00:00Amazon has announced massive job losses that have been attributed to the rise of artificial
00:05intelligence. The CEO of Amazon has said that we're in the midst of a tech revolution that
00:09could be as big as the Industrial Revolution and it'll certainly be as big as when computers came
00:14in. We asked economics expert Steve McCabe what he thinks this means for society. Amazon, a company
00:21that largely didn't exist 20 years ago, has undoubtedly revolutionized our lives insofar
00:28as we go onto our computers, our phones, wherever we may be and we can order stuff because that's
00:34what we like doing. We get stuff and it's delivered to our doorstep. This has had a massive impact
00:39upon the high street. We see closures on a regular basis and if it doesn't work out for many large
00:45retailers they're going to be going down the tubes in January. Now of course the fact that Amazon
00:49are able to do this, they cut the costs, they pass the cost savings onto us but of course anybody who
00:54remembers the headlines during the summer when Jeff Bezos got married, one of the richest men in the
00:58world. Not the richest but you know he's got many hundreds of billions of pounds. Therefore of course
01:03he can afford to sort of do it because they say that Amazon is making lots of money out of this.
01:07What's really worrying about this is the sort of the fact that we're losing 18,000 jobs. That's 18,000
01:12people who no longer have a livelihood. The difficulty is where they're going to get sort of the jobs from
01:17in the future. Having lectured management for the last 30 odd years, you know I've seen sort of lots of
01:22change and of course we look to history. The industrial revolution, it sort of it did away
01:26with sort of people working in cottages, created factories, cheaper goods allowed people to sort
01:31of to consume more which stimulated further production which meant jobs. The difficulty with
01:36AI it seems to me is that some autonomous intelligence means of course we sort of we we get
01:41certain benefits you know as consumers but where the job's going to come from those people who lose
01:46their jobs in the process. We're already a gig economy, you know we've moved from sort of being a largely
01:51manufacturing sort of base and I know this you know having come from the Midlands. This is a
01:56difficulty and I think the challenge for the government is that they need people to be in work
02:01and in well-paid jobs paying taxes and this is what creates the revenue that allows us to have
02:05sort of a good health service, education, defence and so on and so forth. So it's okay for Amazon to
02:10sort of to talk about the sort of the benefits of AI to them but of course AI if you remember of course
02:15it's a sort of footloose investor. It's you know not largely based in this country of course it doesn't
02:19pay its taxes here so we need to sort of have some degree of control but ultimately we're consumers
02:25we have free choice in this and we like cheap stuff.
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