UK AI minister says Britain needs a plan for 'unprecedented' AI job losses

[Sinead]

The UK's AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, has said the government must take seriously the possibility of an unprecedented impact on the jobs market from AI. Speaking at a Labour Party conference fringe event, he stressed there is no evidence yet of AI reducing overall employment. But he said preparing for the worst case now is sensible rather than waiting to be caught out. It is a noticeably more cautious tone than the government's usual enthusiasm about AI

He pointed to what he called silent adoption, where firms quietly bring in automation and simply hire fewer people, so the effect never shows up as headline redundancies. One tech company had apparently told him it was taking on fewer staff for exactly that reason. He also promised more transparency about when AI is being used. That quiet effect is much harder to spot in the statistics than a factory closing

The numbers mentioned are significant. The IPPR think tank has estimated that up to 8 million jobs could be affected in a worst case scenario. Around 11 percent of UK jobs are currently seen as highly exposed to replacement by chatbots, mostly administrative roles, and that could rise to 60 percent of tasks if more advanced agentic AI takes off. Women are said to be around 40 percent more exposed than men because of the sectors they tend to work in

The ideas floated include changes to labour market policy, possible new regulation, reskilling programmes and even redesigning the tax system so that keeping workers is more attractive than automating them. The Prospect union welcomed involving workers but warned that working people must not become the victims of the shift. That is going to be the political fault line

I think it is right to plan ahead, but I am not sure what the plan would look like in practice. Taxing automation sounds neat until you try to define it. Retraining schemes have a mixed record at best. What would you want the government to do if AI does start wiping out jobs at scale?

UK needs plan in case of 'unprecedented' AI job losses, says ministerwww.bbc.co.uk

[Anvil79]

Universal basic income will come up again sooner or later. It was floated by a minister earlier this year and got shot down quickly. If job losses do arrive at scale, that conversation will come back fast

The cost is the problem. Nobody has worked out how to pay for it

[DestinyShip]

Retraining schemes sound good in speeches, but I have seen how they work in practice. People get sent on short courses for jobs that do not exist locally. Without real employers at the end of it, retraining is just a way of making the figures look better

Any serious plan needs to start with where the new jobs will come from. Otherwise it is window dressing

[QuantumLeap38]

Silent adoption is exactly what I am seeing at work. Nobody has been sacked, but when people leave they are not replaced and the remaining team uses AI tools to cover the gap. On paper nothing has changed. In reality the job market for new starters in our area has shrunk a lot

[Brandon]

Eight million is a worst case, and worst cases rarely happen in full. Previous waves of technology destroyed some jobs and created others we could not imagine. I would not panic yet. The IPPR said as much themselves. But having a plan costs very little compared to having nothing if the pessimists turn out to be right

[HiddenFreddy81]

Admin roles being most exposed hits a huge part of the workforce. Those jobs have been the entry point for millions of people

If that ladder disappears, where do school leavers and graduates start? That is the bit nobody seems to have an answer for

[Nicola_67]

Credit to him for saying it out loud. Governments usually only talk about AI as a growth opportunity. Admitting the downside risk is a step forward

[Freddie_85]

Women being more exposed is an important point that rarely gets mentioned, since so much of the admin and customer service workforce is female. Any plan needs to take that into account from the start rather than as an afterthought

[CollapseState]

Taxing robots has been debated for years and never gets anywhere. How do you tell the difference between automation and ordinary productivity software? Is a spreadsheet a robot? It will get tangled in definitions and lobbying until nothing happens

I have heard this debate at every election. It never goes anywhere