Robots Will Replace Millions of Jobs, Warns Bank of England Governor Mark Carney
Over the next few years, robots and artificial intelligence (AI) could wipe out some 15 million jobs. That dire warning did not come from the next installment of the Hollywood Robocop franchise. None other than Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said it on December 5 at Liverpool University.
Carney warned it will be necessary to take countermeasures. Indeed, as he implied in his speech, it will be necessary if we are to avoid political shocks such as those seen in 2016 (i.e. Brexit).
These are not the usual minimum wage or assembly line jobs. The hardest hit by the next major artificial intelligence technology revolution will be accountants, lawyers, and the like. The progress of computers and artificial intelligence are placing their very existence in peril. (Source: “Robots to steal 15million of your jobs, says bank chief: Doom-laden Carney warns middle classes will be ‘hollowed out’ by new technology,” Mail Online, December 6, 2016.)
Clearly, the effect of AI and robotics on the British economy could be devastating. Fifteen million jobs means half of the total. As Carney noted, each technological revolution has ruthlessly cut jobs, and therefore lives and identities.
It happened with the end of the agricultural economy and the emergence of the industrial revolution. It happened again as the service economy eclipsed manufacturing. Now, the phenomenon will hit multiple “classes,” low and middle alike. (Source: Ibid.)
In a previous study on the subject, the Bank of England had already warned that automation threatens jobs at an even faster rate than before. (Source: “Labour’s Share – speech by Andy Haldane,” Bank of England, November 12, 2015.)
Carney also criticized the “lost decade” of 2007-2017, in which, for the first time since 1860, the value of wages in the U.K. in real terms dropped instead of increasing. This phenomenon, said Carney, has generated discontent, pessimism, and protests against globalization. Among the most affected, according to the governor, are “Millennials.”
Millenials are the people who reached adulthood around the turn of the new millennium. They are in their 30s today; they earn some £8000 a year less than those of the previous generation. The arrival of the new “machine age” will force an even greater part of the population to take a step back.