This may be the case because the public is constantly told that for some industries, this dystopian conundrum is already here; a report from Oxford Economics revealed that by its current estimates, robots will displace over 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide by 2030. This massive number represents around 8.5% of the global manufacturing workforce, or the equivalent of making 1.6 workers redundant per robot. The US has already lost 260,000 workers due to the efficiency of automation since the turn of the century.
But surely there is little relations between physical labour jobs and the HR sector, which makes the profession more secure, right? According to Nello Cristiani, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol, maybe not. “Most employees when thinking of AI in the workplace worry about being replaced, and that is indeed a valid concern, since the real point of automation is to replace humans - but I think the technology is not as good as the media believes, so it is not a very immediate threat,” he says.