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(Bloomberg) — Technology Secretary Liz Kendall promised to offer training in artificial intelligence for all UK workers as the government seeks to embrace a technology that it said has the potential to boost economic output by £140 billion ($193 billion) a year.
Online courses developed by British industry will be made available to all UK adults to train them in how to use AI tools to draft text, create content and complete administrative tasks, Kendall’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said late Tuesday in a statement. That will free them up to focus on other work, while giving employers confidence in the skills of their employees, it said.
The initiative comes amid increasing warnings about AI’s potential to disrupt the UK workforce. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said last month that the technology will displace workers, even while making the country more productive. Meanwhile research by Morgan Stanley seen by Bloomberg this week showed Britain is losing more jobs than it’s creating due to AI, and at a faster rate than international peers.
“We want AI to work for Britain, and that means ensuring Britons can work with AI,” Kendall said in the statement. “Change is inevitable, but the consequences of change are not. We will protect people from the risks of AI while ensuring everyone can share in its benefits.”
The science department also said it was establishing an AI and the Future of Work Unit to examine the challenges posed by the technology and provide policy advice to address them. DSIT described its plan as the biggest targeted training program since the foundation in the late 1960s of the UK’s Open University, a distance learning higher education establishment. An expansion of efforts that have already delivered 1 million courses, the government aims to train 10 million workers this decade.
Kendall is due to deliver a speech on AI on Wednesday at Bloomberg’s London office, at which she’ll announce new partners including Cisco, Cognizant and the National Health Service as part of the government’s efforts to expand AI training. They’ll join founding partners including Amazon, Barclays, Google, Microsoft, Sage and Salesforce.
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