Who's afraid of the AI job-snatchers?

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1:38The Documentary, home of the best documentaries from the BBC World Service. Hello and welcome to The Documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Rob Young. Today, will artificial intelligence take our jobs? We look at the history of technological innovations and employment and compare them to what's happening today. What they're asking or offering to do there is to replace human cognition with an algorithm. The various forms of mechanisation we had before were either replacing physical labour or complementing human cognition. We'll assess the impact of AI on the job market right now and ask whether we would rather deal with a bot or a person.

2:22We don't know yet quite how people will react to a world in which AI can in theory provide all these things. But I think time will prove that for most people, for most things, they do still value that human touch. That's all on Business Daily from the BBC.

2:41Artificial intelligence is already writing computer code, drafting legal documents and answering customer service questions. Some of the biggest names in tech say that AI will revolutionise how we work. There seems to be a general fear the technology could make huge swathes of workers redundant. The Pope said recently the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs. Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences and indicating paths forward.

3:25Even those responsible for artificial intelligence are concerned. Jeffrey Hinton is often called the godfather of AI. The large companies are investing huge amounts of money in it. They have to replace jobs to make that money back. That's where the big money is, in selling companies things that will replace workers. So are fears for the future of work justified, or is this just the latest version of the panic humans have been having for centuries?

3:59I want to look back at what history can tell us about big technological leaps and where better to look at that than the Science Museum here in central London which has exhibits such as the first television set, the first computer and even a capsule that's been around the moon and I'm here to meet one of the curators, Laura Joy Peters it's a very very rusty old tube it's in fact an edison tube it's an electricity cable probably from the first public supply of electricity anywhere in the world so it changed how people worked and it meant that we could do work later in the day or we could do work at night and obviously there are parts of the world where electricity and that lighting isn't as widespread but it does change the way we work because we're not tied to the rhythms of the the sun the moon and stars, but actually we could have 24-hour work.

4:57Well, we've now moved to a different part of the Science Museum where there is a satellite. Laura Joy, tell me about this. So we are standing underneath a model of a GPS satellite. GPS is an American global positioning system. It's much bigger than I thought it would be. It's probably the length of a big London bus. it is it's ginormous it's a gold box it's got these two huge wings gps is really interesting to me because gps has absolutely transformed how we move around the world in one generation so previously you know my parents were very good at using maps and they would use a map to plan their route when they're driving automobiles also a really interesting general purpose technology But in one generation, that skill of using maps has been lost because we absolutely just rely on GPS now.

5:50We have it in our phones. We don't need to plan a route in advance. It's changed how we work in a million ways. Laura Joy-Peters, thanks very much for showing me around. Thank you very much, Rob. For more than two centuries, each big new technology has sparked the same fear, that machines will take odd jobs, but the evidence suggests something subtler. Take typing. It used to be a job. Now it's just part of almost every white-collar job. This is something that academics have been trying to get to the bottom of.

6:25OK, very welcome to the Stockholm Concert Hall in Sweden, where the Nobel Prize award ceremony takes place every year on the 10th of December. Simon Johnson won the Nobel Prize for Economics with two colleagues in 2024 for work on how nations became prosperous. He's an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. New technologies do two things. One is they often replace humans with machines or algorithms. So you can think of that as automation. And that, of course, displaces humans from jobs that they previously had that might have been well-paying jobs for the moment.

7:03But new technology also creates new tasks, new things for humans to do. And if those tasks require human expertise, and that expertise is valued by the people who got the money, the employers, you can have actually better outcomes. People can go on to more productive jobs. They can have higher wages and living standards can rise. So really, technological change is always a bit of a race between these two forces, automation, displacing people, and new task creation, raising the demand for people. There are more jobs than ever, which would suggest that all of these new technologies that have been introduced so far have led to more work, not less work.

7:39Yes, up to a point. It's certainly true that work expands. And there were many dire predictions historically about so-called technological unemployment, that new technology would displace people so much that millions would be unemployed. I don't really think we've seen that much, if ever. But it's also possible, and this is unfortunately what we see in the past 40, 50 years in most industrial democracies, that new technology pushes people out of what were previously pretty good jobs, pretty good job for somebody who had a college education, for example, and they get reemployed. So they've still got a job at the end of the process, but it's a less good job.

8:13It's a lower paying job. And when you look at what's happened to inequality of earnings in the United States, and this is true also in much of Western Europe, you can see that people with a lot of education have done really well, in part because of how they've benefited from technological change. People at the low end, without much education, have struggled to have any kind of real wage gain. And a lot of people in the middle got knocked out of the middle. And they didn't go up. They went down. So overall, number of jobs has expanded, but inequality has emerged in this phase of technological change in a way that has become a concern, really.

8:46As you're splitting history up into two sections in a way, there's technology pre-computers, where we ended up with more work and often better paid work. But now in the computerised era, you're saying new work tends to be less good. The new jobs are less good, but this is not unique to this modern phase of history. If you go back sufficiently far to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the mechanization of spinning created lots of opportunities for weavers because the price of spun cotton came down. But the mechanization of weaving, which happened a little bit later in the early 1800s, actually knocked a lot of artisanal weavers out of their well-paying for the time occupations.

9:26There wasn't a big transformation of the rest of the economy in the 1810s, 1820s. And so a lot of the weavers lost out as a result of mechanization. Subsequently, from, let's say, the 1840s or 1850s, there's a much broader transformation of the British economy and other economies. Railways arrive, electricity arrives, eventually cars arrive. So we did have a good hundred years when most technological transformations created enough good opportunities. So even though people were displaced, they could also go on and get a better paying job and be more productive. So was that 100 years the usual or the aberration in terms of technological transformation?

10:02It's certainly a phase that's ended. And it's not been the experience since the 1980s in the United States, the UK and other places. Is there a historical analogue to artificial intelligence? Not really. Artificial general intelligence, which is what the big tech companies tell you and tell their investors that they're pursuing. What they're asking or offering to do there is to replace human cognition with an algorithm. And most of the various forms of mechanization we had before were either replacing physical labor or complementing human cognition. So this is new. But the other thing is, of course, they're offering or threatening to do this for everything.

10:39So in the past, you had transformation of the cotton industry, transformation of the railways, you had transformation of electricity, which is a general purpose technology affecting everything. But if you really get close to anything like artificial general intelligence, the concern, which I think is a legitimate concern, is this would displace humans from many or nearly all tasks across the entire economy more or less simultaneously. So there's never been anything like that plausibly on the horizon. Nobel economics laureate Simon Johnson. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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12:10Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Rob Young, asking what history tells us about whether artificial intelligence will destroy our jobs or just change them. Well, official data in the United States shows that 18 occupations regarded as exposed to AI saw a drop in employment of 0.2 % in the year to May last year. There's also been a slowdown in new jobs for computer coders since AI chatbots were developed, and a decline in graduate-level job openings. It's unclear whether AI is the sole reason for that, but students anxious about their futures are making their concerns heard at university graduation ceremonies.

12:55And this time it was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting.

13:05So today we stand on this edge of another technological transformation. That's the former boss of Google, Eric Schmidt, being booed at an event at the University of Arizona in the US. Let's look at what is happening in real workplaces right now as AI tools are adopted. Chris Eldridge has been recruiting people for 30 years. He's the chief executor for North America at the global recruitment consultancy Robert Walters. I'm fortunate enough to have started my career before the internet. And I think about how ineffective and inefficient some of the practices were that we had to do on a day-to-day basis.

13:44And the internet came along and it took a period of time for us to understand where the benefits were. But eventually, when we'd mastered the internet, it made our lives just so much easier. And most importantly, it gave us time back to do more valuable work. And I think there are parallels with what we're looking at with the use of AI in industry today. What are those parallels? I think we're going to have the same path ahead of us. Today, we see pressure in some areas of the workforce, and we see opportunities being created in others. That is analogous to what happened 30 years ago. The future of AI in the workplace is this kind of AI-enabled economy, where you have workers alongside AI.

14:29They have the skillset to use the technology to create hopefully an abundance of work. And of course, if you don't have the facility with AI currently, you're going to have to go and learn it or you're going to have to go and find people to join your organisations with that skillset. And that's exactly what happened when the internet first came along. And I think there will be a number of different challenges and opportunities for businesses in how they're going to achieve that moving forwards. I think one of the most important things is AI is being used outside of the workplace in lots of people's everyday lives.

15:01And it's going to be picking up those skills and deploying them safely in the workplace, which is going to really push both the individual and the businesses they're working in forwards. When you look across the job market at the moment in North America, what are there fewer vacancies for than there would have been a year or two back? When I talk about North America, it's probably a very similar position across the UK, Ireland, and Europe right now. The roles that are under pressure are those repetitive and process-driven roles, administration, coordination roles, even in technology. So those junior process function roles that can be replicated now through AI.

15:39There is this assumption that this will be the end of entry-level hiring. And I don't think that's going to be the case. And actually, the facts point to something different. It's going to be how companies work with AI to make sure that those new to work or, in fact, sometimes experienced colleagues, how they can adapt what they do today to bring AI into the workplace. On the other side of it, though, we're seeing creation of roles in AI engineering, cybersecurity, AI governance, and cloud roles. And they are kind of existing job families. But on top of that, we're starting to see new, totally brand new to us, cybersecurity automation, AI security architects.

16:18There's been a rise of the chief AI officer. And actually, those roles are less about the technology. They're more about getting the technology working within an organisation. They're kind of humanising of AI in the workplace. So there is opportunity. But are there just as many vacancies now overall as there were a few years ago? Overall, what we're seeing is vacancies are holding firm. We're not seeing a huge peak. We're not seeing a cliff edge. I think there's been an awful lot reported about the big fall off of volume of vacancies. And we're not necessarily seeing that when you look at a global picture.

16:51The volume and demand for roles is remaining healthy and consistent. Chris Eldridge, the North America chief executive of recruiter Robert Walters. And to that point, academics have found that over 60 % of employment in 2018 in the US consisted of jobs that didn't exist in 1940. The World Economic Forum says it expects 170 million new roles will be created by the end of this decade, principally because of AI, but also says that 92 million others will be displaced.

17:28Thank you for meeting me here in your local office cafe for a coffee, or a hot chocolate rather, and I see you have a flake. I do have a flake. Happy days. feel free to munch on that chocolate as we chat. I'm meeting Vicky Redwood, the Chief Economic Advisor at Capital Economics, who's been looking at what the rise of AI might mean for work, economies and society at large. I think some jobs will disappear altogether, and we are seeing that already in fact. So AI is already starting to replace more entry-level roles in, for example, legal services or software coding, and that's likely to continue and spread.

18:05but generally I think we're going to see roles change so most people will be able to use AI to help them with their current jobs and roles without those jobs being lost completely. We think that AI will continue as it's been in the past as previous technologies have been to be a complement to people's work rather than necessarily completely displacing them. Is there a point at which you think actually beyond X number of decades we're just a bit more uncertain about the role of artificial intelligence? If we get to a world where AI can basically do anything that humans can, then yes, there is a huge amount of uncertainty around that for sure.

18:39Our feeling is that even in that world, people will still want what we might call the human touch. They will still want some sort of point of human contact in the things that they're buying or the services that they're buying. The question then is, can the demand for those human provided goods and services expand enough? I think they can. And I think as prices of these things drop, as AI makes it more efficient to produce things and therefore brings prices down, I think we'll see demand for those things increase. So things that most people wouldn't think about spending money on now, be that personal financial advice or an interior designer or the personal trainer, all those sorts of things, if they become a lot cheaper because those people can use AI to do their jobs more efficiently, then I think we'd see demand for those things increase quite a lot.

19:23We're at a cafe in central London. and would your hot chocolate taste as good had we been shown to our table by a robot and a robot had made it and another robot had delivered it to the table. I mean, there is that human touch, which is really important. Yeah, and I mean, that's one of the areas where there is some uncertainty. We don't know yet quite how people will react to a world in which AI can, in theory, provide all these things. I mean, there's some areas where people might prefer them not to be human at fault. Some people like a driverless taxi, for example. But I think time will prove that for most people, for most things they do still value that human touch.

19:57All right, Vicky Redwood from Capital Economics, thank you very much indeed. I noticed you've not eaten your chocolate yet. I don't think about stealing it. That's it for this episode of the documentary from Business Daily. Do get in touch by email businessdaily at bbc.co.uk.