The future of work: your robot coworkersOutsource magazine: thought-leadership and outsourcing strategy

From the invention of the wheel and steam engine to fax machines and desktop computers, technology has always shaped the way we work – but in the last few decades, the pace of innovation has sped up exponentially, forcing employees and those who lead them to constantly blaze new ground and determine new paradigms for the way things are done. The biggest recent change in work and workplace culture is the introduction of robots. This change has caused a lot of panic and unsettlement among researchers, pundits and everyday workers. There are many conflicting stats and studies that spell out doomsday scenarios for human workers, both in-house and outsourced, in the age of robotics: Forrester estimates that 22.7 million jobs will be displaced by 2025; the World Economic Forum estimates that it's closer to 5 million jobs by 2020. But these doomsday scenarios, observe Professor Leslie Willcocks and Professor Mary Lacity in their book Service Automation: Robotics & the Future of Work, rest on a few crucial flaws – namely, attaching scary numbers to vague dates, highlighting job loss without highlighting job creation and forgetting that historically we've adapted to larger changes in the job market without disaster.