Don't believe the robot hype: putting bots to the test

Unless you've been hiding out in a doomsday bunker you'll have heard the news that the robots are coming for your job. They are already delivering takeaways in Washington, DC, flipping burgers in California, doing data entry in accounting firms worldwide, writing articles for the Associated Press, appealing parking tickets, correcting errors on Wikipedia, managing Amazon's warehouses, creating ads for Coca-Cola and helping in complex surgery. Soon "there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better", according to the gloomy prediction of Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive and notorious worrier about the robot apocalypse. Lest you think your role is safe, a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute brings the cheery news that by 2055 robots will be doing more than half of what qualifies as work in today's world. McKinsey has provided a search tool where you can check how vulnerable your occupation is to partial or complete automation, but I'll save you the trouble: unless your job involves owning the corporation that builds the robots it's probably deemed at risk.