CIPD ACE: ‘Training is how we deal with the impact of AI’

Training and reskilling is the best response to the growth of artificial intelligence, according to economist Daniel Susskind.

Delivering the keynote at this year’s CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition in Manchester, Susskind argued that organisations and policymakers need to reframe their approach to AI and the skills workers will need in the future.

“People are far more comfortable with the fact technology has an effect on blue collar workers, but less so about its impact on white collar employees,” he said.

“It’s because these things seem more routine and easier to explain than white collar jobs, which we believe require skills such as creativity, judgement and empathy.”

Susskind looked at the impact of previous major technological disruptions on the labour market, reflecting that today we require 40% of the workers to produce more than 2.5 times the manufacturing output.

He also reflected on previous approaches to AI, which assumed that “if you wanted to build a system to outperform a human expert, you needed a human to sit down and explain the problem, to create a set of instructions and rules for that system”.

But this is no longer a reliable approach, he added. Increasingly, tools such as ChatGPT are able to perform a wide variety of tasks and apply judgement – for example in diagnosing cancers – but do so in fundamentally different ways.

“These technologies are using advances in processing power, data storage and algorithmic design,” he said.

“We tend to think about the work people do as monolithic, indivisible lumps of stuff, but actually we perform a wide variety of tasks in our jobs. If we think about the future of work in terms of replacing entire jobs, we get trapped in a mindset that technology destroys or creates entire jobs in an instant.”

“AI might displace us from certain tasks, but it will make other tasks more important,” he added, referring to McKinsey research showing that only 5% of entire jobs will be replaced, but 60% of jobs will have 30% or more of the tasks they involve automated.

Consequently, organisations and governments will need to focus on the sorts of activity that technology cannot do, what he described as “mass redeployment, not mass unemployment”.

“Currently our education system focuses on training people to do things that tech can do already – take the first few years of being a lawyer – it’s all about document assembly and retrieval, which an AI system can do.”

“There’s also a strong cultural presumption that education is something you do at the start of your life. This is a huge mistake. We need to reskill and train people with the same intensity and seriousness [through their career] as we do at the start.”

Tech billionaire and X CEO Elon Musk last week predicted that humans would eventually not need to have jobs thanks to advances in AI, while other sources have predicted that technology could replace millions of jobs.

CEO Peter Cheese echoed Susskind’s sentiments around how organisations should approach AI, thinking about replacing “old jobs” with good work, and treating it with the same urgency as the climate crisis.

CIPD ACE takes place today and tomorrow (8 and 9 November), including sessions focused on the future of work, workplace culture and transforming learning.

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