We've another one of those little horror stories that the robots are coming to take all our jobs. This is a follow up, concerning Europe, on a US report that decided that near half of all jobs could simply disappear to the robots (who are coming to take all our jobs, recall) in the next couple of decades. Sadly, both reports fail to note one obvious and simple fact:
Having obtained these risks of computerisation per ISCO job, we combine these with European employment data broken up according to ISCO-defined sectors. This was done using the ILO data which is based on the 2012 EU Labour Force Survey. From this, we generate an overall index of computerisation risk equivalent to the proportion of total employment likely to be challenged significantly by technological advances in the next decade or two across the entirety of EU-28.
The answer being, no not 42, more than 50% of all jobs are threatened by technological obsolescence in the EU over that next couple of decades.
Is this something we should be worried about? Clearly the authors of the paper think it worth bringing to our attention, but is it actually worth worrying about?
Well, no. Because even the most slerotic of European economies is going to destroy and create more jobs than that over that same time period.
Using the UK as a rough example, there are around 30 million jobs in the economy. 3 million of these are destroyed each year: around 10%. The economy also creates around 3 million jobs a year. Roughly you understand: and a recession isn't, in general, when more jobs get destroyed, a recession is when fewer jobs get created, that's what makes the unemployment rolls go up.
So the claim is that 50% of jobs in the EU might get destroyed by robot competition in the next two decades. And yet we would expect, just as a straight line estimate, that the EU economy will destroy and create four times as many jobs as that over that same time period, 200% of the current static workforce.
Even if this is something that we want to worry about it's a worry at the margin, it's a little bit more of a known and understood process that we can in general observe that we can deal with, rather than some horrific step change in our lives that we'll have trouble adapting to.
There is one more point here. If you do want to worry about this it's important to note that it's not large companies that create jobs, it's new and small ones. So, if you want to make sure that the robotic unemploymentaggeddon doesn't in fact carve a swathe through Europe you'll need to reduce the regulatory and legal burdens that new companies face in establishing themselves. Deregulation, ease of entry into the market, these are the solutions even if you do want to panic.