Robots to Steal 10 Million Low Paid UK Jobs by 2034

Britons earning less than £30,000 a year are likely to have their jobs taken by robots over the next two decades as 10 million UK positions are said to be eliminated in favour of automation.

According to a joint report by big four accountancy firm Deloitte and the University of Oxford, the lower paid are five times more likely to have their jobs taken over by robots, compared with those earning around £100,000 (€127,245, $159,032).

According to Office for National Statistics data, 30.76 million people are employed in the UK, meaning that the jobs being potentially lost to robots account for 35% of the British workforce.

"Technological advances are likely to cause a major shift in the UK labour market in the coming decades. Unless these changes are fully understood and anticipated, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment," said Angus Knowles-Cutler, London senior partner at Deloitte.

"A widening gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots' is also a risk as lower skill jobs continue to disappear."

The report falls neatly in line with previous estimates that millions of jobs around the world will be lost to robots as the world becomes more digitised and automated.

Speaking at the Financial Times Camp Alphaville event in July this year, professors from Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), Oxford University and Sussex University, said robots will steal around half of all jobs around the world in the not too distant future as the globe has entered a second age of machinery that will have a more profound effect on society than the onset of the industrial resolution, claim academics.

"Before the industrial revolution, it was pretty boring from an economist's point of view, but since the evolution of machines during this time, societies have become more efficient and wealthier," said Erik Brynjolfsson, director at MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

"We are now in the second machine age where robots take on mental, as well as physical work, which does encroach on a vast number of jobs," he added, speaking via a robot at the event.

"Robots now substitute jobs, not just complement them from previous times."