Reinventing Prosperity. Graeme Maxton

journalists and soldiers are threatened with having to find new careers. Computers can already write articles well enough to replace sports and financial writers, and soldiers are being supplanted on the battlefield by robots and remotely controlled drones. The jobs of many hotel receptionists, cooks, and porters are said to be at risk, too.

      Many export jobs in China and other countries with low labor costs could also disappear. If it is cheaper to manufacture goods with robots, many of the factories that moved to China and elsewhere in the last twenty-five years could move back to the developed world to reduce transport costs, though they will not bring many jobs.

      Most jobs will remain, of course. The work of actors and actresses will be extremely hard to mechanize, though not impossible. A lot can be done using computer animation these days, as many photographic models may soon discover to their cost. Societies will still need to have firefighters, as well as clergy. Other reasonably secure jobs include care workers, dentists, and (some) fruit pickers. Those who offer warm hands in hospitals and nursing homes cannot easily be replaced either (though the Japanese are trying⁶). Strategic planners and barristers will always be in high demand, as well as athletes, artisans, florists, and hairdressers. Composers, novelists, and speakers’ agents will not be short of work in the future much either.

      At the end of its report, the Oxford study contains a list of 702 jobs, ranked according to the likelihood of their being eradicated over the next two decades. It makes for interesting reading. If you want to ask yourself how safe your own job is, then the words you need to consider are: personal care, creativity, dexterity, perception, social intelligence, and originality. If your job needs these, you are pretty safe.

      The jobs that are least vulnerable are those that require high levels of education or considerable skill—which will be very well paid—as well as those that generally require dexterity, repetitiveness, creativity, or physical presence—which will not be very well paid.

      Even if a fraction of these anticipated changes occurred, there would be a revolution in the workplace—with widespread social consequences. Unless the transition is managed carefully, society could become even more polarized, with a small elite gaining the chance to earn even more, while the majority earns even less.

      Moreover, the jobs that remain would be bitterly fought over because, in simple economic terms, the supply of workers will greatly exceed the demand, so the price of the average employee will fall. Social mobility would be reduced, too, because the options available to job seekers will shrink.

      With fewer people working, less tax would be paid into government coffers. With higher unemployment, demand for welfare would rise.

      There is, therefore, a risk that this wave of robotization and mechanization might overwhelm rich-world societies, cutting average wages more, widening social divisions further, and inflaming political discord as too many people chase too few jobs. As David Ricardo, a nineteenth-century economist who studied the effects of new technology on wages during the industrial revolution, showed, there is a risk that many people’s wages could fall below the level necessary for them to live.

      Ricardo, who was greatly influenced by his close contemporary Adam Smith, realized that although new technologies increase business profits, they do not always increase workers’ incomes. He pointed out that, in general, new technologies tend to make life better for everyone, partly because they increase productivity and cut costs. They increase output. They also encourage innovation and retraining, as those who are forced out of work need to develop new skills to become competitive in the job market again.

      But he also saw that there is a short-term price to pay for new technological development: higher unemployment and lower wages. These are generally outweighed by the long-term advantages—higher productivity, lower costs, more output, greater innovation, and self-improvement—but not always.