Relax, Luddites, your job's safe

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the great fear has always been that automation would create mass, permanent unemployment.

But progress wasn't to be stopped, and automation has gone hand in hand over the past 250 years with an explosive increase in wages and employment. The reason? Machines increase output per person, and thus the demand for labour and wages. New jobs are created to replace old jobs, and then as these are automated even newer jobs emerge to replace the next lot of losses.

Yet there are many today who doubt that this overwhelmingly benign process will continue, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence, robotics, self-driving cars, drones and a new generation of learning machines. They are convinced that millions of middle-class jobs are about to be wiped out, with nothing to replace them.

Some are even advocating taxes on robots and a minimum income, in effect giving up on the idea that full or even mass employment will ever be possible again. Others agree that new roles will be created, but believe that too many people will lose out, triggering a catastrophic populist backlash.

The good news is that the optimists are being proved right. A study by LEK, a London-based firm of management consultants - Jobs for the Bots? How the UK Jobs Market Is Responding to Automation - concludes that Britain's economy is responding remarkably well to automation by creating more, and higher quality, jobs.

Andrew Allum, the study's author, started off by examining Office for National Statistics data. Looking at 369 categories of jobs, he found that 3.6million roles were created and 1.1million destroyed between 2011 and 2016. Crucially, the majority of the new jobs are in categories that are resilient to future automation, while many of the roles lost were in easy-to-automate sectors.

Some of the worst suffering categories will come as little surprise. Some 42,000 self-service checkouts have been fitted into shops; as a result, the number of cashier roles is down by 39,000 since 2011. There are now 8,500 automatic number plate recognition cameras, processing up to 35million records a day; as a result, 13,000 traffic cop jobs have been eliminated.

The number of cashiers is down by 16%, bank clerks have fallen by 18%, telesales people by 24% and typists by 34%.

In The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne developed a framework to quantify what makes jobs easier or harder to automate based on the tasks contained within the job.

Their thesis was that social, creative and complex jobs are harder to automate, and are, therefore, more sustainable.

Allum's key finding is that, of the jobs that have disappeared, the probability of automation was 61%. By comparison, the jobs created have an automation probability of only 38%, making them much more secure.

Even that number is inflated by what Allum dubs "bubble jobs", equivalent to 25% of the extra 3.6million roles: jobs that are springing up thanks to the digital revolution and the surge in internet shopping, but which are a temporary phenomenon because they will be automated sooner rather than later.

For example, road driving occupations are up by 110,000, but face an 89% chance of automation thanks to driverless technologies. The automation probability for the remaining 75% of post-2011 new roles falls to just 21%. This is extremely encouraging, and suggests that the economy is shifting successfully.

Automation itself is creating lots of good jobs, 328,000 directly to be precise: programmers and software developers are up by 84,000 since 2011, IT directors by 41,000 and mechanical engineers by 34000. The more complex economy is also creating many more jobs - Allum estimates over 600,000 in five years, including in project management and consultancy. Marketing and sales roles are up 200,000, many also driven by new technologies.

Change and technology are directly creating hard-to-automate jobs, and their influence is everywhere: other drivers include demographic change (creating over 600,000 new roles) for teachers, carers and medics; and lifestyle shifts with over 500,000 new roles.

All of this is good news, with one big exception. Most of today's new jobs are complex, social and creative and so more sustainable with respect to automation; most of the roles being lost were not.

The great challenge will be to upskill and train those losing their jobs, including many of the delivery drivers and others who are currently doing well from the internet. On balance, the economy will thrive thanks to technology, and most of us will do well - but we must make sure that a rising tide lifts all boats.

- ©The Daily Telegraph