The autonomous collaborative robot could be assisting engineers on the factory floor by the year 2020 Ocado

Robots could replace 15 million British workers in the "third machine age", according to the Bank of England's chief economist. That's almost half of the 30.8 million people currently employed in the UK.

The figure comes from a Bank of England study into the potential impact of widespread automation in different industries. For its study, the Bank rebalanced the current UK workforce according to probability of automation and found the most at risk occupations are administrative, clerical and production. The caring, leisure, service, sales and skilled trades industries are estimated to face an "average probability of automation" of almost 80 percent, according to the Bank's research. "If these visions were to be realised, however futuristic this sounds, the labour market patterns of the past three centuries would shift to warp speed," said Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, in a speech to the Trade Union Congress in London. "Technology appears to be resulting in faster, wider and deeper degrees of hollowing-out than in the past."


The newly robotic, or at least augmented workforce could lead to wide scale unemployment and a widening of the wage gap, Hardlane continued. If the labour sector fell dramatically, the system may collapse, unable to support itself.

This all sounds very bleak. But Haldane had some words of comfort. "I don't want to make this sound like a counsel of despair," he said, admitting that these projections might be "too pessimistic." "The lessons of history are that rising real incomes have ridden to the rescue, boosting the demand for new goods from new industries requiring new workers."

And -- although the fear that technology will replace workers has been prevalent for centuries -- advancements have actually boosted wages. "Technology has enriched labour, not immiserated it," Haldane continued.

The results are not definitive, Hardlane said, representing merely a "broad brush estimate of the number of jobs potentially automatable",. The likelihood is still that many of the 50 percent of Britain's workforce affected by automation will find other or different jobs.

It might be best to start pitting your skills against robotic capabilities anyway; Haldane offered some ammunition for the fight saying that artificial intelligence is good at solving big data problems, but the human brain is better at processing and problem-solving. Jobs that involve high-level reasoning and logical imagination leaps are likely to therefore remain in the remit of humans. For now. "To bring that down to planet earth, no one anytime soon is, I think, going to choose a robot to cut their hair," said Haldane. "Nor are they likely to choose a robot to look after their young children or elderly parents."