Millions of lost jobs or a four-day working week? The impact of AI on the job market is complicated

The robots are coming – and there’s nothing you can do about it. At least, that’s what big tech companies want you to think.

Terrifying headlines about artificial intelligence are increasingly common. AI could displace between one million and three million private sector jobs in the UK, a report published by the Tony Blair Institute declared last week. Earlier this year, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) predicted 7.9 million job losses to AI under a ‘worst case scenario’.

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“A ‘job loss’ number can hide a lot of other details,” Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan, senior research fellow at IPPR, told the Big Issue.  

“For example, are we keeping jobs that we want? Are we getting rid of jobs that we don’t want? And what is the direction of this job displacement?”

“The answers to these questions significantly will depend on the policy choices we make now. The sense of the inevitability of these technologies is a big way in which big tech firms thrive… but a healthy scepticism is important.”

How many jobs will be lost to AI?

The TBI report predicts up to three million job losses – but the detail is less alarming. Growth in the technology will also create new roles, TBI predicts, minimising job losses to somewhere in the “low hundreds of thousands”.

“A common lesson is that AI is likely to increase the dynamism of the labour market by prompting more workers to leave existing jobs and start new ones,” the report’s authors conclude.

Administrative and secretarial jobs will be the most vulnerable to AI displacement, followed by sales, customer service, and banking and finance roles. TBI call for an upgrade to “labour-market infrastructure to cope with the higher rate of churn”.

“It would be a mistake to concentrate all policy direction on limiting the disruption that this will bring,” the authors add. “Any policies designed to hold back the tide will likely be ineffective and damaging in the long term.”

However, limiting the disruption is – in part – a very good goal, says IPPR’s Desikan.

“We have choice. What kind of societal direction do we want from AI? What’s important is not allowing private firms alone to decide the direction of this change,” he said.

“We need, for example, consultation with workers and unions about what specific AI tools can be used in the workplace.”

In the IPPR analysis from earlier this year, the implications of these choices became increasingly clear.

In a worst-case scenario, the IPPR report says, 7.9 million jobs will be lost. In a best-case scenario, all jobs at risk are augmented to adapt to AI, instead of replaced. This leads to no job losses and an economic boost of 13% to GDP (£306bn per year). Additionally, wage gains for workers could be huge – more than 30% in some cases.

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To make this a reality, the government must adopt a “job-centric industrial strategy”, offering tax incentives or subsidies to encourage job-augmentation over full displacement. Areas like health should be regulated to ensure “human responsibility of key issues”.

“We called for something called ‘ring-fencing,’” Desikan said. “Take teaching, for example. Technically, lot of the tasks which teachers do could – on paper – be replaced by AI. But whether we want these tasks to be replaced by AI is a different question.”

Where there is job restructuring, Desikan adds, workers and trade unions should have a legal right to consultation.

This mirrors a Trade Union Congress suggestion. In their “Artificial Intelligence (Regulation and Employment Rights) Bill” – a draft bill they are calling for lawmakers to adopt – the union calls for enhanced regulatory powers and a guarantee of human involvement in “high-risk” decisions.

“AI can be a liberator, and a public good, but only if a wide range of different people, not just commercial interests, have control over how this new technology is developed and used,” the union urges.

Increased productivity could facilitate higher wages and reduced working hours, other reports suggest.

The TBI report points to the significant productivity gains that AI might bring. The technology could raise GDP by up to 1% over the next five years, and by up to 6% by 2035. The IPPR echo this positivity regarding growth – but urge that the pursuit of growth should not come at the expense of workers.

“These [tech firms] are some of the richest firms in the world. They are lobbying as much as oil and gas. There is a lack of democratic accountability,” Desikan said.

“There is a need for growth, but it’s worrying what kind of compromises might be made in order to get that growth. So, I would say that the government has to be a little more skeptical, in a sense, not Luddite, but trying to address that lopsided balance.”

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