How artificial intelligence will reshape our lives

The fourth industrial revolution is underway and it’s threatening to wipe out nearly half the jobs in Australia.

This latest round is characterised by intelligent robots and machine learning and PricewaterhouseCoopers economist Jeremy Thorpe said it’s going to completely reshape the Australian jobs market.

“Over the next 20 years approximately 44 per cent of Australia’s jobs, that’s more than 5 million jobs, are at risk of being disrupted by technology, whether that’s digitisation or automation,” he said.

Stefan Hajkowicz, who is the principal scientist at the CSIRO, says it’s white collar workers who are about to feel the pain.

“The sort of job losses that we did see in the manufacturing sector in Australia — the car manufacturing sector — are going to get into the administrative services and financial services sector in downtown CBD postcodes and that’s the big challenge that lies in front of us,” he said.

Mr Thorpe agrees, adding that white-collar workers in Australia were “the big growth sector over the last 30 years”.

“We were the beneficiaries of globalisation and it’s going to be a shock to the system when we see not just the growth temper, we actually see a decline in those sorts of jobs.”

Australian financial start up Stockspot says its business model makes thousands of highly paid jobs obsolete.

It claims that by using algorithms and automation instead of people, they can provide better financial advice at a cheaper price.

Founder Chris Brycki said some jobs, particularly in the financial services sector, don’t add value.

“Financial services employs about 10 per cent of our workforce and, really, a lot of those jobs are unnecessary,” he said.

“A lot of research analysts, stock pickers, stockbrokers, they don’t actually add any end value for the consumer.”

Mr Hajkowicz said the technology behind digital currency bitcoin — known as blockchain — also threatens to seriously shake up the industry.