Experts Predict We'll All Be Working Until We're 75, Even After the Robots Take Over

A weekly column about how young people are totally fucked lol.

British retail lives off the poverty of its workforce. Industry body the British Retail Consortium essentially said as much this week, when it warned that the sector is looking at 900,000 job losses in the next decade. It blamed this on the introduction of the so-called National Living Wage in April, as well as a levy for apprentices. At £7.20 [$10.23] an hour, it's not enough to live on and get out of poverty, but paying it will nevertheless be too much of a stretch for retailers who are going to respond by employing fewer people and "increasing productivity," which sounds a bit like working their remaining labor force harder.

But don't worry, UK retail moguls! The national living wage doesn't apply to the under-25s anyway. If I were you I would sack all the grizzled, wheezing old 26-year-olds, grasping for their seven whole pounds and twenty entire pence for every single hour of their toil. Instead grab a load of lithe young sixth-form leavers to staff your shops for as little as £5.30 [$7.53]. At that age, living in grinding poverty is a character-building adventure to charm the grandkids within 50 years' time.

The problem of people wanting to be paid enough to live on could soon be a thing of the past anyway, because the biggest cause of job losses is automation, says the British Retail Consortium. Robots are perfectly capable of selling us stuff, which can be brought to you from a warehouse, making high street shops and their workforces a thing of the past. Morrison's proved as much this week by linking up with Amazon to provide a food delivery service. More and more jobs will get replaced by drones, automated vehicles, and whatever else. Soon, even the automated supermarket checkout machines will be annoyed that a more advanced robot stole their jobs.

So, enjoy having an income while you can. That's if it's not being hoovered up by your landlord. A report released by Shelter this week showed that the average Londoner paid £89,000 [$126,400] to their landlord in the last five years. If you'd been saving that, it could be your deposit on a house but nah, your landlord probably really needed it. Maybe you could pay less in other places, but those are the sort of places that are most likely to be full of those ghost high streets full of empty shops.

Confusingly, we're also going to have to work much longer in our non-existent jobs. That's because the government is pressing ahead with a review of pension ages for those retiring after 2028, and experts reckon it could lead to it being raised to 75. The dream of putting your feet up before your body starts to fall apart is being snatched away. Instead, you'll spend the autumn of your life as the bumbling, confused old head-robot-supervisor in the warehouse, desperately trying to keep hold of your faculties and your job as younger, cheaper workers snap at your heels, jealous that unlike them, you're keeping up with the weekly payments on your drone-delivered Morrison's parcel.

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