Technology and People: Deloitte Report

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, on securing this debate and introducing it so elegantly. We can all swap stories, since we have more time than we thought, about our jobs as students. I used to work as a house painter, up the top of a ladder, and bloomin’ dangerous it was—too scary for me, so I had to give it up. It fits the narrative because now I have things that fix the ladder at the bottom, which makes it a lot safer than it was in my day.

The report in question is a useful counterblast, as the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, said, to those who say in some simplistic way, “The robots are coming for our jobs”. But, unlike the noble Lord, I have a range of reservations about it and questions to raise. Primarily, I have three questions.

First, I think it is a mistake to speak generically of technology as though it were all the same from the 18th and 19th centuries to the present day. When we discuss the issues currently we are talking primarily of the digital revolution, which is a great wave of change washing across the globe, driven by the internet, supercomputers and robotics. The digital revolution has not yet transformed the world as profoundly as the original industrial revolution did, but it is moving far, far faster and is much more immediately global than was ever the case before.

A good example, among many, is the rise of Uber, which was founded only in 2009. It is now capitalised at $65 billion. I studied technology through history as an academic. There has never been such a pace of change, and it is immediately global. The novelty of this has to be appreciated and we have to attempt to grasp it.

Secondly, the authors say confidently that machines,

“seem no closer to eliminating the need for human labour than at any time in the last 150 years”.

The noble Lord seemed to accept that statement.

It may be the case, but I think it is more accurate to say that, given this enormous speed of innovation and change across the world, we live in a kind of “don’t know” world precisely because of the pace and scope of change. We can read, for example, Richard and Daniel Susskind’s The Future of the Professions or Eric Topol’s The Patient Will See You Now. It is an interesting reversal. You go to the doctor, wait for five hours and then they say, “The doctor will see you now”. Eric Topol foresees a transformation in medicine where patients are empowered—not down the line but in the near future.

Anyone who reads these and many similar works must recognise that we are in new territory and that we are still exploring the territory. It offers a huge and, to me, potentially disturbing mix of opportunities and risks—with, as yet, imponderable consequences. We simply do not know whether the theorems advocated in the report will hold over the next 20 or 30 years, although some aspects of them may do.

Thirdly, the authors’ main thesis is that machines reduce costs, thereby freeing people to expand consumer spending, thus creating new jobs. Yet endless consumption does not seem the way forward for a world already running out of key resources and where conservation has to be a key value. So this theorem might also run up against other constraints.

At this point in our history, we have to be adventurous in our thinking because a range of possible futures confronts us. As I said, at this point we have no way of knowing which of them will turn out to be reality. The potential consequences for public policy seem to me quite huge. The level of disruption in the job market is likely to be higher and much more sudden than at any previous period. Whole industries might disappear overnight. Whole industries have disappeared overnight—again, this is more or less without precedent. Therefore, skills training will need to be highly flexible, creative and innovative.

The implications for welfare are also quite profound. It is no accident that basic income has surfaced as a theme in the thinking of many countries across the world. Not just work but education, medicine, social care and many other areas are likely to be transformed in their very nature by the digital revolution. We must track these changes in a continuous way and confront an open future, not one where we can simply apply a theorem derived from the past.