Close to 10% of U.K. jobs at risk from automation, but it's not all bad news

Close to 10 percent of the U.K.'s workforce -- about 1.5 million workers -- occupy jobs that are at "high risk" of automation. That's according to a study today published by the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics (ONS), which found that of the 19.9 million people the department surveyed in 2017, approximately 7.4 percent could be replaced by autonomous machines in the coming years. ONS forecasts that service workers -- chiefly waiters and waitresses, retail inventory restockers, and entry-level salespeople -- will be disproportionately affected; it reports that 25.3 percent of supermarket checkout jobs disappeared between 2011 and 2017. And it expects agricultural, automotive, and service industries won't fare much better -- they've seen a collective 15 percent decline in the same timeframe. Women, who in 2017 held 70.2