机器人的工作？英国就业市场该如何应对自动化（英文版）.pdf

Executive Insights

If you watched the Channel 4 television program

“Humans,” it’s a stark illustration of what many

believe the future could hold for a world where

automation increases and the mere mortal’s role

becomes obsolete. Aside from the dystopian

images of popular fiction, however, the key

question for businesses engaged in the U.K.

employment market is how significant the impact

Between 2011 and 2016, the number of jobs in the U.K. grew by

2.5 million. This is a net figure, taking into account over 0.5 million

jobs destroyed by automation and factors such as demographics,

increasing complexity, changing lifestyles and automation itself

creating 3.6 million jobs. Looking at ONS data across 369

categories of jobs, we see that 3.6 million jobs were created and

1.1 million destroyed.

Our analysis shows that of the jobs that have disappeared in the past

six years, the probability of automation as calculated by Frey and

Osborne — at 61% — was high. By comparison, the jobs created

Automation has particular benefits for tasks in which repetitiveness

is key — or where automated systems can deliver outputs that are

more consistent and thus better or faster service. As a result, several

traditional job roles are disappearing fast — from cashiers to traffic

wardens — as automation takes hold (see Figure 1).

In retail, self-service checkouts have revolutionized the shopping

experience, with 42,000 units now installed and the loss of 39,000

cashier roles since 2011.

Jobs for the Bots? How the UK Jobs Market Is Responding

to Automation

jobs (47%) faced a high probability of being automated.

But by using the automation framework developed in that

paper and by examining recent trends, we see that the

U.K. job market is, so far, responding well to automation.

Frey and Osborne’s work estimated the risk of automation

for a wide range of jobs depending on how difficult they

are to automate — in simple terms, how complex, social

or creative the jobs are. And in these terms, the U.K.

market is successfully creating harder-to-automate jobs in

numbers that more than replace those lost to automation