Four million British private sector jobs could be replaced by robots within ten years, according to a report.
“The potential impact amounts to 15% of the current workforce in the sector and emerged in a poll conducted by YouGov for the Royal Society of Arts, whose chief executive, Matthew Taylor, has been advising Downing Street on the future of modern work,” reported the Guardian on Tuesday. “Jobs in finance and accounting, transport and distribution and in media, marketing and advertising are most likely to be automated in the next decade, the research says.”
According to the report, 13 percent of British employers predicted more than 30 percent of jobs would become completely automated within the next ten years.
Finance and accounting is at the top of the list of jobs potentially replaced, followed by transportation and distribution, manufacturing, media/marketing/advertising/PR and sales, retail, I.T. and telecoms, and legal.
At the bottom of the list were hospitality and leisure, construction, education, and medical and health services.
According to the Guardian, the Royal Society of Arts “warns that artificial intelligence and robotics will ‘undoubtedly cause the loss of some jobs, whether it is autonomous vehicles pushing taxi drivers out of business or picking and packing robots usurping warehouse workers’,” but “argues that new technologies could phase out mundane jobs, raise productivity levels and so deliver higher wages and ‘allow workers to concentrate on more human-centric roles that are beyond the reach of machines’.”
This month, Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan claimed that a “big number” of his employees would be replaced by automation eventually.
“In our banks, we have people behaving like robots doing mechanical things, tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people,” proclaimed Cryan. “We have to find new ways of employing people and maybe people need to find new ways of spending their time… The truthful answer is we won’t need as many people.”
“We need to admit that what we had is nice but it’s not necessarily for the future,” he continued, claiming, “We need more revolutionary spirit.”
In May, Google China Founder Kai-Fu Lee also claimed artificial intelligence “will probably replace 50 percent of human jobs,” while in June, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said humans need “to start recognizing the inevitability of machines taking over more and more tasks that we used to do in the past.”
In August, one report predicted robots would also be the future of bricklaying and general construction, citing robot bricklayers and exoskeletons.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.
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