Artificial Intelligence and the Labour Market

Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts

Wednesday 26th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Kevin Hollinrake)]

I am grateful to be called, Dame Maria, and it is a pleasure to speak in the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) on bringing this timely subject forward. I thought it would be appropriate to type his question into ChatGPT. I put in, “What is the potential impact of AI on the labour market?” It said, “AI has the potential to transform many aspects of the economy and society for the better. It also raises concerns about job displacement and the future of work.” That is it in a nutshell. It did not say that it was time for a Labour Government.

[Justin Madders]

Did the AI tell the Minister that the Conservative Government have got everything right?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I have not actually posed that question, but perhaps I could later.

This is an important debate, and it is important that we look at the issue strategically. The Government and the Labour party probably have different approaches: the Labour party’s natural position on this kind of stuff is to regulate everything as much as possible, whereas we believe that free markets have had a tremendous effect on people’s lives right across the planet. Whether we look at education, tackling poverty or child mortality, many of the benefits in our society over the last 100 years have been delivered through the free market.

Our natural inclination is to support innovation but to be careful about its introduction and to look to mitigate any of its damaging effects, and that is what is set out in the national AI strategy. As we have seen, it has AI potential to become one of the most significant innovations in history—a technology like the steam engine, electricity or the internet. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) said exactly that: this is like a new industrial revolution, and I think it is a very exciting opportunity for the future. However, we also have key concerns, which have been highlighted by hon. Members today. Although the Government believe in the growth potential of these technologies, we also want to be clear that growth cannot come at the expense of the rights and protections of working people.

Only now, as the technology rapidly improves, are most of us beginning to understand the transformative potential of AI. However, the technology is already delivering fantastic social and economic benefits for real people. The UK’s tech sector is home to a third of Europe’s AI companies, and the UK AI sector is worth more than £15.6 billion. The UK is third in the world for AI investment, behind the US and China, and attracts twice as much venture capital investment as France and Germany combined. As impressive as they are, those statistics should be put into the context of the sector’s growth potential. Recent research predicts that the use of AI by UK businesses will more than double in the next 20 years, with more than 1.3 million UK businesses using AI by 2040.

The Government have been supporting the ethical adoption of AI technologies, with more than £2.5 billion of investment since 2015. We recently announced £100 million for the Foundation Models Taskforce to help build and adopt the next generation of safe AI, £110 million for our AI tech missions fund and £900 million to establish new supercomputer capabilities. These exascale computers were mentioned in the Budget by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor. These developments have incredible potential to bring forward new forms of clean energy, and indeed new materials that can deliver that clean energy, and to accelerate things such as medical treatment. There are exciting opportunities ahead.

If we want to become an AI superpower, it is crucial that we do all we can to create the right environment to harness the benefits of AI and remain at the forefront of technological developments. Our approach, laid out in the AI White Paper, is designed to be flexible. We are ensuring that we have a proportionate, pro-innovation regulatory regime for AI in the UK, which will build on the existing expertise of our world-leading sectoral regulators.

Our regulatory regime will function by articulating five key principles, which are absolutely key to this debate and tackle many of the points that have been made by hon. Members across the Chamber. Regulators should follow these five principles when regulating AI in their sectors: safety, security and robustness; transparency and explainability; fairness; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress. That feeds into the important points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), who held this ministerial position immediately prior to myself, about deception, scams and fraud. We can all see the potential for that, of course.

Clearly, right across the piece, we have regulators with responsibility in those five areas. Those regulators are there to regulate bona fide companies, which should do the right thing, although we have to make sure that they do. For instance, if somebody held a database with inappropriate data on it, the Information Commissioner’s Office could easily look at that, and it has significant financial penalties at its disposal, such as 4% of global turnover or a £17 million fine. My hon. Friend the Member for Watford made a plea for a Turing clause, which I am, of course, very happy to look at. I think he was referring to organisations that might not be bona fide, and might actually be looking to undertake nefarious activities in this area. I do not think we can regulate those people very effectively, because they are not going to comply with anybody’s regulations. The only way to deal with those people is to find them, catch them, prosecute them and lock them up.

[Damian Collins]

The Minister talks about safety, but does he agree that that has to be safety by design, and not just having response mechanisms built into the system so that a victim can appeal? I know he has looked at fraud a lot in the past, and there is a presumption that all will be done to combat fraud at its known source, rather than just providing redress to victims.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That is absolutely right. We will not deal with everything in the world of AI in this respect, but there needs to be overarching responsibility for preventing fraud. That is something we have committed to bringing forward in another legislative vehicle—the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, which is passing through Parliament now—but I agree with my hon. Friend that there should be a responsibility on organisations to prevent fraud and not simply deal with the after-effects.

Our proposed framework is aligned with and supplemented by a variety of tools for trustworthy AI, such as assurance techniques, voluntary guidance and technical standards. The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation published its AI assurance road map in December 2021, and the AI Standards Hub—a world-leading collaboration led by the Alan Turing Institute with the National Physical Laboratory and the British Standards Institution—launched last October. The hub is intended to provide a co-ordinated contribution to standards development on issues such as transparency, security and uncertainty, with a view to helping organisations to demonstrate that AI is used safely and responsibly.

We are taking action to ensure that households, public services and businesses can trust this technology. Unless we build public trust, we will miss out on many of the benefits on offer. The reality is that AI, as with other general-purpose technologies, has the potential to be a net creator of jobs. I fully understand the points raised by the hon. Member for Birkenhead—of course, we do not want to see swathes of people put out of work because of this technology. I hasten to add that that has never been the case with other technologies. There have been many concerns over the ages about how new technologies will affect jobs, but they tend to create other jobs in different sectors. The World Economic Forum estimates that robotics, automation and artificial intelligence will displace 85 million jobs globally by 2025, but create 97 million new jobs in different sectors, which I will discuss in a second. I think the hon. Member for Birkenhead asked in his speech whether I would be willing to meet him to discuss these points; I am always very happy to do that, if we can convene at another time.

The hon. Member also raised the point about how AI in the workplace has the potential to liberate the workforce from monotonous tasks such as inputting data or scanning through documents for a single piece of information. I will address the bigger concerns he has around that, but in the public sector it would leave teachers with more time to teach, clinicians with more time to spend with patients and police officers with more time on the beat, rather than being behind a desk.

As was raised in a salient point by my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe, AI also has tremendous potential in defence and national security. That is absolutely critical. It was interesting that leading people in the world of technology, led by Elon Musk, recently wrote a letter asking for a six-month pause while we look at how we can properly moderate the impacts of AI. I am not sure that that is a good idea, because I am not sure China and Russia would play that game. It is important that we stay ahead of the curve, for exactly the reasons pointed out by my hon. Friend.

[Damian Collins]

The Minister is exactly right. That initiative also suggests that AI is not yet here but, actually, the issues we have discussed today exist already. We can look at them already; we do not need a six-month pause to do that.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That is absolutely right. There is an opportunity but also a potential threat. It is important that we continue to invest, and it is great that the UK is ahead of the game in its investment, behind only the US and China, which are obviously much bigger economies.

The key thing is that we take action on skills, skilling up our workforce in the UK to take advantage of the potential of AI. Clearly, a good computing education is at the heart of that. We have overhauled the outdated information and communications technology curriculum and replaced it with computing, and invested £84 million in the National Centre for Computing Education to inspire the next generation of computer scientists. Our national skills fund offers to do just that, with free level 3 qualifications for adults and skills bootcamps in digital courses, including coding, AI and cyber-security, available across England.

On that point, as well as the opportunities in AI, we need to look at the new opportunities in the new economy. Some jobs will be displaced, so we need to ensure that we are skilling up our workforce for other opportunities in our new economy, be it data science or green jobs with the green jobs taskforce. Recently, in Hull, there were 3,000 new jobs in the wind turbine sector with a starting salary of £32,000, which illustrates the potential for green jobs in our economy. So although jobs might be displaced, others, hopefully better-paid jobs will replace them. We want a higher-wage, higher-skilled economy.

The Government are also supporting 16 centres for doctoral training, backed by an initial £100 million, delivering 1,000 PhDs. We expanded that programme with a further £117 million at the recent launch of the Government’s science and technology framework. Last year, we invested an additional £17 million in AI and data science postgraduate conversion courses and scholarships to increase the diversity of the tech workforce, on top of the £13 million that has been invested in the programme since 2019-20. We also invested £46 million to support the Turing AI fellowships to attract the best and brightest AI talent to work in the UK.

The point about protections for workers’ rights was raised by many Members in the debate, not least the hon. Members for Gordon (Richard Thomson) and for Birkenhead; the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders); and my hon. Friends the Members for Folkestone and Hythe and for Watford. It is important to see the Government’s position on workers’ rights here. We are bolstering workers’ rights, raising the national living wage, with the highest increase on record—a near 10% increase—and six private Members’ Bills that increase workers’ rights, including on flexible working and other issues. There is also the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Bill, which is the favourite Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Watford, who was its sponsor prior to becoming the Minister.

On the concerns many raised about workplace monitoring, we are committed to protecting workers. A number of laws are already in place that apply to the use of AI and data-driven technology in the workplace, including in decision making, which was raised by the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston. The Equality Act 2010 already requires employers and service providers not to discriminate against employees, job applicants and customers. That includes discrimination through actions taken as a result of an algorithm or a similar artificial intelligence mechanism. Tackling discrimination in AI is a major strand of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s three-year strategy. Existing data protection legislation protects workers where personal data is involved, and that is one aspect of existing regulation on the development of AI systems and other technologies.

Reforms as part of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill will cast article 22 of the UK GDPR as a right to specific safeguards, rather than as a general prohibition on solely automated decision making. These rights ensure that data subjects are informed about, and can seek human review of, significant decisions that are taken about them solely through automated means, which was a point raised by the shadow Minister. Employment law also offers protections. The Employment Rights Act 1996 provides that employees with two years of continuous service are protected from unfair dismissal, which would encompass circumstances where employees’ article 8 and UK GDPR rights have been breached in the algorithm decision-making process that led to the dismissal.

Of course, all good employers—by their very nature—should use human judgment. The best way we can help employers in any workplace is to have a strong jobs market where employers have to compete for employees. That is the kind of market we have delivered in this economy, despite some of the difficulties that surround it.

I once again thank the hon. Member for Birkenhead for tabling this timely and important debate. To be clear again, we have a strong ambition for the UK to become a science and technology superpower, and AI is a key part of that. However, the Government recognise the concerns around these technologies and appreciate that, as with all new technologies, trust has to be built. We will continue to build our understanding of how the employment rights framework operates in an era of increasing AI use. AI has the potential to make an incredibly positive contribution to creating a high-wage, high-skill and high-productivity economy. I very much look forward to seeing the further benefits as matters progress.