Solving Employment: Responses to Automation

In the past, automation and mechanisation mostly affected the manufacturing sector – for instance robots painting cars and machines canning foods. On the one hand, machines boosted productivity and relieved workers from many tedious and sometimes dangerous tasks. On the other hand, they contributed to the hollowing out of manufacturing employment. New advances in automation are now set to bring major changes to almost all professions, including service sectors. Improvements in AI and falls in computing and storage costs mean that many tasks performed by accountants, lawyers, medical doctors and other high-skilled occupations will be taken over by computers1. A recent McKinsey study suggested up to 800m jobs globally could be lost to automation by 20302 (against a global workforce total of around 3.5bn in 2017).