UK needs plan in case of 'unprecedented' AI job losses, says minister

The government must "take seriously the possibility of an unprecedented impact on the jobs market" caused by artificial intelligence (AI), a UK minister has said.

AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said there was no evidence so far of an overall reduction in jobs as a result of AI, but one of his priorities was to have a contingency plan in place for worst case scenarios.

"If it's going to hit us in a big way, you are going to want to be as ahead of the curve as possible," he told a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference.

Carsten Jung, of the IPPR think tank, said: "In a worst case scenario you could have about 8 million jobs being negatively affected by this."

Jung said the think tank was working on a "pandemic preparedness" report on AI labour market disruption.

The level of AI adoption by industry was not that high so far and it might not ultimately lead to massive job losses, he said, but he claimed it was still going to have a bigger impact on the labour market than the industrial revolution.

He also admitted that "stark scenarios" the IPPR had produced in 2024 were "to some extent" wrong but, he argued, AI had evolved rapidly since then from doing "boring" tasks to "more high-level reasoning and creative tasks".

"We are not preparing enough for something quite big that's coming," he told the meeting.

According to Jung, about 11% of UK jobs are "highly exposed" to being replaced by AI chatbots, "led by secretarial and administrative occupations".

But with the rise of more sophisticated agentic AI, he argued that the proportion "could rise to about 60% of tasks across the UK economy".

The government needed to be ready to help retrain service sector workers, he argued, but also to bring in measures to "slow down the transition slightly" to keep people in their jobs.

That could involve redesigning tax structures to "make it a bit more attractive to hold on to workers than automating them," he said.

But he warned that "a lot of the policies we might want to do in a really severe disruption scenario will cost a lot of money," particularly as the UK is more of a service-based economy than other G7 nations.

He also said that women were "40% more exposed than men" to the threat of AI because a higher proportion worked in service jobs.

Narayan told the meeting that the impact of AI might have been under-estimated because of the "silent adoption" of the technology by workers, which did not show up in industry surveys.

UK firms had said there was "no aggregate impact in the overall labour market today," the AI minister added, but one tech firm had told him they had hired fewer people because tasks had been automated "so the actual net impact might not be fully captured".

The minister said he was determined that workers would have a voice in the transition to AI, and promised "much better transparency when AI and technology is adopted" so that any productivity gains could be measured.

And he said one of his top priorities was "thinking through what you would do in contingency" if the job losses were as bad as some were predicting.

This could involve changes to "labour market policy" and "even where we might go on some aspects of regulation," he added.

Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect trade union, welcomed the government's commitment to giving workers more of a say, but warned against "creating the conditions in which working people become victims" of AI.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has, meanwhile, used his conference speech to fire a warning shot at "tech titans" he said could not be relied on to manage the safety risks posed by AI alone.

He said that while some tech companies were "calling for us to act", others "are saying we should leave it all to them".

But he argued that the "lesson of history is that we cannot leave it to corporations to put in place the guardrails to serve the public interest".

"It is neither their purpose nor their motive, theirs is to maximise profits. We cannot and will not allow that to come at the expense of our children or indeed humanity," he continued.

He said that while the "technological progress" from AI was "inspiring", the "threat it poses according to its own inventors is daunting".

He said the UK would confront those "urgent risks", including by using its G20 presidency next year to "lead the efforts to manage AI so we keep our country and our world safe".