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November 13th, 2015 
Awake Goy 
The chief economist for the bank of England has warned that approximately half of the workforce in the UK and the US are likely to lose their jobs to robots.
Andy Haldane said that robots could take over up to 15 million British jobs as technological automation trends spread across all industries and service sectors.
The warning follows a 300-page Bank of America Merrill Lynch report which also said that as artificial intelligence continues to rise, jobs across multiple industries will be wiped out.
RT reports: Unveiling the Bank’s new statistics, based on the historic trends in the market economy, Andy Haldane warned the Trades Union Congress that half of UK workers might find themselves unemployed in the coming decades.
“Taking the probabilities of automation, and multiplying them by the numbers employed, gives a broad brush estimate of the number of jobs potentially automatable,” Haldane said, stressing that 15 million people might be affected on the island nation that currently has a workforce of 31.21 million.
Be very afraid: Andy Haldane @bankofengland reveals how likely you are to be replaced by a robot… pic.twitter.com/uHvutoe5wz
— Heather Stewart (@heatherstewart3) November 12, 2015
The same trend, the chief economist warned will also be witnessed in the US, where the current labor force of roughly 160 million Americans will see half of its jobs go to automation.
“For the UK, that would suggest up to 15 million jobs could be at risk of automation. In the US, the corresponding figure would be 80 million jobs,” Haldane said.
At the same time, the economist noted that previous predictions concerning the impact of modernization on the workforce had been proven wrong since the beginning of the industrial revolution. However, citing fears over the growth of “artificial intelligence,” Haldane said that if the Bank’s predictions are correct, the labor market patterns of the past three centuries would “shift to warp speed.”
“Machines are already undertaking tasks which were unthinkable – if not unimaginable – a decade ago,” said Haldane. “The driverless car was science fiction no more than a decade ago. Today it is scientific fact.”
The future accountants face a “vocational extinction” of 95 percent, while hairdressers’ positions will be cut by a third. Economists will lose up to 15 percent market share to robots. Overall the Bank of England forecasts that around 70 percent of jobs in sales and customer service jobs will be cut because of robots. Skilled trades people are also at risk.
“For the UK, roughly a third of jobs by employment fall into each category, with those occupations most at risk including administrative, clerical and production tasks,” Haldane warned.
Source Article from http://yournewswire.com/bank-of-england-warns-that-robots-will-steal-half-of-our-jobs/
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