Inside Out | We are woefully unprepared for the tech revolution that will upend our jobs market

Spend an afternoon with a couple of hundred wide-eyed visionary techies, as I did at KPMG’s “Changing Face of Commerce” workshop last week, and the first reflex is to run for the panic button.

It is difficult to reconcile their smiles and millennial enthusiasm with their messages – that 250 million jobs will be lost in China, 80 million in the United States and 15 million in Britain, for example, as our lives are technologically transformed.

Even the more grounded analysts at the International Labour Organisation carry messages that would unsettle most of our communities.

A recent study says three in five existing jobs in the 10 economies in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will be automated by 2025. It says most jobs in Thailand’s massive car industry will be lost to robots. So, too, in Vietnam’s garment industry. The impact will be particularly jarring for low-skilled women workers.

There will be job carnage in some unexpected areas – among surgeons, actuaries, insurance agents and paralegals, for example. As the cost of sequencing a genome has fallen from US$100 million in 2001 to US$100 today, and about 3 US cents by 2020, so the health insurers’ task of anticipating health risks will fall dramatically, according to Steve Monaghan at Gen.Life.

The result: insurance premiums will tumble, the actuaries and insurance agents selling us health insurance products will be laid waste, and early warning of possibly serious illnesses will pre-empt the need for many operations and spill our surgeons’ gravy train.