Bank of England: Automation to Eliminate Roughly Half of U.S. and British Jobs
November 13th, 2015Via: CNBC:
One central bank has some frightening predictions when it comes to job stability in the future.
80 million jobs in the United States are at risk of being taken over by robots in the next few decades, a Bank of England (BoE) official warned on Thursday.
With U.S. data showing that total nonfarm employment hit 142.6 million in October, that’s roughly over half of the total jobs at risk.
And the U.S. isn’t the only one who’d be at the mercy of the mechanical hands.
In a speech at the Trades Union Congress in London, the bank’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, said that up to 15 million jobs in the U.K. were at risk of being lost to an age of machines, which is almost half of the employed population currently.
To come to its conclusion, the Bank of England conducted a U.K. study which organized occupations into three categories: high, medium and low probability of automation, and demonstrated the share of employment these jobs represented.
It based its survey on research by Oxford professors Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey and Dr. Michael Osborne, who projected a similar change in the workforce over the course of the next few decades within the U.S. Thus, the BoE’s own predictions suggest these developments could also materialize over the next 20 to 30 years.
