Read:

What kind of education system do we need to ensure the UK is a technology leader in the future?

Everywhere in the world is going to suffer a shortage of AI know-how. I’d actually argue that the difficult bits to put in place, the UK has a good head start in. But the wider point is understanding the wider importance of this. If you are a UK business who is not in technology, you are going to need to use these kinds of technologies to be competitive. And so, the issue is more an understanding that change is coming and starting to understand that the workforce and the way you go about things are going to have to change. You know, we’ve lived this, we’ve seen offline retailers – bricks and mortars and highstreets - some of them have managed to adapt, some of them put their heads in the sand and didn’t think the change was there – it was inevitable. I think that’s more my concern. But what it comes down to is a couple of things: first of all, we do need to not be squeamish in public policy about education from a point of view of what the country needs, and again we’ve had a very idealistic concept that it was perfectly fine for everyone to study Syrian – important as though the monuments of ancient Baghdad are - actually we need to make sure we’ve got people studying subjects which are very varied, everything from the creative industries to mathematics. That actually will allow our companies to get the staff they need, so we need to be realistic about where the world is going.

That doesn’t mean we need everyone to have a pointy head and do advanced mathematics and machine learning. We don’t, but what we do need is people that are for example more at home with the ideas of probability and risk. The world is moving into one where decisions are made on information in a much more sophisticated way than they ever have, so we have to have people that have some basic understanding of that. For example, you’d be looking at the curriculum in school to make sure that your 15-year-old knows a little more about how to actually evaluate risk. And of course, we’ve all just lived through a great lesson in this with Covid and all these numbers that are flying around and trying to understand what this means for me. And then all the caveats that the scientists put on everything. But what we actually need to understand is that the world is moving to a world where some of these skills are actually important in general. Perhaps those are the kinds of things are more profitable.

And the other side of it is adapting. Realising we have to adapt. The world is going to change. There are a whole range of estimates for the effect of technologies like AI on jobs, and we could have a long debate about what number it is, but its big. And one of the first reactions you see when you see that is ‘heavens that’s going to be disastrous’. But then you look back at the 60s and we had the computer come along and had all those payroll clerks who lost their jobs, but could we have predicted all the IT consultants we have now? So, what it’s about is being adaptable, about understanding there’s going to be change in the workplace and having policies that allow that and allow retraining and allow the skills and assets that people have to be transferred into these new worlds.