News you want to use week 14.

Far fewer workers are at risk of being replaced by a robot in developed economies than previously thought, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. About 14 per cent of jobs in OECD countries are ‘highly automatable’, the rich country think-tank concludes in one of the first significant pieces of research that examines the differences in the tasks being done by similar workers.

The research suggests far fewer jobs are at risk of disappearing than previous estimates from Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, two academics at the University of Oxford, which found that 47 per cent of US jobs were at risk from ‘computerisation’.

Jobs in English-speaking countries, Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are the least likely to be automated, the report finds, while jobs in Germany, Japan and southern and eastern Europe were the most at risk.