Member Article

May 4th Story: Robots worth a third more than the average Brit - R2-D2 salary revealed as £39,221

For over a decade we have been warned that human jobs could be ‘stolen’ by automation or AI, with the general consensus estimating that robots will be responsible for making as many as half of all current jobs obsolete by 2035.

With the force truly upon us this Friday on May 4th (National Star Wars Day), Adzuna, Europe’s fastest-growing job search engine, reveals how much robots are actually worth in today’s market by revealing the estimated salary for favourite Star Wars robot, R2-D2.

By crafting R2-D2’s CV and processing his career achievements through Adzuna’s ValueMyCV tool, Adzuna have revealed R2-D2 is worth £39,221 on the current job market if he came down to Earth - a third higher than the national living wage (£24,720, according to ONS).

And as robots are deemed to be worth more than humans by employers, many new job roles are even seeking human employees to have robotic or futuristic skills. Adzuna analysed their database of over 1.2million live job ads and discovered that employers are seeking employees with skills such as Jedi, Warrior, Knight, Ninja and Padawan and requesting them in their job descriptions!

• Knight: 1463 (number of times the term appeared in job title or job description), £30,872 (average salary)

• Ninja 234 (number of times the term appeared in job title or job description), £34,098 (average salary)

• Warrior: 122 (number of times the term appeared in job title or job description), £28,539 (average salary)

• Jedi: 17 (number of times the term appeared in job title or job description), £28,300 (average salary)

• Padawan: 5 (number of times the term appeared in job title or job description), £63,750 (average salary)

Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, comments: “With the gradual introduction of automation, robots and AI, we are on the precipice of a third industrial revolution - the most significant of our time. We will not only witness jobs and industries evolving but new jobs and industries being born that could only have been dreamed of on Tatooine, Hoth or Jakku. And this is positive for the job market.

“Instead of the doom and gloom headlines drumming up visions of a robot-run future, our research suggests humans will still have jobs, as employers adapt and appoint workers into these new roles. We are already seeing this with roles like Drone Engineer, Robot Scientist and AI Regulatory Solutions Consultant - firmly putting humans back in the driver’s seat and ‘managing’ robots. However, whether or not we will soon see Death Star concierges, Millenium Falcon janitors or Super Star Destroyer drivers is yet to be seen.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Adzuna .