About 1.7 million manufacturing jobs have already been lost to robots since 2000, including 400,000 in Europe, 260,000 in the US, and 550,000 in China, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics.

The firm predicted that China will have the most manufacturing automation, with as many as 14 million industrial robots by 2030.

In the UK, several hundreds of thousands of jobs could be replaced, it added.

However, if there was a 30% rise in robot installations worldwide, that would create $5 trillion in additional global GDP, it estimated.

At a global level, jobs will be created at the rate they are destroyed, it said.

Upto 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world could be replaced by robots by 2030, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics.

People displaced from those jobs are likely to find that comparable roles in the services sector have also been squeezed by automation, the firm said.

However, increasing automation will also boost jobs and economic growth, it added.

The firm called for action to prevent a damaging increase in income inequality.

Each new industrial robot wipes out 1.6 manufacturing jobs, the firm said, with the least-skilled regions being more affected.

Regions where more people have lower skills, which tend to have weaker economies and higher unemployment rates anyway, are much more vulnerable to the loss of jobs due to robots, Oxford Economics said. (Agencies)