The Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, has warned that artificial intelligence and machines have the potential to make a huge number of jobs obsolete, with thousands of UK workers at workers facing unemployment due to new technology. Haldane told the BBC that the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” would be on a “much greater scale” than the previous three, and said the UK will need a skills revolution to avoid unemployment on a mass scale.
He said that previous industrial revolutions had “a wrenching and lengthy impact on the jobs market, on the lives and livelihoods of large swathes of society”.
"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,” he said. "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.”
Mr Haldane added: “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."
Some jobs will be created as a result of the new technology, with roles that focus on human interaction, face-to-face conversation and negotiation becoming more important, while simple manual jobs will be more at risk. Earlier this year, the think tank Centre for London warned that almost one-third of jobs in London have high potential to be carried out by machines within the next 20 years. In a study published in April, Centre for London said the wholesale, retail, transportation, storage, accommodation and food sectors – which collectively employ a million people in the capital – would be particularly hard hit.
1 comment:
For what it's worth I commented on this as below.
It is all a question of ownership and control of the means of production and distribution. Presently it is in the hands of an economic, parasitical, exploiting class (1-5% of the global population), whether organised as private, corporate or statist entities or a mixture of all three of those.
The real actual wealth producers , who not own and control the means of production and distribution, (90-95% of the global population) are therefore compelled by economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or a salary which is effectively rations merely sufficient to reproduce themselves as waged slaves for future exploiters, thus also reproducing poverty both relative and absolute, as workers also produce surplus value above there waged ration which is where all profit is derived.
This wealth produced by the worlds workers torrents up into the pockets to the parasite class and funds, governments ,armies, ideological and repressive state apparatus all designed to maintain the economic dominance of the capitalist class.
The outcome of the retention of ownership and control of the means of production an distribution in the hands of a minority parasite class in competition with each other is that the arrival of better technological and informational developments is accompanied by increases in the rate of exploitation of workers retained in production, still relatively impoverished and insecure, in relation to the wealth they collectively produce and the dispersal to service jobs or macjobs, or welfare to work, if 'lucky' for the redundant others.
So capitalism having spawned the technology and informational infrastructures necessary for the implementation of a progressive new society is incapable of delivering this as its ethos is always geared to accumulation of profit forthe minority parasitic social class.
Only an advanced, post-capitalist, classless,commonly owned , production for use, free access, delegatory democratic society owned and run by us all, locally, regionally and globally, in conditions of real social equality can do this.
We need to dissolve the politicians, ( the state being the administrative arm of a ruling class) elect ourselves (no more leaders), abolish the wages system, establish free access to a relative superabundance of wealth which would flow from common ownership and production for use (of utilities not commodities) using the technological and informational structures from developed capitalism and win and run the world ourselves for and by all of the worlds people.
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