Future of Work

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Knight on having secured this debate, on introducing it so ably and on his mention of me. Perhaps I ought to say “Sit down at the back there and shut up”, as I used to in Cambridge. It was a very absorbing speech.

I want to discuss the impact of the digital revolution on the future of work. To me, the digital revolution is not technology; therefore I dispute the way it was described. It is technology only in the sense in which electricity is technology. As it is now everywhere, this world is driven, sort of overwhelmed, by data. We are living through a period of change perhaps as profound as the original Industrial Revolution, but which is happening far faster and is much more immediately global. When the telephone was first invented in the 19th century, it took 75 years to reach 50 million people. The first developed smartphone came to market only in 2007, and today there are 2.5 billion smartphones in the world. That is unbelievable. Each of them is far more than a phone. An iPhone 6 is something like 120 million times more powerful than the Apollo computer that sent astronauts to the moon. It is huge algorithmic power—AI, if you like—that is driving the digital revolution and which connects its other two elements, the internet and robotics.

It is very important to set this in context. Machines have been replacing humans for many years in some core sectors of industrial economies. Only just over 1% of workers in Britain are now employed in farming, which was once by far the most dominant occupation in the economy. The widespread use of robotics in manufacturing industry, which dates from about the 1960s, has had a similar effect: 40% of the UK labour force worked in manufacturing in 1950 but that proportion is now down to only 9%, a quite extraordinary statistic. It is only 8% in the United States and, whatever President Trump might say, 85% of those job losses have come from automation.

Britain today is overwhelmingly a white-collar service economy. The issue is that that economy is today in its turn being invaded and radically restructured by the digital revolution, particularly the dramatic changes and advances occurring in AI. What has happened in manufacturing could sweep through whole swathes of the rest of the economy over the next few years, so I would be much less sanguine about this than my noble friend Lord Knight. At the moment, there are high overall levels of employment, even if many jobs are unstable and part-time, especially in the so-called gig economy. What these figures mask is the retreat of work from the lifespan. I am sorry not to be able to quote a dentist; instead I have to quote a famous American economist, Jeffrey Sachs, who has provided an analysis of this. As Sachs says:

“It’s amazing to reflect that for Americans 15 years and over, the average time”,


spent in paid employment,

“each day is now just 3 hours 11 minutes”.

People in jobs,

“average 7 hours and 34 minutes, but only 42.1 percent of Americans 15 and over are at work on an average day”.

I would like to know from the Minister whether he might have comparable figures for this country. We are talking here about the retreat of work from life.

The digital revolution is already starting to transform the legal profession, accountancy, management consultancy, architecture, journalism and many other areas. Andy Haldane, the chief economist—God, I am mentioning another economist—of the Bank of England, has calculated that 15 million jobs in the UK, roughly half of all jobs, are under threat from automation as AI and robotics advance. We have to remember that this is against the backdrop of the massive retreat of manufacturing work and agriculture. Today’s smart machines are replacing not only brawn but brains, and this process is accelerating. Rather differently from what my noble friend said, we just do not know at this point how far new jobs will be created to replace them, whether there will be a sustained growth in unemployment or even whether humanity will win what has been called the “race against the machine”.

We are very much in unknown territory. As we seek to analyse the implications, we must avoid the old chestnut that following periods of innovation new jobs have always been created, and that the same must therefore happen again. Active state intervention is needed at this point to track trends and set up proactive policies for a new world that is emerging at helter-skelter pace. New thinking will be needed across the spectrum, from secondary and higher education through to healthcare and other areas of benefits, which should be restructured to follow workers, not jobs. I know I have to finish but I cannot emphasise enough that this is unknown territory, and against this backdrop I still have my reservations about the Government’s approach to higher education, where many students might be incurring huge debts for jobs that simply might not exist down the line.