Automation of British industry 'pretty rubbish', claims Bank of England economist

British companies have a 'below average' usage of robotics, and higher than average share of GDP going to labour

British industry is "pretty rubbish" when it comes to automation and the adoption of technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

That's according to Bank of England economist Will Abel, who claimed that the UK has a "below average" adoption of robotics, with a consequently higher proportion of GDP going to labour, rather investment in industrial technology.

Speaking yesterday at an event run by the Resolution Foundation, the economist suggested that the UK lags far behind its near neighbours, particular Germany.

"One reason why we might not have seen this decline in the labour share [of GDP] is that we're pretty rubbish on automation", said Abel. "We're about a quarter of the level of automation relative to Germany."

This also partly accounts for the UK's lower productivity compared, in particular, to Germany.

Across the world, the share of GDP going to labour in the form of wages, notes the Telegraph, has declined. The International Monetary Fund attributes this to automation. But in the UK, it has increased, from 49.9 per cent in 1997 to 54.6 per cent in the third quarter of 2016.

Automation is expected to make a wide variety of occupations redundant in the coming decades as artificial intelligence and robotics provide lower cost alternatives to employment - such as the self-service checkouts at supermarkets and self-service ordering now rolled out at restaurant chain McDonalds.

While fears of large-scale unemployment have attended every prior stage of automation, new jobs and opportunities have also opened up.

According to accountants PwC, three per cent of jobs are at risk of automation within the next five years or so, with 30 per cent at risk by the mid-2030s. However, artificial intelligence alone could also provide a $15 trillion boost to the global economy, it adds.

There's a new wave of automation hitting big business and the public sector, and organisations that fail to prepare or implement properly will, literally, be left for dead.

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