a post by Adam Corlett for the Resolution Foundation blog
Talk of looming automation, AI and robots is pervasive in public policy chat – including in the government’s new industrial strategy. Almost as common are projections that the weak growth of the past decade is here to stay – including in the latest official economic outlook. Sometimes these assumptions are even mentioned in the same breath. But these forecasts can’t both be right, and one outcome is definitely preferable to the other.
In the ‘robots’ view of the next ten or twenty years, machine learning will allow many jobs or tasks to be automated; from driving taxis to diagnosing disease and from cashiers to translators. And it’s not just AI. Greater physical capability could mean ubiquitous flying drones, robots on construction sites and the continued mechanisation of manufacturing. The new industrial strategy argues that “the world is undergoing a technological revolution… of a scale, speed and complexity that is unprecedented”. Similarly, Labour’s Future of Work Commission states that “both the scope and pace of the current technological revolution are likely to be at least as great as any that has gone before.”
But at the same time the government’s independent economic forecasters, the Office for Budget Responsibility, have downgraded their forecast for growth in productivity – or how much the country produces compared to the total number of hours worked by humans. Crucially, their projections are based not on expectations about future technology but purely on what past trends would suggest.
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