The thing is, it is certainly possible that AI will mean that the UK’s demand for labour will plummet but….that would involve us all becoming much, much poorer?
Replies
I have one simple populist solution. And Worzel Gummidge hair 🤦♀️
aug 7, 2025, 7:22 am • 0 0 • view
Will demand for labour plummet? Certainly AI tools will make many workers more efficient and mean fewer needed but plummet is a massive exaggeration
aug 6, 2025, 5:18 pm • 0 0 • view
The only persons job I’m currently convinced ChatGPT will be taking is Boris Johnson’s…
aug 6, 2025, 5:40 pm • 0 0 • view
The absolute state of the “man”
aug 6, 2025, 5:21 pm • 0 0 • view
I look forward to AI doing home physiotherapy visits and absolutely boggle at the idea of an algorithm explaining to a dozen 14 year old why they should stop drinking and kicking the shit out of that bus shelter.
aug 6, 2025, 6:45 pm • 2 0 • view
Yeah, but they're probably comfortable with that
aug 6, 2025, 8:41 pm • 0 0 • view
Intermittently you’ll see the “maybe AI will solve it?” from politicians in the “I just think that the numbers have to go down somehow and that we can’t persuade voters on it” camp and it’s…a truly terrible solution!
aug 6, 2025, 5:15 pm • 52 3 • view
The usual version is just the “white collar jobs will vanish” - a catastrophic event for most households. This is the even more “have you thought the political economy of this through at all?” version of “all jobs will vanish”.
aug 6, 2025, 5:59 pm • 40 3 • view
The Star Trek nerd feels at pains to point out that, at the point at which this fabled sentient AI comes into we’ll have bigger problems over whether said AI is sentient/should have employment rights and the gazillion other legal/ethical considerations
aug 6, 2025, 6:08 pm • 1 0 • view
I’ve decided to take comfort in the fact that you can find identical truisms in speeches given by Nineties politicians about the rise of the Internet.
aug 6, 2025, 6:10 pm • 4 0 • view
Fully Automated Luxury Borisism
aug 6, 2025, 6:03 pm • 2 0 • view
Fully Luxurious Automated Borisism. For the acronym.
aug 6, 2025, 6:06 pm • 7 0 • view
Related: don't know if it's just the hair, but he's looking even more like that other guy than ever. You know the one.
aug 6, 2025, 6:48 pm • 0 0 • view
Politicians like AI because they see it as yet another opportunity for them to avoid making tough decisions.
aug 7, 2025, 7:16 am • 0 0 • view
Maybe AI and ChatGPT will rid us of politicians and journalists who can then be redeployed to something useful and adding value😜
aug 6, 2025, 6:03 pm • 1 0 • view
I’d had thought Johnson would be pretty easy to replace with a Chat bot. Indeed hearing some of his utterances, I sometimes think he has been.
aug 6, 2025, 6:11 pm • 5 0 • view
Not so easy to replace Johnson with Artificial Intelligence - Artificial Stupidity is more like the answer.
aug 6, 2025, 10:22 pm • 2 0 • view
That's not a given. In theory if all the work can be done with far fewer people then *in principle* prosperity can be the same with far more leisure. The 'but' is of course that in our present systems all would flow to the owners of capital and would have to be pried fairly ruthlessly from them.
aug 6, 2025, 6:23 pm • 1 0 • view
If your example pans out, it's then white collar workers who are doing less for the same pay. To blue collar workers, white collar workers would become the workshy wealthy skimming off society. It only works if everyone benefits equally and I can't see how that could happen.
aug 6, 2025, 6:47 pm • 2 0 • view
Their overselling of AI 1) reveals who owns them 2) reveals their desperation for the venture capital money to keep pouring in to this semi-failure of a technology 3) reveals their need to keep the hype & propaganda going to sell to govts & corporations.
aug 6, 2025, 6:03 pm • 2 0 • view
They can wave goodbye to student loans being repaid. And that was already a gaping black hole in waiting...
aug 6, 2025, 6:07 pm • 0 0 • view
It’s a deeply unserious attitude to economic life masquerading as seriousness Part of the problem is that CEOs are reflecting this back at them and expecting them
aug 6, 2025, 7:22 pm • 1 0 • view
I used to work in social care, and still work in a somewhat related field. AI will not solve anything there for a long, long time. Maybe workers who don't speak English well could do a bit better on admin with AI, but these jobs are mostly not admin and the data you need to train AI on conversations
aug 6, 2025, 11:32 pm • 2 0 • view
with real service users will not be easy to get. I would be very surprised if a single frontline social care job could go to an AI in the next 10 years.
aug 6, 2025, 11:32 pm • 1 0 • view
I can only assume, if his pitch is 'crushing endless and inescapable poverty for everyone!', that he's not planning on a comeback?
aug 6, 2025, 6:01 pm • 0 0 • view
Some old white collar jobs disappear, while some brand new ones appear for people who use the new technology. *Potentially* we could become more efficient and productive... but don't worry. Like spreadsheets and email, it's just as feasible to create new forms of inefficiency and mismanagement.
aug 6, 2025, 7:20 pm • 1 0 • view
There is no "labour saving device" that can't be embedded in a completely inefficient set of working practices.
aug 6, 2025, 7:21 pm • 1 0 • view
The jet engine made aircraft faster but there were still lots of design choices that could be made badly.
aug 6, 2025, 7:26 pm • 0 0 • view
We will simply ask our AI personal assistants for advice on how to pay the mortgage and they will solve the problem.
aug 6, 2025, 6:01 pm • 0 0 • view
"no no don't worry, they'll just free up everyone to do the difficult bits of their jobs more efficiently!" she said, with the air of someone trying to desperately meet a set of fiscal rules
aug 6, 2025, 6:02 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm old enough to remember when the same guy said 'computers will solve Brexit'
aug 6, 2025, 5:30 pm • 2 0 • view
Ah yes. Compared the British border in Ireland with the congestion charging boundary
aug 6, 2025, 5:39 pm • 2 0 • view
Also, even in the most optimistic case, chatGPT can't wipe peoples arses!
aug 6, 2025, 5:26 pm • 1 0 • view
no, but it's going to make computer programmers, research scientists, lawyers and accountants redundant, and their next job could be in care
aug 6, 2025, 6:10 pm • 1 0 • view
Its huge sell sign for the technology in terms of being that useful to most people or being a net good for our society outside of a few industries (medical and scientific research, etc)
aug 6, 2025, 5:36 pm • 0 0 • view
'ChatGPT is going to revolutionise this thing i find difficult or annoying*' *Taking care of people.
aug 6, 2025, 5:41 pm • 0 0 • view
Stephen, Stephen - be pragmatic! Now we *know* that voters hate immigration. That's been established. But mass impoverishment? Nobody knows which way they'll jump on that.
aug 6, 2025, 5:18 pm • 33 3 • view
I do enjoy how occasionally you’ll see a Labour type who has boiled their brain with too much polling or too much Internet basically saying this non-ironically.
aug 6, 2025, 5:34 pm • 14 0 • view
I’d be less bothered about the consequences of morons voting if it didn’t directly affect me as well. I’m not particularly bothered if people decide to actively impoverish themselves, I draw the line at myself though. On our current path we’re going to end up voting stupidly on immigration
aug 6, 2025, 5:47 pm • 1 0 • view
Can we just do 'part-time' impoverishment?, say Wednesday and Thursday, to see how we like it, think Ted Heath tried that once.
aug 6, 2025, 5:51 pm • 2 0 • view
The thing that I find maddening is that we’ve already had our child touching the hot stove moment despite being told it’s hot.When you poll the country on it you have a strong majority of people saying we shouldn’t have done it.Yet we have a wedge of people convinced it won’t be hot this time around
aug 6, 2025, 6:02 pm • 2 0 • view
And that wedge appear to be the only ones that anyone in the media (certainly on the right) ever talk to
aug 6, 2025, 6:07 pm • 2 0 • view
Always remember, the part of the population that owns and run everything, let's call them the elites, predominantly went to private school and had severe mummy/nanny issues during childhood, a bit of masochism doesn't bother them, they just like to share it with the rest of us, occasionally.
aug 6, 2025, 6:26 pm • 0 0 • view
FFS Stephen. How many more times must I link my rambling apologia before you stop making fun of me itcouldbesaid.substack.com/p/it-could-b... 😜 Oh...you mean the actual labour types...the ones who still somehow think they're not speedrunning Bidenism with a side order of Macronism
aug 6, 2025, 5:41 pm • 2 1 • view
The p-word is a red flag that you're about to hear something so hugely insanely ideological that it's too big even to see the curvature.
aug 6, 2025, 5:51 pm • 2 0 • view
After so many years in the Brexit wars, it makes sense. Brexit was basically a vote to risk more impoverishment for less immigration. The fact that it ended up offering a bit more poverty and a lot more immigration was a bit of a surprise, no?
aug 6, 2025, 6:18 pm • 1 0 • view
Not like Boris Johnson to cheer on something which will obviously make the UK significantly poorer.
aug 7, 2025, 8:17 am • 0 0 • view
50% of AI in healthcare is deployed in radiology, its useful but demand for radiologists has gone up. It's complicated. AI is useful. True Hyperscaling LLMs to AGI has failed. Also true.
aug 6, 2025, 8:03 pm • 0 0 • view
I just don’t think I’d be brave enough to suggest ChatGPT as the future if I were delivering a badly thought through speech that was clearly flung together in a hurry and I was being vastly overpaid for.
aug 6, 2025, 5:23 pm • 6 0 • view
Whats the over under on Chat GPT writing the speech though?
aug 6, 2025, 5:30 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm not QUITE convinced that AI is yet at the stage to help people get dressed.
aug 6, 2025, 5:38 pm • 1 0 • view
The things about AI and policy opinion even so called leaders like this is that many don’t know what they are talking about. It shows how the question of technology is not systematically studied and read about.
aug 6, 2025, 11:11 pm • 0 0 • view
Which would likely increase the need for social care workers right?
aug 6, 2025, 5:21 pm • 1 0 • view
…which goes to show there are still people willing to listen to Johnson’s BS.
aug 6, 2025, 7:27 pm • 0 0 • view
Somehow I’d forgotten he was like this.
aug 6, 2025, 5:15 pm • 3 0 • view
Apologies.
aug 6, 2025, 5:15 pm • 3 0 • view
In many ways it’s a mercy he was out of office before generative AI emerged into public consciousness. He’d have loved it. A ready-made solution there to ensure no tricky policy problem ever had to be properly interrogated or trade-offs considered.
aug 6, 2025, 5:20 pm • 6 0 • view
Good news on that front is that robotics is *nowhere near* the point that it will help with social care right now. Leading robotics companies are currently trying to show that they can 'move toy animal from chair to table'. aihabitat.org/challenge/20...
aug 7, 2025, 7:49 am • 0 0 • view
Also it's just mental. Social care, especially elder social care, is plainly not replaceable with chatgpt. What planet are these people living on.
aug 6, 2025, 5:57 pm • 14 0 • view
The same one as Tony Blair?
aug 6, 2025, 5:58 pm • 1 0 • view
Yes. GPT is mostly crap. We’ve implemented hundreds of use-case that failed to deliver FTE reductions for many private firms. It’s still immature technology riding the hype-cycle. Non-AI tech is still delivering better automation. Demand for labour will continue to increase in service sectors.
aug 7, 2025, 12:10 am • 1 0 • view
I think Social care workers will be the last to be replaced by technology. The tasks are physically complicated to perform and the homes/client needs and challenges are varied; the need for Soft social skills and social contact by clients would need require advanced AI/robots. Tyrell corporation?
aug 6, 2025, 5:27 pm • 1 0 • view
I'd love to see chatgpt give someone personal care. Would it look like this?
aug 6, 2025, 8:11 pm • 0 0 • view
ChatGPT is not going to change adult diapers, wash bedlinen, scrub floors or distribute medicine to those challenged by Alzheimer's. The Roombas aren't ready to that yet either. So we'll need humans from somewhere.
aug 7, 2025, 5:20 am • 0 0 • view
People who claim jobs can be replaced by AI, are normally telling us more about their relationship to their own jobs than they realise.
aug 6, 2025, 6:09 pm • 3 0 • view
I guess that Johnson feels an affinity with Chat GPT as neither is capable of self-awareness and both are likely to spout a load of nonsense (which shouldn't be surprising, as neither understands anything). Both also hoover up enormous amounts of money and energy for little perceivable benefit.
aug 6, 2025, 8:11 pm • 0 0 • view
When we have 10 million people going hungry we can have a revolution
aug 6, 2025, 6:06 pm • 0 0 • view
You can tell he’s getting desperate for attention by the state of his Barnet - the more ridiculous it gets, the more needy he is.
aug 6, 2025, 5:17 pm • 0 0 • view
🤮
aug 6, 2025, 5:29 pm • 0 0 • view
Listen, for years they have visibly had no answer to "How do you actually support an aging population without immigration?" and now they have a Thing To Say, it seems unfair to critique whether it would actually work or not
aug 6, 2025, 5:24 pm • 15 2 • view
I think (as you might have guessed) this is a useful framework for thinking through this sort of thing. All about working out displacement vs compensation effects. FWIW - labour bargaining power is higher today than a decade ago when I wrote this. www.ft.com/content/e990...
aug 6, 2025, 6:02 pm • 7 2 • view
That does seem to be the explicit pitch to CEOs from a lot of tech companies - untold wealth for some, impoverishment for others.
aug 6, 2025, 5:44 pm • 7 1 • view
Can't see any flaws in that plan! Ruling above a pryamid of misery has never famously gone very, very wrong for those at the top.
aug 6, 2025, 5:45 pm • 6 0 • view
Coming from the people who claimed that in “just a few years” a new technology that no one is currently working on, will be able to determine the contents of a lorry crossing from Fermanagh into Cavan and determine its final destination
aug 7, 2025, 7:29 am • 1 0 • view
Alternatively ChatGPT learns the deadly joke from Monty Python and starts deploying it against social care residents
aug 6, 2025, 5:38 pm • 3 0 • view
As someone who has worked in care provision and elderly psychiatric care, I can confidently say that the only people who are actually good at it are the people who have gone into it because it's what they want to do.
aug 6, 2025, 8:05 pm • 42 2 • view
It's indicative of the regard in which they hold this field of work, that people like Johnson think anybody made desperate for a job will do this particular job just fine.
aug 6, 2025, 8:07 pm • 17 1 • view
He has no idea of what’s involved, has he?
aug 6, 2025, 8:36 pm • 1 0 • view
And, of course, the regard they hold towards the recipients of such care.
aug 6, 2025, 8:08 pm • 14 0 • view
How, precisely, does any kind of AI or robot comfort a demented elderly person while it wipes their bottom?
aug 6, 2025, 6:40 pm • 2 0 • view
No Chatbot is going to take a 90 year old to the toilet
aug 6, 2025, 5:16 pm • 6 0 • view
But it might take the job of someone who will!
aug 6, 2025, 5:17 pm • 7 0 • view
Yes. As I understand it, the argument is that it will do a lot of labour people are currently employed in, freeing them up to be carers. But the point is, unless we are planning to pay carers the money people earn now then uh...lots of people will be a lot poorer!
aug 6, 2025, 5:22 pm • 6 1 • view
But what if we’re built different?
aug 6, 2025, 5:37 pm • 0 0 • view
Quite a lot poorer. So that's not going to popular. Care work is very physical So how does that work with an ageing population?
aug 6, 2025, 5:37 pm • 3 0 • view
It’s an incredibly shitty way to view people & their relationship to the labour market but it’s a correct analysis & for people who currently work in e.g. call centres or retail they won’t necessarily be poorer. In Teesside with huge # call centre jobs & faster aging. Shift is already happening
aug 6, 2025, 6:08 pm • 1 0 • view
Over the life cycle it is a problem, though: only one person working in the care home I know well is above 45. Not true of call centres.
aug 6, 2025, 6:16 pm • 1 0 • view
To be fair. Both the carers have in for mum when neither my dad or I can be around are in their 50s/60s but that's very much at the less demanding end of it. It's simply not a job everyone or even many losing those jobs will be suited to - and would need to entice people to become so.
aug 6, 2025, 6:28 pm • 2 0 • view
And if you are saying "an entire class of jobs is going to be wiped out to the extent there's a huge pool of labour desperate to fill those vacancies" then you have some pretty big economic and social problems to contend with!
aug 6, 2025, 6:35 pm • 0 0 • view
Isn’t it amazing that so far, whenever we’ve reached one of the traditional sci-fi/futurist milestones, which always seem to be binary good/terrible, it’s always been terrible? No post-scarcity paradise for us, oh no. It’s dystopia all the way down.
aug 6, 2025, 6:42 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah. But also. Good luck being the politician who tells people "you're all out of a job, but good news, you'll be so desperate for work you'll be doing a difficult, draining job with more responsibility for less pay."
aug 6, 2025, 6:49 pm • 2 0 • view
I am aged 54. In my working life whole jobs have vanished (typist, clerks) and whole industries (commercial printing wiped out). But other stuff seems to come along...
aug 6, 2025, 6:47 pm • 1 0 • view
The issue also is that while call centre jobs cluster in lower cost areas, care jobs are in person in many areas including high cost ones. So that's going to be a challenge too
aug 6, 2025, 6:34 pm • 2 0 • view
Not to rebut with anecdata but my mum is a care home manager & her staff skews older. The domiciliary carers move to care homes in their 40s, especially those that don’t drive/exclusive car access. Think this is v regional specific tho
aug 6, 2025, 6:26 pm • 2 0 • view
Fair enough - annoyingly I couldn’t find any proper data so I fell back on my anecdote.
aug 6, 2025, 6:52 pm • 1 0 • view
The data on this fucking sucks, which is part of the problem.
aug 6, 2025, 7:11 pm • 2 0 • view
Yes, but that's not what he's advocating (I appreciate you know this). He's advocating using a fictitious invention based on a technology that does something entirely different, and what's more his aspirations for that fiction are entirely bland. An alarm clock can offer a reminder service.
aug 6, 2025, 5:36 pm • 0 0 • view
So the ninety year old sits in their own piss then. Maybe or maybe not shouting at a Chatbot.
aug 6, 2025, 5:19 pm • 0 0 • view
The best you might get is an AI doctor who talks away to them while diagnosing stuff. ChattyGP
aug 6, 2025, 5:19 pm • 0 0 • view
He has literally no idea about this subject. He's no doubt being paid shed loads so just makes up shit. I shouldn't think he's spent a day of his life looking after an elderly or physically frail person. Please someone make him shut up.
aug 6, 2025, 9:23 pm • 0 0 • view
He might have a point if generative AI means that lawyers will have no choice but to get jobs as care workers because robots can write standard contracts fairly competently
aug 6, 2025, 5:24 pm • 0 0 • view
ChatGPT can't flush a toilet.
aug 6, 2025, 5:24 pm • 1 0 • view
Echo other commenters: it’s magical thinking in sci-fi clothing to think that a digital agent (esp an LLM like CGPT) can perform the practical-emotional tasks that constitute caring for needy people. Are we sure BJ isn’t just trying to sound buzzy and clever by chucking "AI" into his ramblings?
aug 6, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
I work for a large care charity and there's no delicate way to say this: Boris Johnson is a contemptible moron and we desperately need more immigrants to fill our vacancies, ChatGPT cannot help in any way.
aug 7, 2025, 11:35 am • 1 0 • view
Also, if so many people are soon to be out of a job, why aren't AI evangelists screaming from the rooftops about us desperately needing UBI?
aug 7, 2025, 11:37 am • 1 0 • view
"ChatGPT will replace middle-management jobs, freeing up a huge workforce who can then move into social care."
aug 7, 2025, 7:48 am • 1 0 • view
Johnson’s carer shouldn’t let him out of the house like that.
aug 7, 2025, 7:20 am • 0 0 • view
ChatGPT can wipe your arse? Where do I sign up?
aug 6, 2025, 5:25 pm • 2 0 • view