The new white-collar fear: will robots take your job?

As part of a BBC Panorama investigation, Rohan Silva discovered thousands of British jobs have already been replaced by machines - and millions more middle class roles are at risk

Channel 4's series, Humans prompted widespread debate about the dangers of artificial intelligence - and a world increasingly reliant on robots Credit: Photo: Des Willie/Kudos/Channel 4

The robots are coming! It’s a classic science fiction plot recently revived by Humans, Channel 4’s biggest drama success for 20 years: hyper-intelligent machines taking our jobs, leaving us poor mortals on the sidelines. But for workers in every corner of the UK today, this futuristic storyline is at risk of becoming reality.

I’m fascinated by the impact of technology on our economy and society. Previously Senior Policy Adviser to David Cameron, I now spend my time at my company Second Home surrounded by the brightest digital entrepreneurs. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been travelling around the country with the BBC’s Panorama programme, looking at how jobs are increasingly being replaced by software and robots.

By now, we’re used to the idea of technology largely taking over blue collar jobs. The Nissan car plant in Sunderland is a classic example: it produces over 500,000 vehicles each year - more than any other factory in Europe - and yet it employs just 6,000 people; a fraction of the number of human workers that would have been needed before advanced robotics transformed the manufacturing process. As the old joke goes, the factory of the future might only need a human and a dog to keep it running: a dog to make sure that no-one tampers with the machines, and a human to feed the dog.

Increasingly, machines are providing not only the brawn but the brains
Tyler Cowen

But as the leading US economist Tyler Cowen puts it, machines aren’t only replacing human brawn - as they become more advanced, they’re increasingly replacing human brains. Or to put it another way: if the most precarious place to be working in the British economy in the 1970s and 80s was as a blue collar worker in a factory, today it’s the kind of white collar job occupied by the middle classes.

According to Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, in the years ahead, millions of jobs in sectors such as accounting and auditing will be replaced with machines that can so the same tasks much more cheaply and effectively than human workers - without requiring salaries, holidays or sick pay - while administrators, paralegals and bank clerks will also be hit hard.

They’re not alone in reaching this conclusion. Earlier this year, the Lords’ Select Committee on Digital Skills published a report on the 'unstoppable' digital technological revolution, which suggested that 35 per cent of UK jobs are risk of being automated over the next two decades.

Analysis shows that over half of all secretarial jobs in the UK have already disappeared over the past ten years, and while there are over a million call centre employees in the UK today, advances in speech recognition software and other technologies mean that many of these jobs are also predicted to disappear in the next decade.

Three in ten Britons believe that they will soon be replaced in their job by a robot, according to a report, last year (Photo: Warner Br/Everett/REX)

This is only the beginning. Self-driving cars have racked up over a million miles of motoring on American roads, and are expected to replace many human drivers in the years ahead. Powerful computers are already carrying out the vast majority of stock market trading, and in teaching hospitals in Boston and elsewhere, software is starting to be used to diagnose medical conditions.

Traditionally middle class jobs are increasingly vulnerable to technology

To put it bluntly, traditionally middle class jobs are increasingly vulnerable to technology, and this is likely to have a huge impact on our economy and society. Take Margaret Davies, for example, one of those featured in our Panorama programme. Until recently she had worked in a HMRC tax office in Wales handling tax enquiries for 26 years. Advances in technology mean that more of us are doing our taxes online, which brings big cost savings for Government, but also means that Margaret and 33 of her colleagues have been made redundant, and their office closed.

Of course, the technology revolution is not just destroying jobs - it’s creating huge numbers of new ones too, especially in areas like IT and the creative industries. And the good news is that the new jobs being created pay an average of £10,000 a year more than the jobs being lost to automation. But a fiftysomething whose job is replaced by software doesn’t necessarily have the right skills to find employment in the brave new world of artificial intelligence and robotics.

There’s a parallel here with the the 1980s - pro-market reforms made the economy as a whole larger and more dynamic, but entire communities were left behind. The same could easily happen again, which would be a tragedy.

New analysis by Deloitte for the BBC, published tomorrow, shows that some parts of the UK are going to be hit disproportionately hard as a result of automation. Sixty per cent of jobs in the North East are at medium to high risk of being replaced by machines and software, for example - far higher than in London or the South East.

So what can we do about it? Back in 1997, Garry Kasparov was the first chess grandmaster to be beaten by a computer programme, in a historic milestone in the evolution of technology. After his defeat, Kasparov made a passionate case for investing in education and training to ensure that humans have a chance of winning the race against the machine. As he put it, “We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can upgrade our software.”

Robot mother
A robot has learned to make better 'offspring' based on how well earlier generations performed in tasks

I travelled to America to meet Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology near Boston, and authors of <The Second Machine Age>, who argue this means dragging our education system into the 21st century - particularly our outmoded approach to adult training and apprenticeships, which is still based on the needs of the past hundred years.

We need to embed computer science at the heart of our national skills agenda, and ensure that more adults in the UK have the opportunity to learn coding - the language of computers and the lingua franca of the modern technology economy - to enable them to develop and manipulate software and robotics themselves, rather than compete against them.

Business thinker Geoff Colvin, in his new book, Humans are Underrated, argues that there are tasks we will always want humans to carry out, whether providing leadership or working in teams - McAfee and Brynolfsson agree, suggesting that we need to help people develop skills that machines are still relatively bad at, such as creativity, empathy and problem-solving. To do so, we need to fundamentally overhaul our school curriculum and exam system, which in many ways is still unchanged from the Victorian age.

The robots played the role of the three wisest men in the kingdom
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have built robots who demonstrate powers of deduction

Perhaps most radically of all, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady argues that our voluntary model of skills training, in which individuals are typically expected to bear the cost themselves, is inadequate in this new era. Instead, Government should fund this reskilling in full - and potentially even paying people to retrain. This is certainly a bold vision, but arguably it’s the kind of ambitious policy thinking that matches the scale of the changes ahead.

Woody Allen said that life doesn’t imitate art - it imitates bad TV. Well, in just about every second-rate sci-fi television show, there comes a crucial moment where the heroes have a choice about whether to give in or fight back. When it comes to the real-life race against the machine, we have no time to lose. Either we can rise to the challenge of automation, and radically overhaul our education, training and skills system, or wage a losing battle trying to compete.

Science fiction scripts usually have a happy ending. Unless we take the right steps as a nation today, our future may not be quite so rosy.

Panorama: Could A Robot Do My Job? is on BBC One, Monday at 8:30pm. Part of Intelligent Machines Week across BBC News on radio, TV and online