Technological Unemployment Is Coming
A 2015 study by the Bank of England isolated how technological change, in particular the rise of machine learning, would mean the loss of 15 million jobs in the UK – 40 per cent of the labour market – over the next few decades. Underpinning that would be the shrinking space for uniquely human skills, with this limiting any chance for workers to up-skill in response. A year later, the bank’s governor, Mark Carney, repeated those forecasts saying many livelihoods could be ‘mercilessly destroyed’ by technological change, and that ever-higher income inequality could be one of the major consequences.
Those findings confirmed the conclusions of an earlier report published by two Oxford University academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne. In 2013 they claimed that 47 per cent of all US jobs were at ‘high risk’ of being automated, with a further 19 per cent facing medium risk. Elsewhere Peter Sondergaard, research director for the consultancy Gartner, predicted that by 2025 one in three jobs will be automated as the result of an emerging ‘super class’ of technologies, with general purpose robotics and machine learning leading the way. Finally, in a 2016 report to Congress, White House economists forecast an 83 per cent chance that workers earning less than \$20 per hour will lose their jobs to robots in the medium term.
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