between rich and poor.
The results of a Bank of England study, Haldane added, suggested that administrative, clerical and production tasks were most at threat.
In a speech to the umbrella organisation for Britain’s trade unions, the TUC, he asked if the Luddites – reputed to have smashed machines during the Industrial Revolution – had been proved right two centuries on.
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