I read an article in Business Insider I think, could be wrong, which were showing that within X yrs loads of jobs would be replaced by automation, and humans are being replaced quicker than new human jobs are being made. It also implied that the quality of human jobs is both lowering and increasing, creating a void in the middle of machines.
I recall the article had a brexit slant on it, I suspect you or someone else has read it and may remember it better than I. So it seems this version is already manifesting.
There have been hundreds of articles over the last year or so about the coming wave of automation. Not limited to the UK either, i.e. Brexit is only a tiny part of it.
For instance, when self-driving vehicles are perfected so that they are "good enough" (which could potentially happen quite quickly, and certainly a lot quicker than when they are "near perfect") i.e. when they contribute to fewer accidents than human drivers, then you start losing entire industries worth of jobs:
- Long haul truck drivers and local delivery drivers (think anything from container transport to Amazon deliveries to the guy/gal bringing you your pizza or your Indian takeaway)
- Taxis
- Driving instructors
- Car manufacturers (most people won't want to buy an expensive piece of rapidly depreciating metal if they can call up on demand transport cheaply enough - and self-driving cars should be much cheaper than taxis as the only overheads are fuel, i.e. electricity, and the cost of maintenance and cleaning)
In the UK alone, there are over a million people employed in the above professions.
And when you really dig into it, you begin to realise that there will be "collateral damage" at the edges as well. For example, if most cars are self-driving, then the need for car parks goes away. As does the need for car parking attendants, traffic wardens etc. (This may be a good thing from your perspective - especially the latter - but it still represents jobs lost for good)
Even a very pessimistic timetable for self-driving cars suggests they'll have been perfected by 2025 (many timetables have 2020) so we're talking about 8 years until millions are put out of work.
