00:00We've all heard the warnings that artificial intelligence could change work as we know it, and possibly wipe out whole careers.
00:08But what's fact? What's fear? And how much is already happening under the radar?
00:13What does this really mean for the future of work? And what steps should we be thinking about now?
00:18What's very significant in previous versions of the Industrial Revolution I'm talking about, so the original one a couple of hundred years ago,
00:25and indeed even the more recent one in terms of IT, it sort of created new opportunities.
00:30Some people sort of resisted it for understandable reasons, because of course they feared the changes, but it created sort of new opportunities, new jobs.
00:39The real danger of AI, it's going to take away jobs, and from where I'm sort of standing, quite literally, I can't sort of see where the new jobs are going to come from.
00:48While some industries may be more exposed than others, it's not just about job losses.
00:52There's also a growing debate around how AI could reshape the kind of work we do, changing tasks, speeding up decisions, or even altering how we measure productivity altogether.
01:03This revolution, it can cut across all the middle class of the sectors, so previously, and certainly in the sort of the robotics of the sort of the 1980s,
01:11you know, when I was looking at factories then, it was the sort of manuals of workers losing jobs,
01:15because anybody who's been into a modern factory will tell you there are far fewer workers than there would have been sort of certainly a generation or two generations ago.
01:22So this one is going to sort of hit the sort of the blue-collar workers, and indeed the sort of the white-collar workers working in offices.
01:28Their jobs may disappear at a sort of vast rate, and of course there will be sort of social consequences to that.
01:35Researchers looked at how often people are using AI chatbots to help with certain types of work.
01:40The more useful AI is for a job, the more likely it is to be disrupted, but that doesn't always mean it will be replaced.
01:47In some cases, it could mean more investment or expansion instead.
01:50IT was supposed to sort of liberate us, and it has done, but of course it's created other sorts of burdens upon us.
01:57And indeed, of course, the whole point about sort of AI, or at least the sort of the, it's going to be used by sort of the big companies,
02:02they are sort of footloose, they're often sort of based overseas, they get the benefit,
02:06but it's a matter of sort of, you know, where the sort of the benefits that they enjoy,
02:10do we sort of get some of that back through taxation?
02:13So big questions to the governments.
02:14As with any major technological shift, there are questions over how we manage change.
02:19From education to workplace regulation, the decisions made now could determine whether AI becomes a force for good,
02:25or deepens inequality across the job markets.
