When will a robot steal your job?

From taxi drivers and estate agents to chefs and *gulp* journalists, many of us face being replaced at work by a machine.

When a robot can do your job better than you, without the need for breaks or sleep, the harsh truth is that you may not have that job for much longer.

A new report from Deloitte suggests that around 800,000 jobs have been lost due to new technologies over the last fifteen years, though nearly 3.5 million higher skill and better paid jobs have been created. As a result, according to Deloitte, technology-driven change has added a whopping £140 billion to the UK’s economy in new wages.

If you’re not one of the 800,000 who has lost their job, you might think that overall the picture looks fairly positive. But just because you’ve been safe up to now, don't kid yourself that that will always be the case.

Dr Carl Benedikt Frey and Professor Michael Osborne of Oxford University produced a list of the most at-risk jobs a couple of years ago. Let's take a look at how likely you are to be replaced by a machine at work.

Taxi drivers

Would you trust a machine to take you safely from place to place? Google, NASA and Uber have hit headlines for their efforts in building robotic cars; NASA’s are even equipped with new technology, such as sideways driving that should make parallel parking a breeze.

They’re still some way from hitting the roads and it’ll likely take a long time to push through necessary legislative changes, but the overall feeling is that automation of taxicabs is a near certainty. We just don’t know exactly when it will happen.

Chance of automation: 89%

Telemarketers

If you’ve ever been pestered by automated telemarketing calls, you’ll be well aware of what a nuisance they can be.

It’s much cheaper to record a message on a computer and have the system call hundreds of recipients at once, rather than employ a building full of people to do it. So it seems very likely that telemarketing will become more reliant on automation as time goes on.

Chance of automation: 99%

Factory workers

This isn’t just probable, it’s already happening – mechanisation and automation has been taking place since the Industrial Revolution.

Repetitive manual labour is now increasingly performed by robots. Car assembly lines are generally now a line of robotic arms performing the major work, with humans now inspecting the results to ensure they meet quality expectations later on.

Chance of automation: 98%

Library assistants

While groups like The Library Campaign push for improved services in public libraries, are the jobs in libraries at risk from automation?

Library assistants, and other similar clerical positions, are at high risk of automation due to the repetitive nature of sorting and ordering books. But if we lost the human touch in libraries, would we put enthusiasm for reading at risk?

Chance of automation: 95%

Estate agents

Do you really need a human to help sell your house? Apparently, there’s a pretty good chance of estate agents working in sales being replaced by a computerised system of some kind.

With some online estate agents like eMoov and Tepilo already offering estate agent services, such as the production of photos and floorplans, for a fraction of the cost of high street agents, it’s clear that there is the possibility to push at least some of aspects of estate agency into efficient computerised systems.

Chance of automation: 86%

Chefs

The Shadow Robot Company, in collaboration with Moley Robotics, unveiled the world’s first robotic kitchen earlier this year. The machine works by recording and copying the actions of a human, so it could in theory produce any recipe. If you can get Michelin-star quality food without paying the wages of a Michelin-starred chef, and have less kitchen mishaps to boot, why pay more?

This machine is not cheap, as you might have guessed. With a price tag of around $14,000, it will be launched in 2017.

But if smaller, ‘home-friendly’ machines can also be produced in large quantities, might people stop going out for dinner altogether?

Chance of automation: 96%

Cocktail waiter

Much like a robot that cooks, a cocktail robot uses its arms to pick up, mix and shake ingredients and then serve them in a glass.

The real question is whether or not we can trust a robot to make us the perfect drink, particularly as it has no way of tasting what it has made.

While cocktails are a little more complicated and may benefit from a touch of human inspiration and taste inspection, robots could easily pull pints or serve simple soft and mixer drinks.

Chance of automation: 77%

Beauticians

Manicurists and pedicurists could find their work threatened by the rise of the machines. The repetitive motion of a nail file could be recreated by a robotic system fairly easily, although the quality of the finished product might be a concern for customers.

Other basic robotic tasks might include fingernail painting and waxing – though not everyone would trust a robot with the latter!

Also in this category, more complicated robots may be programmed with an eye for make-up, or even have limbs to perform massages.

Chance of automation: 95%

Tax collector

Tax revenue agents could be replaced, suggests the research, with a computerised system. When you think about how much work HMRC does that must be automated, this one isn’t so much of a stretch of the imagination.

As long as we don’t end up with Terminator-style collectors coming after us for late tax returns, we probably wouldn’t notice much of a difference.

Chance of automation: 93%

Journalists

Could the loveMONEY staff be in for trouble? Well, there’s already precedent for the replacement of writers with robots, as the Associated Press published its first-ever robot-authored article on 11th November 2013.

While features and opinion pieces would remain safe from unimaginative (for the time being) robots, it will be interesting to see whether robots are used as an assistant to collect facts and figures in pieces in the future.

It seems less likely that robots could take over broadcast journalism, as listening to one read the Six O’Clock News might not be all that engaging. But we’re ready to be surprised.

Chance of automation: 5.5%

Doctors

You (and your GP) will be pleased to hear that there is only a miniscule chance of doctors being replaced by robots any time soon.

Although a robot could be programmed to recognise symptoms and report back on these, it wouldn’t have the knowledge and experience to make an accurate diagnosis. Perhaps we’ll see more gadgets in surgeries to help doctors identify illnesses, but it seems very unlikely that they’ll let automation take charge.

Chance of automation: 0.04%

What do you think? Could a robot do your job? Let us know in the comments box below.

Earn more from your current account

More from loveMONEY:

£99 US flights - be quick to land one!

Millions of motorists 'to pay thousands' to drive into cities

Why we're £500 better off thanks to inflation