A new report came out last week forecasting the likelihood of automation taking human jobs. The study comes from PwC (Price Waterhouse Cooper) and can be seen online at UK Economic Outlook where the section about international automation begins on page 30.

The upshot is not quite as dreary as the 2013 Oxford study by Frey and Osborne which estimates nearly half of US jobs vulnerable within 20 years. Nor is the new investigation as hopeful as the 2016 paper from Arntz, Gregory and Zierahn titled The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries which found a significantly lower number for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations (listed in OECD.org).

Here’s a snip of the PwC text leading up to an explanatory chart:

This debate was given added urgency in 2013 when researchers at Oxford University (Frey and Osborne, 2013) estimated that around 47% of total US employment had a “high risk of computerisation” over the next couple of decades – i.e. by the early 2030s. However, there are also dissenting voices. Notably, Arntz, Gregory and Zierahn (OECD, 2016) last year re-examined the research by Frey and Osborne and, using an extensive new OECD data set, came up with a much lower estimate that only around 10% of jobs were under a “high risk of computerisation”. This is based on the reasoning that any predictions of job automation should consider the specific tasks that are involved in each job rather than the occupation as a whole. In this article we present the findings from our own analysis of this topic, which builds on the research of both Frey and Osborne (hereafter ‘FO’) and Arntz, Gregory and Zierahn (hereafter ‘AGZ’). We then go on to discuss caveats to these results in terms of non-technological constraints on automation and potential offsetting job creation elsewhere in the economy (though this is much harder to quantify).

The following chart compares the PwC findings with the earlier reports:

The chart illustrates the comparison of estimates well, but leaves out the all-important time projection, which is the first key point, found on page 30:

Our analysis suggests that up to 30% of UK jobs could potentially be at high risk of automation by the early 2030s, lower than the US (38%) or Germany (35%), but higher than Japan (21%).

The mid-range PwC estimate is still very tough at 38 percent job loss — during the worst point of the Great Depression in 1933, America’s unemployment rate was 25 percent

In addition, the US government’s immigration machine remains stuck on auto-pilot, importing more than one million legal immigrants annually. Why continue this outdated policy when workplace opportunities are about to shrink dramatically? It’s not like America needs workers for the factories, when the US has lost more than seven million factory jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979, yet production is barreling along at near-record levels. Advanced machines are propelling a manufacturing revolution.

So America doesn’t need to import foreign workers at all going forward. In fact,

Automation makes immigration obsolete.

This kind of immigration-fueled population growth needs to stop. Hordes of unemployed foreigners are unlikely to be peaceful when jobs disappear.

Plus, it’s disappointing that the Treasury Secretary is so clueless about technology, as reported in La Times: