According to a report by Oxford Economics, the economic forecast and quantitative analysis organisation, robots will take over 20 million jobs in the manufacturing sector, worldwide — that is, almost 8.5 per cent of the workers in the manufacturing space, globally.
The report reveals that, on an average, every time a new robot is installed, 1.6 manufacturing workers are displaced. In the US, robots have already taken over five million manufacturing jobs since 2000. In 2016 itself, 43 per cent of the world’s robots were said to be in use in the automotive industry alone.
China tops the list of countries that are automating widely, and is expected to have about 14 million industrial robots in place. The rest of the world will account for about six million active robots.
With advancements in technology, the prices of robots have fallen, making them more affordable than in the past. Earlier, the World Economic Forum had predicted that half the companies will cut their workforce by 50 per cent within the next couple of years. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the multinational professional services and consulting company, had predicted that about seven million jobs will be displaced in the UK within the next 17 odd years. According to McKinsey, the American multinational consulting firm, 800 million people across the globe will be rendered jobless in the next one decade, due to widespread automation.
