Lawyers, journalists, chefs, bankers, doctors – the robots are coming for your jobs next

At the Hannover Messe robotics fair in Germany yesterday, UK company Mobey Robotics launched the world’s first robot chef, capable of watching and mimicking the kitchen skills of a human chef and recreating them with superhuman consistency. There is already a restaurant in Soho with touch-screen tables where you can place your order and pay your bill, and restaurants in Japan where robotic waiters serve food. As these new technologies become cheaper and more widely available, they are likely to replace the need for human labour in restaurants altogether.

If you find this a bit unlikely, remember that we’ve already accepted robots at the supermarket checkout, the airport check-in, the train station, the cinema and the bank. Start-up culture is expressly geared towards what it calls disruption, which chiefly involves identifying redundancies in existing systems and working out how to replace them. The more jobs lost the better.

Agriculture and manufacturing jobs now tend to exist in countries where the labour force is willing to work below the cost of a machine capable of performing the same function.