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.