In “Global Cities, Global Talent” a new Deloitte report that’s bullish on London and bearish on NYC because of the greater number of high-skilled jobs the former has recently added, perhaps the most worrying conclusion is that the hollowing out of low-skilled positions via automation may further exacerbate our increasingly middle-less economy. According to Deloitte, women may be particularly prone in this new normal.

The paper does note that “the difficulty of implementing the technology, social or political resistance or the relative human cost of labor versus investment in technology” may be the “real brakes on the pace of job automation.” It seems doubtful those things will be any type of long-term obstacle to automation, and it really shouldn’t be artificially restrained. But policy is going to have to answer many difficult questions in the next few decades to keep societies from irreparably fraying.

From Matthew Nitch Smith at Forbes:

One of the biggest accountancy firms in the world Deloitte released a report today entitled “Global cities, global talent” and it warned that “automation risks ‘hollowing out’ London’s lower paid jobs.”

However, at the same time it said 235,000 high-skill jobs have been created in London since 2013.

Basically, those working in lower paid jobs, mainly service and manufacturing sector jobs like cleaning, waitressing, and some factory work, are at the greatest risk of losing their jobs because robots are able to do it instead of them. 

The warning comes close after the World Economic Forum (WEF) warned that as many as five million jobs could be lost between 15 major and emerging economies by 2020 due to robots, automation, and artificial intelligence.

The British Retail Consortium also said that 900,000 jobs would be lost in retail across the country thanks, in part, to “robots.” It added that almost a third of stores would close by 2025. 

Automation on a mass scale has always been concern to economists and employees alike, but we’re now starting to get the sense that what was once in the realm of sci-fi is going to have a real, imminent impact on global cities like London.

So who should be worried?•