Future of Work

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for introducing this important debate. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld.

I have seen in my own career, as an engineer and mathematician in research and consulting and as director of the Met Office and of a high-tech company, many applications and new ideas arising from computers, technology and systems. I was impressed by the possibilities when I was a student and a Labour activist. I remember listening to Leon Bagrit’s Reith Lectures in 1963. However, when I attended the Labour Party conference in 1970, I was also interested in a vigorous debate about whether people needed telephones.

At that time in the UK we were absolutely in the dark about the extraordinary subterranean knowledge that had been developed in this country during the war. The great developments in data and mathematics led by Alan Turing did not really come to light until the late 1990s. By contrast, the United States was considerably more open with von Neumann’s work. As we have seen this week, government and industry have begun to understand Lorenz’s discovery that most electronic calculations contain small errors that can lead to chaotic predictions. Eventually, just last year the fundamental wartime contributions of Alan Turing and other computer mathematicians led to the establishment of the multi-university Alan Turing Institute, embedded within the British Library.

In fact, from the 1950s onwards, there were some applications of computers in business. One of the interesting ones even beat Amazon to it. Freeman’s mail order company—my godfather was a director—was well known in all the valleys, and it introduced the KDF9 computer to distribute its goods. It is a pity that that, like other technologies, it did not make the global level. Sometimes the commercial application of computation moved much faster than the scientific calculation. Noble Lords may not know that in the early 1950s, Joe Lyons, which used to distribute Swiss rolls and stuff for the tea shops around London, was so advanced that the Met Office used to send people from Dunstable down to Hammersmith to learn how to do it.

Around 1990, of course, Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet system at the European nuclear centre in Geneva, which led to the local and international multiusers data exchange—the internet. This has rapidly evolved to the exchange of millions of users and social media. Businesses sprang up and extended the logic database to much broader ideas now, as other noble Lords have said, including art, design, media and music.

On Saturdays in London I have seen children using laptops to compose stories, pictures and sound with digital and non-digital means, which gives them extraordinary excitement and interest. It is also very different from so-called digital skills, which is a rather restrictive term. These developments are turning into advanced jobs, like those I saw this week in Didcot, which are producing electronic media illustrations for complex science, engineering and medicine. This enables research workers to communicate with business and to learn about business, and sometimes students start their own businesses. As the House of Lords committee heard, more could be done by universities to stimulate this type of business growth.

In the poorest regions of the world, individuals or small groups now make use of electronic means, as I have seen in India, where I saw people communicating informally as they pick up sticks for fuel and waste, while on the other hand they are also making use of the most advanced knowledge of climate change for their agriculture or, for example, using their mobile phones to see the dangers associated with fishing and tropical cyclones. So these are extraordinary new developments, with new jobs.

However, given these developments in electronic information, how can people make best use of them? In the parliamentary debate on 7 September, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and other noble Lords emphasised that people in a modern society should be able to use electronic digital information and called on the Government to expand this. I just want to emphasise that a great deal of these skills have nothing to do with digital aspects but are to do with screen-based methods of simply looking at pictures and pushing your fingers across the screen, and lead to completely new kinds of activity and skills. This was loosely described as “digital skills”, but, as I say, it should be broader than that.

There is general agreement, then, that training in digital skills and these wider skills is urgently needed for access to many public services, and for information as well as for jobs. Training needs to be done by public bodies, such as local libraries and jobcentres, and private organisations, which can be more focused. I hope that the Minister will tell us about UK progress in public and private training.

However, the Government should also be looking forward to a new future, in which much of the usage of electronic information, communication and creativity will have very little to do with the digital aspect. For example, I look forward to the idea of talking to a robot about my bank account. At the moment, I like to talk to a person, but I suspect that that is rather expensive. There are many aspects of the use of these electronic communication systems that will change people’s lives, and indeed will enable these to be used by people who are simply not able to use the digital facilities.

Finally, these skills are important, but we also need to teach people about scepticism and caution with regard to scams and other things. As Lorenz pointed out, there are often errors associated with difficult calculations.