[Senator Clay Davis]

Gonna be fun to see the spin to blame this on immigrants

Will robots replace US workers? US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and PwC apparently have different answers.

Nearly 40 percent of US jobs are at risk of being taken over by robots within about 15 years, says a new report by consultancy firm PwC. Yet, US Treasury Secretary disagreed, saying on Friday morning that he was not worried about the mass displacement of US workers by the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI).

“It’s not even on our radar screen… 50 to 100 more years,” Secretary Mnuchin said at Axios’s New Shapers event. “I’m not worried at all…. In fact I'm optimistic.”

But the PwC report said the opposite, predicting that 38 percent of existing US jobs face the potential threats of automation, followed by 35 percent in Germany, 30 percent in Britain, and 21 percent in Japan.

“A key driver of our industry-level estimates is the fact that manual and routine tasks are more susceptible to automation, while social skills are relatively less automatable,” Jon Andrews, head of technology and investments at PwC, said in a statement. “That said, no industry is entirely immune from future advances in robotics and AI.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/20...s-yes?cmpid=TW