20/08/2018

Will AI take your job?

BBC News reports that the chief economist of the Bank of England has warned that the UK will need a skills revolution to avoid 'technological unemployment' with artificial intelligence making jobs obsolete.

Andy Haldane said the possible disruption of what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be 'on a much greater scale' than anything felt during the First Industrial Revolution of the Victorian era.

He said that he was already seeing people struggling to make a living and that we must learn from history and ensure that people were trained in preparation for the new jobs that would become available.

Tabitha Goldstaub, chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council reiterated Andy's points and said that we must be ready for change and focus on the jobs that will replace those lost through the use of AI.

'Each of those [industrial revolutions] had a wrenching and lengthy impact on the jobs market, on the lives and livelihoods of large swathes of society,' Andy told the Today Programme.

'Jobs were effectively taken by machines of various types, there was a hollowing out of the jobs market, and that left a lot of people for a lengthy period out of work and struggling to make a living.

'That heightened social tensions, it heightened financial tensions, it led to a rise in inequality.

'This is the dark side of technological revolutions and that dark-side has always been there.

'That hollowing out is going to be potentially on a much greater scale in the future, when we have machines both thinking and doing - replacing both the cognitive and the technical skills of humans.'

Andy went on to say that job losses would be compensated for by the creation of new jobs as a 'new technological wave' broke over society.

'That is a much harder number to begin to estimate or guesstimate,' he said.

'What we can I think say with some confidence, however, is that given that the scale of job loss displacement it is likely to be at least as large as that of the first three industrial revolutions.

'We will need even greater numbers of new jobs to be created in the future, if we are not to suffer this longer-term feature called technological unemployment.

'It has not been a feature of the past, but could it possibly be a feature for the future? I think that is a much more open question than any previous point, possibly, in history.'

Andy said that jobs that used human interaction and negotiation were likely to be safe.

Tabitha said 'What we have to think about is the time in which this change is happening, and it is definitely happening quicker than ever before.

'The challenge we have now is ensuring our workforce is ready for that change.

'What are the new jobs that will be created whether those are in building new technology, maintaining the new technology or collaborating with the new technology?

'There is a hopeful view [based] on the fact that a lot of these jobs [that disappear] are boring, mundane, unsafe, drudgery - there could be some element of liberation from some of these jobs and a move towards a brighter world.

'Now that's not going to be an easy journey, but I do believe there is hope at the end of it all.'