Are the machines coming for your investment returns?

Rathbones' asset allocation strategist Ed Smith looks at the impact of technology on the workplace.

Throughout history, predictions of widespread technological unemployment have failed to come to fruition. Will fears about the latest wave of technology — robotics and artificial intelligence — be any different? Technophobia is a recurrent theme in the history of economic progress: Pericles spent huge sums on major public works amid fears new technology would lead to mass unemployment; Elizabeth I denied a patent to a knitting machine, convinced it would turn her subjects into beggars; and in 1964 a group of Nobel prize-winning economists alerted President Lyndon B. Johnson to the dan...