So you already heard about driverless cars and automated forklift transporting packages of coffee pods at a Nestle plant in Switzerland. You also don’t mind Google entering the race for home automation and Amazon helping its workers in the US to prepare for life after automation.
Now just to put things in perspective, you also remember Chris Cornell quavering in the 2006 Daniel Craig-starrer movie Casino Royale:
Arm yourself because no-one else here will save you
The odds will betray you
And I will replace you…
Are you able to connect the dots? We are just trying to assess how will automation transform the workplace and what will be its implications for employment.
This is what a McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report has to say: Almost half of today’s work activities in all sectors across the globe have the potential to be automated by 2055 and India and China together account for the largest technically automatable employment potential — more than 700 million full-time equivalents between them — because of the sheer size of their labour forces.
China, India, Japan, and the US account for just over half of the 1.1 billion technically automatable activities and $15.8 trillion in total wages. The potential is also large in Europe, where 54 million full-time employee equivalents and more than $1.7 trillion in wages are associated with technically automatable activities in the five largest economies — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.
