As automation swallows the world of work, will we restrain the robots to protect the dignity of labour?

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The question of why we work is increasingly important as we enter a new age of automation, often called the “fourth industrial revolution”, and it should be front and centre both for the companies driving this transformation or benefitting from it, and for the governments designing policies to mitigate its negative effects on workers. In a report last year, PwC estimated that the net impact on UK employment from new technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence, over the next 20 years will be broadly neutral, as many existing jobs disappear but numerous new ones are also created. The PwC report recommends government actions such as a national retraining programmes for older workers, measures to encourage people to continually update their skills and greater investment in so-called STEAM skills that will be most in demand in an increasingly automated world. They should be incentivised, perhaps through the tax system, to keep or even expand their workforce by developing workers’ skills or, as MIT economist Daron Acemoglu has recently suggested, by creating new labour-intensive tasks that also improve productivity.