It is 2030, and Britain has fewer robots than other countries. It must cope with a shrinking workforce and a stagnant economy
to believe now, but a little more than a decade ago people were seriously worried about robots taking all the jobs. Back in 2018 the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, gave a warning that “large swathes” of the population would become “technologically unemployed”. He argued that the “fourth industrial revolution” of automation and artificial intelligence would create even more disruption to people’s working lives than the previous three. Robots would do everything.
Second, the 2020s showed that the level of employment depends on more than just automation: it also depends on ageing and immigration. As their populations aged, rich countries saw their workforces shrink. Many invested more in robots as they aged, and some let in more migrants, plugging some of the skills gaps and boosting productivity. Countries with relatively slow ageing and lots of robots did best.
Had Britain invested more heavily in automation, it might have been better able to cope. As Daron Acemoglu ofand Pascual Restrepo of Boston University showed in 2018, countries which age fastest tend to invest the most in robotics—causing theirgrowth to hold up better than you might expect. Britain, though, was a technological laggard.
Britain was an extreme case. Other countries faced different problems, or managed them better. Japan and South Korea have seen their workforces shrink in absolute terms but, by investing in robots and software to perform repetitive tasks, and by retraining workers for employment in caring professions, both countries softened the blow of the demographic transition and maintained high productivity growth.
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