Looking for a hot investment? Look no further than robots, says Bank of America Merrill Lynch

The market for robots and artificial intelligence could be worth $153 billion by 2020, with robots performing 45% of manufacturing tasks by 2025, compared to just 10% today, so reveals a report published this week by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the corporate and investment arm of Bank of America.

Opportunities for investors exist in aerospace, transport, financials, health care, services, and mining. But, potential risks are also noted, ranging from the development of fully autonomous weapons—who controls the drones, and what are they going to do with them?—to the exacerbation of social inequality if machines take all of the jobs.

With Google reported to have bought eight robotics companies in a two-month period in 2014, and Toyota investing $1 billion in setting up a research company in Silicon Valley to develop artificial intelligence and robotics, the sector has never been so popular.

Richard B. Freeman has written for IZA World of Labor about the ownership of robots and artificial intelligence technologies. He notes that as “companies substitute machines and computers for human activity, workers need to own part of the capital stock that substitutes for them to benefit from these new ‘robot’ technologies.” He suggests that “[w]orkers could own shares of the firm, hold stock options, or be paid in part from the profits,” as “[w]ithout ownership stakes, workers will become serfs working on behalf of the robots’ overlords.”

Read more can be read on this story in the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. 

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Who owns the robots rules the world, by Richard B. Freeman