2017-05-02
26 分钟Welcome to LSE IQ, a podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
This is the podcast where we ask leading social scientists and other experts to answer an intelligent question about economics,
politics or society.
Are we all set to be automated out of our jobs?
In the 1960s,
the US cartoon The Jetsons depicted a future world where domestic drudgery and work was delegated to a range of labour-saving robots.
70 years later, and this future hasn't come to pass, but the predictions about the future keep coming.
A 2015 analysis by the Bank of England found that over the next 10 to 20 years,
up to 15 million jobs could be at risk of automation in the UK alone.
In this episode, Sue Windybank asks what exactly is the future of work?
Leslie Wilcox is Professor of Work, Technology and Globalisation at LSE.
I asked him how replaceable humans are in the workplace,
and he set out the two schools of thought on the future of automation.
One is that human beings will be replaced,
and this school argues that the technology can be so developed that humans are totally replaceable.
On one extreme version by 2045, the great singularity will occur,
which is the point that when we no longer control the machines, the machines run each other and we become useless.
The other view is that machines have augmented human beings and played to the strength of human beings, augmented them,
but also done things that human beings are not so good at, and these two schools of design now really shape the future.
Dr Guy Michaels from LSE's Centre for Economic Performance has looked at the impact of the kind of robotic arms you find in factories,