A new study has found that 47 per cent of jobs in the US are “at risk” of being automated within the next 20 years.

The researchers analysed more than 700 jobs listed on a careers website along with the skills and education required for each position and weighed them against how easily they could be automated and what engineering obstacles were preventing them from being computerised.

Specifically the researchers say that “low-skill and low-wage jobs” will be the first to go.

“Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk,” the researchers wrote in the Oxford University study titled “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation.”

“These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation.”

Administrative, transportation and logistics, production, services, sales and construction jobs are also likely to be on the chopping block within the next two decades.

The good news is that robots can’t do tasks that require creative and social intelligence so low-skill workers will likely be “reallocated” into jobs that require those skills, the researchers claim.

“For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills,” the researchers wrote in the study.

However, it is going to be even more important for low-skilled workers to identify pockets of their industries that robots can’t replace and quickly skill-up in those areas so as not to be left out of the economy altogether.

The study highlights the urgency of creating education and training systems that allow workers to retrain for new occupations in a short space of time.

However, technology also needs to catch up.

Analysts have long said that technology is not creating jobs as quickly as it is replacing them.

Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, told CBS News earlier this month that the percentage of Americans with jobs is at a 20-year low.

“Just a few years ago if you travelled by air you would have interacted with a human ticket agent. Today, those jobs are being replaced by robotic kiosks. Bank tellers have given way to ATMs, sales clerks are surrendering to e-commerce and switchboard operators and secretaries to voice recognition technology,” Mr Brynjolfsson said.

“There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest.”

The top 20 jobs that are in danger of computerisation, according to the Oxford report, are:

1.Telemarketers

2.Title examiners, abstractors and searchers

3.Hand sewers

4.Mathematical technicians

5.Insurance underwriters

6.Watch repairers

7.Cargo and freight agents

8.Tax preparers

9.Photographic process workers and processing machine operators

10.New Accounts clerks

11.Library technicians

12.Data entry keyers

13.Timing device assemblers and adjusters

14.Insurance claims and policy processing clerks

15.Brokerage clerks

16.Order clerks

17.Loan officers

18.Insurance appraisers (auto damage)

19.Umpires, referees and other sports officials