The last few years have seen no shortage of reports and papers exploring the potential impact of technology on the labor market. The latest of these comes from PwC, who projected the impact of AI and other technologies on the UK labor market over the next 20 years. Suffice to say, projections 20 years into the future are kinda pointless, so the findings have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The work is part of a wider economic outlook report that they perform each quarter and so as with so many of these kind of predictions, I do wonder how reliable the methodology is. The headline of the report veers from previous work by consultancies and academics, which tended to focus largely on the number of jobs potentially taken by new technologies. PwC attempt to distinguish themselves by also projecting the number of jobs that are set to be created, and they believe the ledger is largely equal, with the potential for technology to even create more jobs than it destroys.
“Productivity has been a perennial problem for the UK, but AI gives us the opportunity to turn things around. The impact of integrating AI into a manufacturing environment is not dissimilar to upgrading a paper-based back office system into a proper IT infrastructure. Immediate productivity gains of up to 20 per cent should not be surprising, which would help the UK to remain competitive with the rest of the world. In fact, the UK has been significantly behind its G7 counterparts in terms of productivity with the exception of Japan for a number of years, according to recent ONS figures,” Mike Hughes, Zone President of UK&I at Schneider Electric, said in response to the report.
Useful information
The authors themselves admit that their headline finding takes into account a whole bunch of uncertain factors that render them highly speculative. Whilst I would largely ignore the result as a work of fiction therefore, the authors do make some recommendations on how we can react that warrant attention.
They urge governments to invest more in so called STEAM skills (science, technology, engineering and mathematics, with the extra ‘a’ for art and design), as they believe these will be at the heart of innovation in the future. What’s more, this should be ongoing, lifelong learning, representing a break from the linear study > work > retire approach to life that has dominated the last century or so.
For those who struggle to adapt, they recommend that the safety net be increased. Indeed, a central argument for things like Universal Basic Income is that in addition to providing a safety net, they also provide a degree of slack that will allow the lifelong learning mentioned above to occur.
To this, they remind us that whilst AI is likely to disrupt society, the benefits are likely to outweigh the costs, so whilst government needs to support those who are disrupted by the technology, they also have to support the growth of the technology.
Given the tremendous investment being made by governments into AI, it’s an urging that you sense doesn’t really need to be made. Any publication of a report into the impact of AI seems guaranteed to generate column inches, and it’s hard not to look at the report as another to jump on this PR-driven bandwagon.
