The UK must brace itself for significant job displacement as artificial intelligence (AI) continues its rapid ascent, the Governor of the Bank of England has warned.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Andrew Bailey suggested the widespread adoption of AI could mirror the profound societal shifts seen during the Industrial Revolution.
He highlighted that the earlier technological revolution also sparked considerable concerns over its impact on populations and employment.
Mr Bailey said: “As you saw in the industrial revolution, now over time, I think we can now sort of look back and say it didn’t cause mass unemployment, but it did displace people from jobs and this is important.
“My guess would be that it’s most likely that AI may well have a similar effect. So we need to be prepared for that, in a sense.”
Mr Bailey said it would likely be “a lot easier” for people looking for employment to secure a job if they had “training, education, (and) skills” around AI in place.
“We do have to think about, what is it doing to the pipeline of people? Is it changing it or not?” he said.
“I think if it’s people working with AI, I’m not sure it will change the pipeline, but I think we’re right to have a have an eye on that point.”
He added AI’s potential to improve the nation’s economy was “pretty substantial”, but stressed: “How quickly it comes through is another question, history would suggest that it does take some time.”
Microsoft previously identified job roles most at risk of being replaced by AI after assessing more than 200,000 interactions with its Copilot generative AI chatbot.
The workers whose roles were found to have the greatest overlap with AI were interpreters and translators, with 98 per cent of their work activities overlapping with tasks carried out by Copilot, often with a high degree of success.
Other workers who scored highly included historians (91 per cent), mathematicians (91 per cent), writers (85 per cent) and journalists (81 per cent).
