Financial adviser Deloitte analysed ONS labour force data from the last 14 years and matched changes in employment against a range of different jobs.
Jobs that are most likely to become mechanical typically involve routine tasks including personal assistants, bank clerks and typists.
Over the last decade smartphones replaced human personal assistants for the vast majority of City workers, and in doing so empowered us, increased our productivity and helped us to achieve more.
Since 2001 around 800,000 of these lower-paid and lower-skilled roles have disappeared. But at the same time 3.5m of the higher-skilled positions mentioned above have been created, resulting in a net gain in both job numbers and to the economy of around £140bn.
Financial workers have the least to fear from a digital revolution, the report suggests.
From 2001 to 2015, there’s been a whopping 842 per cent rise in jobs for business and financial project managers.
And the news gets even better for City workers, as that type of career pays an average of £10,000 more than occupations at a higher risk of being taken over by robots per year.
Angus Knowles-Cutler, vice chairman of Deloitte, said: “Our work shows the automation of jobs – and a shift from brawn to brains – is well underway in every nation and region of the UK. But we appear to be benefitting from this, not losing out.”
Are you replaceable?
That’s a fear many people feel when we talk about technology, robots, and the future. Will the end result of all these developments leave them unemployed and penniless?
There’s even a certain minicab hire service which has stated its aim of developing self-driving cars and ultimately replacing all of its human drivers (a move which hasn’t slowed Uber’s ascension to become the world’s most valuable private tech company with a $51bn price tag).
Despite these fears, the reality is a somewhat less-shocking picture of life in Britain.
Our workforce is changing, adapting, to the changing workplace around us.
Jobs are being created in abundance, according to Deloitte, specifically in the creative, caring and more complex areas of the economy which are at least risk from any impending ‘robopocalypse’.
