Protecting British jobs will be a challenge as artificial intelligence systems become more advanced, the new head of the government’s AI taskforce has told the BBC.
Ian Hogarth said it was “inevitable” that more jobs would become increasingly automated.
The whole world will have to rethink the way in which people work, he added.
“There will be winners or losers on a global basis in terms of where the jobs are as a result of AI,” he said.
This week BBC News is focusing on AI, how the technology affects our lives and what impacts it may have in the near future.
There have already been reports of multiple job losses as a result of companies choosing to use AI tools instead of humans, with BT recently saying it will shed around 10,000 staff by the end of the decade as a result of the tech.
But others believe these developments will also usher in a lot of new human jobs that do not currently exist, just like the rise of the internet did.
A report released earlier this year by Goldman Sachs pointed out that 60% of current jobs did not exist in 1940.
Capturing the benefits
Mr Hogarth, a tech entrepreneur and AI investor, said the aim of the new taskforce was to help the government “to better understand the risks associated with these frontier AI systems” and to hold the companies accountable.
He said he was concerned about the potential for AI to cause harm – for example with a wrongful arrest if used in law enforcement, or generating malicious computer code that results in increased cybercrime.
He also said that expert warnings of AI’s potential to become an existential threat should not be dismissed, even though this divides opinion in the community itself.
But he was also cautious of not missing the benefits of these technologies.
Notably in healthcare, AI tools are identifying new antibiotics, helping people with brain damage regain movement and being trained to spot early symptoms of diseases.
Mr Hogarth said he once built a tool that could identify breast cancer signs in scans.
The group he will lead has been given an initial £100m to oversee AI safety research.
He would not say how he intends to spend the money but that he thinks he will know if he has succeeded in the job if “the average person in the UK starts to feel a benefit from AI”.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made AI a key priority, and wants the UK to become a global hub for the sector. Someone who knows him put it to me more bluntly: “He is obsessed with it.”
OpenAI, the firm behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, has announced that its first international office will be located in London, and data firm Palantir has also said it will open headquarters in the city.
But the UK faces several challenges in positioning itself as a key player in this lucrative and fast-moving area of tech.
