Sadiq Khan is to warn in a major speech that artificial intelligence could destroy huge numbers of jobs in London and “usher in a new era of mass unemployment” if ministers do not act now.
In his annual Mansion House speech, the Mayor of London will say the capital is “at the sharpest edge of change” due to its reliance on white-collar workers in the finance and creative industries and professional services such as law, accounting, consulting and marketing.
Khan will argue that “we have a moral, social and economic duty to act” to ensure that new jobs are created to replace those that disappear, with entry-level and junior jobs being the first to go.
In Thursday night’s speech, the mayor plans to highlight research that shows 70% of the skills in the average job will change by 2030.
However, he also sees huge potential benefits from AI for public services and productivity in the economy, arguing that “AI can enable us to transform our public services, turbocharge productivity and tackle some of our most complex challenges”.
However, he will warn the gathered business leaders that if the technology is used carelessly, it will “usher in a new era of mass unemployment”.
He would say there is a clear choice: “Seize the potential of AI and harness it as a superpower for positive change and creation or surrender to it and sit back and watch as it becomes a weapon of mass destruction of jobs.”
City Hall is launching a London Taskforce on AI and the Future of Work with expertise from government, businesses and the AI sector to assess the potential impact of the technology on London’s jobs market. It will also provide free AI training for Londoners.
More than half of workers in London expect AI to impact their jobs in some way in the next 12 months, according to City Hall polling.
Across the UK, up to 3 million low-skilled jobs in trades, machine operation and admin roles could disappear by 2035 due to automation and AI, according to a November report from the charity National Foundation for Educational Research.
However, many experts and analysts have expressed mixed views on how many jobs AI could replace. Anthropic, the American AI developer behind cloud chatbots, on Thursday released a report on the economic impacts of AI that found increasing share The types of jobs could use AI for at least a quarter of their work.
However, it presented a mixed picture on whether AI agents can truly replace human labor, finding that AI has low success rates on complex tasks and tasks requiring university education. It states, “Knowledge-intensive work requires human cooperation and judgment.”
Financial research firm Forrester released its own study On the same topic, it found that AI and automation will have a “more modest impact than expected” on American jobs by 2030.
It says the problem is that companies are “over-automating roles due to the AI hype”, which could lead to costly reversals and reputational damage in the future.
“Many companies announcing AI-related layoffs do not have mature, vetted AI applications ready to fill those roles, highlighting the trend of ‘AI washing’ – attributing financially motivated cuts to future AI implementation,” it said.
Khan will argue in his Mansion House speech that Britain and other countries have been too slow to respond to new technology in the past and that the growth of social media has led to mental health crises among young people, an increase in online abuse and an alarming increase in misinformation.
Separately, City of London Mayor Susan Langley said Thursday morning that she had noticed some finance workers were wary of coming to London from abroad because they were concerned about their safety.
However, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The City of London is one of the safest cities in the world. There is a perception that you would walk out of your office and be swept away by a tsunami of crime.
“This is completely wrong. The competition for investment is really fierce at the moment, and I think any kind of unfounded negative sentiment being spread there really risks undermining the UK on the global stage, and we can’t let that happen.”
