This means Britain is doing better, not worse, from AI
It would help if everyone could get this right:
The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of artificial intelligence and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests.
British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% – the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley.
The research, which was shared with Bloomberg, surveyed companies using AI for at least a year across five industries: consumer staples and retail, real estate, transport, healthcare equipment and cars.
It found that British businesses reported an average 11.5% increase in productivity aided by AI. US businesses reported similar gains, but created more jobs than they cut.
The entire point of AI - or any other form of mechanisation - is that we require less human labour to perform any given set of tasks. This is “increasing labour productivity” and is an unalloyed good thing. Thus the UK destroying jobs - which are, recall, costs not benefits - by the use of AI is one of those good things. Unalloyedly so.
The problem, obviously, comes in what that now surplus labour goes on to do. In the US it is being employed to do more and other things. The US economy is growing because that freeing up of labour from one task allows others to be performed - the place is richer by the value of those new and or more things being done. Our problem here in Britain is that the new work is not being undertaken with that now surplus labour.
That is, the problem is not AI - that good thing - but the ability of people to set up and do new things, or more of old things. It’s the bureaucracy, stupid!
Abolish the laws, strictures and permissions that prevent people from redeploying labour and we’ll all get richer - just as the US is. Plus, obviously, once we’ve fired the bureaucrats they too can be set to productive tasks instead.
Tim Worstall