The automation of millions of jobs will increase inequality in the UK unless the government intervenes to support small businesses and workers through the transition, according to a major report into the future of work.
Ministers need to act in the interest of those who will be made unemployed or whose jobs dramatically change, said the report by the Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW) thinktank, in order to prevent skills shortages hitting employers and workers from suffering a decline in job satisfaction and wellbeing.
Artificial intelligence software is expected to become a widespread tool in factories, offices and in the public sector, demanding new skills, the IFOW said. However, a survey of 5,000 UK employees found “a pervasive sense of anxiety, fear and uncertainty” about the introduction of AI technology, and what it could do to their work.
Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel prize winner in economics and the report’s main author, said ministers needed to consider “how AI can bring productivity and prosperity, without putting people under more intense stress and pressure? How can it help us identify and deliver new opportunities, without exacerbating growing divides cross the country?”
He said the three-year report, which also surveyed 1,000 businesses, discovered that while some major employers had developed tools to mitigate the effects of automation and AI to support staff, many smaller employers struggled to comprehend how they would transform the workplace and what skills and training staff would be needed in order to adapt over the next decade.
The report makes a series of recommendations, including establishing science centres – like London’s Crick Institute – in regional cities to prevent the capital and the arc between Oxford and Cambridge from dominating innovations in fast-growing bio-technologies and securing a disproportionate number of high paying jobs.
Pissarides, professor at the London School of Economics, said devolving decision making to the regions would also be an important element of the reforms needed, while unions should also be given new powers of “digital access, collective rights to information and new e-learning roles, backed by the Treasury”.
He said this would be in “recognition of the key role of unions to deliver meaningful partnership working”.
James Hayton, professor of innovation at Warwick Business School, and a member of the report team, said the impact on jobs, skills, and job quality should not be blamed on AI, but how firms used it.
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“It is how firms and managers choose to implement it that is so crucial in bringing benefit to their workforce and overall productivity,” he said.
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