Artificial Intelligence and the Labour Market

[Dame Maria Miller in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the labour market.

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Maria. I am grateful to all hon. Friends and Members who have taken the time to participate in this important debate. It is a particular pleasure to see my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) in his place. I wish to draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence technology poses a severe threat to the labour market and to workers’ rights. The negative effect of AI on the workforce cannot be ignored, as it has the potential to displace jobs, lead to economic inequality and erode the rights of workers. AI has the capability to automate jobs and various industries, which could result in widespread unemployment and exacerbate existing socioeconomic disparities. Low-skilled workers, who are already vulnerable to exploitation, are likely to be the most impacted, leading to a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Furthermore, the implementation of AI in the workplace could result in the violation of workers’ rights such as privacy, autonomy and fair pay. The use of AI to monitor and control workers could lead to increased exploitation, discrimination and the creation of a toxic work environment. If left unchecked, the rise of AI could lead to a future where workers are replaced by machines, and human dignity is sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits. The deployment of AI in the workplace must be accompanied by strong regulations and policies that prioritise the wellbeing and rights of workers.

Governments and companies must take responsibility for the harmful impact of AI on the labour market and take immediate action to prevent its negative effects. Failure to do so would result in an irreparable loss of jobs, economic inequality and a violation of workers’ basic rights.

For Members who have heard me speak before in this House, that introduction must have felt unusually stilted, or perhaps uncharacteristically eloquent. That is because it was written entirely by ChatGPT—one of a number of increasingly sophisticated AI chatbots that have become readily accessible in the past few months. At this point, let me reassure my parliamentary researcher, who is watching this debate, that he does not need to worry about his P45—yet. The unusual distinction of being the first Member of Parliament to openly read AI-generated text into Hansard belongs to the hon. Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans). Like him, I have chosen to turn to one of the most widely used AI-powered technologies to illustrate the rapid advances taking place in the field of artificial intelligence, and the potentially devastating consequences that this could have on workers in every sector of the economy.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making an impressive speech and extremely good points about the welfare of workers. As a union rep, I agree that we must have safeguards around AI developments. Does he agree that in order to make this new technology available to all, we should seek to level up across the UK and ensure that coding opportunities and the jobs of the future are available to young people in all areas, including deprived areas?

The hon. Member makes a good point. When it comes to AI, all workers need protections.

Research by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that AI will be responsible for 46% of the UK’s long-term output growth. It promises job creation in sectors such as health, education, and science and technology. At the same time, it threatens devastating job losses in sectors such as manufacturing, transport and public administration. Some 7% of all UK jobs could be automated away within the next five years, and as many as 30% could disappear within 20 years.

The last time we experienced systemic economic displacement on anything like that scale was during the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and 1990s. The architects of that policy believed that nothing should be done to support those communities that carried the cost of the economic and social fallout, the legacy of which my constituency of Birkenhead continues to live with to this day. They followed the ancient mantra that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. We must not repeat that mistake again. I have called today’s debate to make an urgent plea for a rights-based and people-focused approach to artificial intelligence, and for a process that puts the voices and interests of workers at its heart. In this new machine age, we must assert more than ever the fundamental right of all people to a basic level of economic security and dignity at work.

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, much of which I support. It is not controversial to suggest that the NHS would benefit from more doctors or that digital tech has the potential to improve people’s lives. The Health and Social Care Committee has been looking at both of those issues. As part of one of its inquiries, the Committee went to San Francisco about a month ago to look at how AI can help in medicine. We found that computers can be taught to read mammograms of breast screening tests. That means that, rather than having to be read by two independent doctors, the mammograms can be read by one doctor and one computer. Apparently, the process is more accurate than one involving two computers or, indeed, two doctors. Therefore, AI has the potential not just to cause the workforce issues raised by the hon. Gentleman, but to benefit areas with workforce shortages.

I thank the hon. Member for those points. I have already said that we must embrace AI and what it does for us. We are not here to stop progress, but my point is that the Government need to build in regulatory rights and protections.

The benefits of this new technological revolution must be shared by everyone, not just an elite few. I do not claim to have the answers to a challenge of such enormous magnitude—I look forward to hearing hon. Members’ thoughts in a few moments’ time—but a starting point must surely be guaranteeing support to those sectors and communities that will be most affected by the threat and reality of economic displacement. That means strengthening our collective social security net and seriously considering the role that a universal basic income might play in ensuring a decent standard of living in a labour market increasingly characterised by job scarcity. It means investing in skills and lifelong learning, ensuring that workers whose employment is lost to AI have the opportunity to find well-paid and similarly rewarding work.

In any democracy we have to recognise that technology is never ideologically neutral. Every technological system reflects the interests and biases of its creators and funders. Our challenge is to ensure that AI technologies reflect a multiplicity of voices, including those of workers, and not just in their application but in their conception and design as well. I hope we will continue to discuss how we can achieve that.

A people-focused approach to AI must also mean doing more to guarantee the rights of those workers who are already working alongside artificial intelligence and related technologies in their workplace. The AI working group set up by the Trades Union Congress surveyed thousands of workers in producing its report on the worker experience of AI and associated technologies. It shows vividly how workers are increasingly managed by machines, how their rights and autonomy are being steadily eroded, and how automated processes often perpetuate human prejudice when making decisions on employees’ performance, hiring and promotions.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Dame Maria, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), both on securing this very important debate and on his excellent speech.

Artificial intelligence is an enabling technology. It is driving the digital age, but it is based on a series of points of data that are gathered by computer systems and processed in order to make decisions. It still requires a huge amount of human intervention in determining what data will be drawn on and therefore what decisions should be made. Consequently, there has to be a level of human responsibility, as well.

We can see already from the development of AI that it is not just question of computer systems learning from existing patterns of behaviour; they are also effectively thinking for themselves. The development of AI in chess is a good example of that. Not only are AI systems learning to make the moves that a human would make, always selecting the perfect combination and, therefore, being much more successful. When given the command to win the game, AI systems have also developed ways of playing that are unique, that the human mind has not thought of or popularised, and that are yet more efficient at winning. That is very interesting for those interested in chess. Perhaps not everyone is interested in chess, but that shows the power of AI to make autonomous decisions, based on data and information it is given. Humans invented the game of chess, but AI can learn to play it in ways not thought of by humans.

The application of AI in the defence space is even more scary, as touched on by the hon. Member for Birkenhead. AI-enabled weapons systems can be aggressive, make decisions quickly and behave in unpredictable ways. The human strategist is not able to keep pace with them and we would require AI-driven defence systems to protect ourselves from them. It would be alarming to live in a world where aggressive technology driven by AI can be combatted only by AI, with no human intervention in the process. It is scary to think of a security situation, like the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s, where the strategies are pursued solely by AI. Therefore, we will have to think as we do in other areas of warfare, where we have bans on certain types of chemical weapons. There are certain systems that are considered so potentially devastating that they will not be used—there are moratoriums on their use and deployment. When thinking about AI in the defence space, we may well have to consider what security to build into it as well. We also need to think about the responsibility of companies that develop AI systems just for their commercial interests. What responsibility lies on them for the systems that they have created?

It is a privilege to speak in this debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) for securing it. I wanted to apply for it myself—he beat me to the chase, which is a wonderful thing.

Before I became an MP, one of my final clients was in the AI space. It dealt with artificial intelligence and psychology—I believe that my first entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests was my final bit of work for it—so I have seen this technology evolve over many years. We often talk about technology revolutions, but this has been an incredibly fast evolution.

We are seeing Moore’s law, which related to the size and scale of technology, affect society. The scale of what is happening right now is both inspirationally amazing and terrifying at the same time. It will absolutely shape the job market and the type of jobs that come through over the next few years. It will shape how people interface with their co-workers, with technology, with society and with politicians. It will affect every aspect of our lives.

I am particularly concerned about the use of artificial intelligence for deception. I have long said—not necessarily in the Chamber, so I put it on the record now—that there should be in law something that I would call the Turing clause. It would mean that when technology is used to deceive somebody into believing that they are talking to a real person or engaging with a real business, whether for entertainment or for any other purpose—for instance watching a deepfake, which is perhaps for entertainment purposes—it must be crystal clear to them that they are being deceived.

I will give some examples. I was recently speaking to somebody who works in the entertainment industry, running studios where they record sound, voiceovers and music. They said—I should declare that I do not know the scale of this issue and have not looked into the numbers—that lot of the studios are often being used to record voiceovers for AI companies, so that the AI can learn how to speak like a real person. We all know about fraud and scams in which somebody gets phoned up from a call centre and told, “Your insurance is up,” or by someone pretending to be from the Government. We saw, awfully, during the covid crisis how those horrible people would try to scam people. Doing that requires a number of people in a space.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making those extremely important points. Just last week, we had the Children’s Parliament at the all-party parliamentary group on the metaverse and web 3.0. The children were excited about the opportunities of AI and the metaverse, and we were told on the day that the World Economic Forum predicts that technology will create 97 million new jobs by 2025 alone. But like the hon. Gentleman, they were also very concerned about what is real and what is not, and they were concerned about the mental health impact of spending much of the day in an altered reality setting. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need much more research into the mental health impact on staff and young people who are engaged in AI?

I thank the hon. Member for her comments. Mental health is a passion of mine—I had a ten-minute rule Bill about ensuring that mental health first aiders are in the workplace—and I agree wholeheartedly. We saw that in evidence given to the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee; Rio Ferdinand talked, including in his documentary, about the fact that what is said online can affect a person’s real life. The challenge with artificial intelligence is that it will not just be able to say those things; it will probably know precisely how to do the most harm, how to hit the right triggers to make people buy things and how to fool and deceive people to ensure they hand over money or their rights.

I will move on because I am conscious of time. I know we have quite a long time for this debate, but I do not intend to use it all; I promise. I think that the creativity part is absolutely essential. A few weeks ago, I predicted in Parliament that, in the next year or so, a No. 1 song will be created by artificial intelligence for the first time. I have no doubt that a No. 1 bestselling book will be written by artificial intelligence. I have no doubt that new songs in the voices of artists who are no longer around, such as Elvis Presley, will be released, and that actors who are sadly no longer alive will play starring roles in new films. We are seeing this already on a soft scale, but it is going to become more and more pervasive.

It is not all negative. I do not want to be a doomsayer. There are great opportunities: Britain—this wonderful country—could be the home of identifying and delivering transparency within those industries. We could be the country that creates the technology and the platforms to identify where artificial intelligence is being used; it could flag up when things are not real. It could, for example, force organisations to say who they are, what they are doing and whether they have used artificial intelligence. I think that will create a whole new world of labour markets and industries that will stem from this country and create all the jobs that we talked about earlier.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Dame Maria, and to take part in this particularly timely debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) on securing it.

I begin by declaring a rather tenuous interest—a constituency interest of sorts—regarding the computing pioneer Alan Turing. The Turing family held the baronetcy of Foveran, which is a parish in my constituency between the north of Aberdeen and Ellon. Although there is no evidence that Alan Turing ever actually visited, it is a connection that the area clings to as fastly as it can.

Alan Turing, of course, developed what we now know as the Turing test—a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. One of the developments to come closest to that in recent times is, of course, ChatGPT, which several speakers have mentioned already. It is a natural-language processing tool driven by AI technology, which has the ability to generate text and interact with humans.

The hon. Member for Birkenhead was a bit braver than I was; I only toyed with the idea of using ChatGPT to produce some of my speech today. However, I was put off somewhat by a very good friend of mine, with an IT background, using the ChatGPT interface to produce a biography of me. He then shared it with his friendship group on Facebook.

I think it is fair to say that it shows up clearly that if ChatGPT does not know the answer to something, it will fill the gap by making up something that it thinks will sound plausible. In that sense, it is maybe no different from your average Cabinet Minister. However, that does mean that, in subject areas where the data on which it is drawing is rather scant, things can get quite interesting and inventive.

The hon. Gentleman makes an incredibly important point. When AI systems such as that are asked questions that they do not know, rather than responding, “I don’t know,” they just make something up. A human is therefore required to understand whether what they are being showed is correct. The hon. Gentleman knows his own biography better than ChatGPT does, but someone else may not.

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. He has perhaps read ahead towards the conclusion of my speech, but it is an interesting dichotomy. Obviously, I know my biography best, but there are people out there, not in the AI world—Wikipedia editors, for example—who think that they know my biography better than I do in some respects.

However, to give the example, the biography generated by AI said that I had been a director at the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, and, prior to that, I had been a senior manager at the National Trust for Scotland. I had also apparently served in the Royal Air Force. None of that is true, but, on one level, it does make me want to meet this other Richard Thomson who exists out there. He has clearly had a far more interesting life than I have had to date.

Although that level of misinformation is relatively benign, it does show the dangers that can be presented by the manipulation of the information space, and I think that the increasing use and application of AI raises some significant and challenging ethical questions.

Any computing system is based on the premise of input, process and output. Therefore, great confidence is needed when it comes to the quality of information that goes in—on which the outputs are based—as well as the algorithms used to extrapolate from that information to create the output, the purpose for which the output is then used, the impact it goes on to have, and, indeed, the level of human oversight at the end.

In March, Goldman Sachs published a report indicating that AI could replace up to 300 million full-time equivalent jobs and a quarter of all the work tasks in the US and Europe. It found that some 46% of administrative tasks and even 44% in the legal professions could be automated. GPT-4 recently managed to pass the US Bar exam, which is perhaps less a sign of machine intelligence than of the fact that the US Bar exam is not a fantastic test of AI capabilities—although I am sure it is a fantastic test of lawyers in the States.

This is one point—and a concern of mine—that I did not explore in my speech because I was conscious of its length. As has been pointed out, a speech has been given previously that was written by artificial intelligence, as has a question in Parliament. We politicians rely on academic research and on the Library. We also google and meet people to inform our discussions and debates. I will keep going on about my Turing clause—which connects to the hon. Gentleman’s point—because I am concerned that if we do not have something like that to highlight a deception, there is a risk that politicians will go into debates or votes that affect the government of this country having been deceived—potentially on purpose, by bad actors. That is a real risk, which is why there needs to be transparency. We need something crystal clear that says, “This is deceptive content” or “This has been produced or informed by AI”, to ensure the right and true decisions are being made based on actual fact. That would cover all the issues that have been raised today. Does the hon. Member share that view?