Bank of England's Andy Haldane Warns Smart Machines Could Take 15M UK Jobs (robotenomics.com)

New submitter Colin Robotenomics writes In an important new paper based on a speech at the trade union congress in London, Andy Haldane Chief Economist at the Bank of England and Executive Director of Monetary Analysis and Statistics has examined the history of technological unemployment and has given a thorough review of the literature and implications for public policy. The media will likely focus on the number of jobs that can be displaced and not necessarily Haldane's points on new jobs being created – both of which are highly important as is 'skilling-up'. His report reads in part: "...Taking the probabilities of automation, and multiplying them by the numbers employed, gives a broad brush estimate of the number of jobs potentially automatable. For the UK, that would suggest up to 15 million jobs could be at risk of automation. In the US, the corresponding figure would be 80 million jobs."

Comments

Re:15M

[Chrisq]

They've been saying this since the 1970s, with all sorts of forecasts of 15 hour weeks. Yet there are many millions now in work compared to the 1970s and everyone's working longer hours than ever.

In the 1970s they assumed that everyone would work less. What happened is that some work more than ever and others don't work at all.

Re:15M

[Random_Goblin]

This is not a new problem, and is well covered in Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness written in 1932.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day.

Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.

In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before.

But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.

There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness.

Can anything more insane be imagined?

The whole essay is well worth reading, and remains just as true as ever it was..

Re:15M

[drinkypoo]

They've been saying this since the Industrial Revolution. Millions of jobs WERE lost, but many millions more were created.

Yes, but it's still a race to the bottom, because of the jobs which were created, more of them were unskilled — read "not paying a living wage" there to see the problem. We're seeing the same thing here in the USA right now; although the total number of jobs grew this last year, the number of people seeking employment has not changed at all. That's both because job growth is only just keeping up with population growth, and because the majority of the new jobs don't pay a living wage. The best we're able to do at the moment is fight a holding action, only we're doing nothing to improve the situation in the future, so that's the same as losing the war.