Earlier this month, the governor of the Bank of England told the BBC that AI wouldn’t massively increase unemployment. He argued that in the face of technological revolutions “economies adapt, jobs adapt, and we learn to work with it.”
There won’t be fewer jobs, but there will be different ones. In January, MIT’s Technology review recalled, in this context, that in 1938 its then president Karl Compton had supposed that emergent technologies have “created so many new industries” that “technological unemployment is a myth.”
Today, as our post-industrial revolution sees once inviolable white-collar professions fall into step with the march of the machines, another Dr Compton – King’s College London’s Martin Compton – has stressed that universities must be unafraid to engage with the employment opportunities offered by new tech, to prepare students “for the world they’re actually going to be living in.”
The increasingly common use of AI tools is causing rapid shifts in the labour market. A key challenge for policymakers, educators and researchers is to identify which areas of work will be most affected by this technology.
