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The government must "take seriously the possibility of an unprecedented impact on the jobs market" caused by artificial intelligence (AI), a UK minister has said.
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said there was no evidence so far of an overall reduction in jobs as a result of AI, but one of his priorities was to have a contingency plan in place for worst case scenarios.
"If it's going to hit us in a big way, you are going to want to be as ahead of the curve as possible," he told a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference.
Carsten Jung, of the IPPR think tank, said: "In a worst case scenario you could have about 8 million jobs being negatively affected by this."
Jung said the think tank was working on a "pandemic preparedness" report on AI labour market disruption.
The level of AI adoption by industry was not that high so far and it might not ultimately lead to massive job losses, he said, but he claimed it was still going to have a bigger impact on the labour market than the industrial revolution.
He also admitted that "stark scenarios" the IPPR had produced in 2024 were "to some extent" wrong but, he argued, AI had evolved rapidly since then from doing "boring" tasks to "more high-level reasoning and creative tasks".
"We are not preparing enough for something quite big that's coming," he told the meeting.
According to Jung, about 11% of UK jobs are "highly exposed" to being replaced by AI chatbots, "led by secretarial and administrative occupations".
But with the rise of more sophisticated agentic AI, he argued that the proportion "could rise to about 60% of tasks across the UK economy".
The government needed to be ready to help retrain service sector workers, he argued, but also to bring in measures to "slow down the transition slightly" to keep people in their jobs.
That could involve redesigning tax structures to "make it a bit more attractive to hold on to workers than automating them," he said.
But he warned that "a lot of the policies we might want to do in a really severe disruption scenario will cost a lot of money," particularly as the UK is more of a service-based economy than other G7 nations.
He also said that women were "40% more exposed than men" to the threat of AI because a higher proportion worked in service jobs.
