Industrial automation is the trend. Have you been affected?

Some 800 million jobs around the world could be lost to automation by 2030, according to a new forecast. The report, from the McKinsey global institute, says advances in artificial intelligence and robotics will have a huge impact on People's Daily lives and work, rivaling even the second industrial revolution that helped shift humanity from an agrarian to an industrial society. In the United States alone, between 39 million and 73 million jobs will be lost to automation, or about one-third of the workforce.

But the report also points out that, as in the past, advances in technology will not be purely negative. There will be more new jobs, and now some industries will be redefined and workers will face the opportunity to change careers. The report's authors say the challenges this generation faces are how best to navigate this transition. Income inequality will increase and even lead to political instability. Those who need retraining are not college students or young people, but mostly middle-aged professionals.

But the change won't be fair to everyone. For example, there are already a lot of cutting-edge technologies widely adopted today, and only 5% of jobs are done through automation. But automation will replace a third of the 60 per cent of jobs in the future. The McKinsey researchers cite a 1960s us government conclusion: "technology destroys jobs, but it doesn't work." For example, after the personal computer became popular in the United States in 1980, the invention created 18.5 million new jobs even as jobs were lost. So the same could happen to industrial robots. Despite previous reports that industrial robots could affect the employment of a significant number of workers.

As with previous research on the subject, many people may be skeptical. After all, economic forecasting is not an exact science, and McKinsey researchers are keen to draw more negative conclusions. For example, the global loss of 800 million jobs should be considered as an extreme situation, the report also mentioned that the more optimistic impact range is 400 million.

Of course, the study is one of the most comprehensive in recent history, modeling more than 800 occupations and surveying 46 countries that account for more than 90 percent of global GDP. The report provides a detailed analysis of six representative countries, including the United States, China, Germany, Japan, India and Mexico, which are at different stages of economic development, different economic conditions and different degrees of labor dependence.

The report highlights the extent to which automation affects jobs in different countries. Advanced economies such as the United States and Germany, faced with the impact of automation and high technology, will encourage the development of automation through higher wages. The report predicts that in the United States, as the problem of an aging population worsens, employment in industries like health care will increase. Mechanical jobs, including manual labor (mechanical workers, cooks), data processing (staff, data entry) and other jobs are most easily replaced by automation technology.

Even in advanced economies like the United States, automation can exacerbate social imbalances. High-paying creative cognitive jobs would have an advantage, while the demand for medium - and low-skill occupations would be significantly reduced. The end result, McKinsey says, will be "two different levels of Labour". Previous reports have reached similar conclusions, suggesting that upper-income people would be better able to adapt to a changing job market, and that social mobility would suffer as a result. Traditional jobs will be slowly phased out by automation.

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