EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
Report: Robots to take one in three UK jobs, requiring billions for retraining
More than 10 million jobs will be automated out of existence over the next two decades, and the poor will be hurt the most, the Institute for Public Policy Research said in a new report.
The robots are coming, said the report from the British think tank, and it will be jobs in the lower-skill sector that they will take first. The research said that 5 million jobs alone will be automated in four sectors: transport, manufacturing, retail and hospitality.
A concern is that workers in these lower-skill sectors are least able to adapt, with retail and wholesale workers – around 2.5 million – likely to be replaced. Yet many don’t have the qualifications needed to move on.
IPPR is urging the government to prepare for this and spend billions of pounds on retraining programs, stating that if something isn’t done to address the robot uprising the U.K. may end-up with a society facing an unprecedented wealth gap. A researcher for IPPR, Joe Dromey, told The Guardian, “Britain can’t afford to ignore the huge changes that will transform our labor market in the coming years.”
IPPR said that £2,000 ($2,500) should be allocated to workers who lacked A-levels (the equivalent of a U.S. high school diploma) as a retraining allowance. Workers with better qualifications should be given half that amount, and expected to make up the other half themselves, the researchers said.
The U.K., however, isn’t expected to be as affected by automation as the U.S. Last month research company PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report stating that within the next 15 years, 38 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated, with Germany and Japan at 35 percent and 21 percent, respectively.
Although jobs will be created during the robot revolution, leaders in tech such as Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk and former Baidu Inc. Chief Scientist Andrew Ng believe training for a human-machine working relationship won’t be enough. Both men have said that a universal basic income might be the only answer to job displacement, although the implementation of a standard amount of guaranteed money for everyone has its fair share of skeptics.
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