Sadiq Khan is to warn in a major speech that artificial intelligence could destroy swathes of jobs in London and \u201cusher in a new era of mass unemployment\u201d unless ministers act now.<\/p>\n
In his annual Mansion House speech, the London<\/a> mayor will say the capital is \u201cat the sharpest edge of change\u201d because of its reliance on white-collar workers in the finance and creative industries, and professional services such as law, accounting, consulting and marketing.<\/p>\n Khan will argue that \u201cwe have a moral, social and economic duty to act\u201d to ensure that new jobs are created to replace those that will disappear, with entry-level and junior jobs the first to go.<\/p>\n In the speech on Thursday night, the mayor plans to highlight research that suggests 70% of skills in the average job will have changed by 2030.<\/p>\n However, he also sees huge potential benefits from AI for public services and productivity across the economy, arguing \u201cAI could enable us to transform our public services, turbocharge productivity and tackle some of our most complex challenges\u201d.<\/p>\n However, he will warn the assembled business leaders that if the technology is used recklessly, it will \u201cusher in a new era of mass unemployment\u201d.<\/p>\n He will say there is a clear choice: \u201cSeize the potential of AI and use it as a superpower for positive transformation and creation or surrender to it and sit back and watch as it becomes a weapon of mass destruction of jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n City Hall is launching a London taskforce on AI and the future of work, with expertise from the government, businesses and the AI sector, to assess the potential impact of the technology on London\u2019s jobs market. It will also offer free AI training for Londoners.<\/p>\n More than half of workers in London expect AI to affect their jobs in some way in the next 12 months, according to City Hall polling.<\/p>\n Across the UK, up to 3m low-skilled jobs in trades, machine operations and admin roles could disappear by 2035<\/a> because of automation and AI, according to a November report by the charity National Foundation for Educational Research.<\/p>\n However, many experts and analysts have expressed mixed views on how many jobs AI could replace. Anthropic, the US AI developer behind the Claude chatbot, released a report on Thursday on the economic impacts of AI that found an increasing share<\/a> of job types can use AI for at least a quarter of their work.<\/p>\n However, it offered a mixed picture on whether AI agents could actually replace human labour, finding that AI has a lower success rate on complex tasks and those requiring a university education. \u201cHuman collaboration and judgment remain essential for knowledge-intensive work,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n