The argument, raging for several years, has become wellchoreographed. In 2018, the BBC reported on a study conducted for the City of London that suggested a third of jobs in the UK capital would be performed by machines within the next 20 years; wholesale and retail sales, transportation, storage, and food industries, employing a million people, would be hard hit (Kulka and Brown 2018). The Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, interviewed on the topic, declared that the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ would be of a ‘much greater scale’ than changes wrought by steam power, electricity and early computerization. Though these had ‘a wrenching and lengthy impact ... leaving many out of work for long periods struggling to make a living’, such effects would be yet more severe ‘when we have machines both thinking and doing – replacing both the cognitive and the technical skills of humans’ (Morrison 2018). Immediately, Simon Jenkins (2017), a reporter with The Guardian, responded with an article: ‘Worrying About Robots Stealing Our Jobs? How Silly’. Noting a chronic labour shortage in British social services such as health and education, Jenkins declared fear of AI mass unemployment absurd. New technology would mechanize some activities, but, ‘as throughout history’, labour markets would shift and ‘people – or their offspring – retrain’. ‘Short term disruption’ was ‘the reality of economic history’, yet ‘we survived and prospered as new needs, and jobs, emerged’. Another industrial revolution would release time for work in ‘service industries [that] essentially involve human relationships’ and ‘cannot be done by robots or machines’. Economists would, Jenkins concluded, do better to ‘welcome AI as releasing workers into the experience economy’.
Since the two contending positions were first outlined there have been a spate of predictive studies. Some are produced, commissioned or published by elite advisory organs of capital, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2016; Arntz, Gregory and Zierahn 2016; Nedelkoska and Quintini 2018) or the World Economic Forum (WEF 2016, 2017); others by private business consultancies with an interest in AI-related opportunities, like the McKinsey Institute (Manyika et al. 2017), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC 2017; Rao and Verweij 2018; Hawksworth, Berriman and Goel 2018) and Gartner (2017). Others come from legal associations dealing in labour law (Wisskirchen et al. 2017); the International Labour Organization (Chang and Huynh 2016) and anti-poverty organizations (Boston Consulting Group–Sutton Trust 2017). There have also been many independent academic studies.<sup>1</sup> This outpouring has in some respects refined analysis and in others rendered it more confusing.
automating the social factory
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