No jobs in 30 years? UK tech leaders push back on Musk’s AI claims
Elon Musk’s bleak prediction that “there’s not going to be any jobs for anyone” in 30 years has come under heavy fire from some of the UK’s leading AI figures at London Tech Week.
Instead of sounding an alarm for mass unemployment, UK experts argued for transformation and a new focus on control over AI, rather than a surrender to the inevitability of job losses.
“This isn’t actually a question about jobs, but about control”, said Matt Clifford, Number 10’s AI leader and author of the government AI action plan.
Refuting Musk’s apocalyptic statement, he added: “If you have an AI that can help your job and other jobs, that’s a really good thing”.
Jean Innes, chief executive of the Alan Turing Institute, agreed that Musk’s statement was more a provocation than an accurate predication, meant to “galvanise us to respond. And I think that’s great”.
Both stressed that while AI will inevitably reshape the workforce, it is still early days, and the critical question should be how society manages this change.
Businesses pivot towards AI
Their worlds echo a broader shift across UK industry.
Online grocery giant Ocado’s chief executive, for example, recently revealed that advances in AI and robotics have cut the human labour required to pick a 50 item order from 25 minutes in 2012, to just 10 today.
This has enabled faster service and boosted efficiency, yet has also lef to 500 fewer workers this year, after 2,300 jobs were already flagged as at risk last year.
This experience is one of many felt across many sectors, prompting concerns around AI enhancing productivity, but also displacing staff.
As Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn, said: “Companies are moving from asking ‘what’s our AI strategy?’ to experimenting… implementing generative AI into processed.”
“It is starting to change the landscape for work”, she added.
Peter Cheese, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, also raised urgent questions. “This latest generation of AI could change every job. I don’t think that’s too much of an exaggeration”, he said.
He added that for most companies, this is still early days, whilst reassuring: “It is primarily changing roles not eliminating them, enabling humans to focus on more value-add elements of their jobs”.
AI as a productivity tool
Since ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, employers have grappled with whether it should be used to amplify their workforce’s capacity to maintain output with fewer hires.
Many, like Schroders, see AI as an evolutionary tool: “We don’t see a short-term revolution and mass displacement of roles but we do anticipate these trends will drive an evolution over the next five to 10 years that will reshape workforces” , said Meagen Burnett, the fund manager’s chief financial officer.
By enabling employees to deliver higher value work, proponents argue that a more AI-literate workforce could be a powerful competitive edge.
Other firms are already leaning heavily into automation. IBM, for instance, uses AI agents to replace hundreds of HR staff, while Klarna’s AI assistant manages two-thirds of customer service queries – though the firm’s chief executive later acknowledged the quality of trade offs involved.
Global tech titans Google and Meta are also reshaping recruiting, marketing and engineering with AI, driving reorganisations and layoffs internally.
Ethical considerations of AI use
But many traditional industries are still grappling with governance, ethics and data protection around generative AI, according to James Milligan, global head of technology at recruiter Hays.
“Lots of traditional sectors outside of tech – large private sector companies, FTSE 250, Fortune 500 – are still grappling with some of the basics of good governance and data protection policies in a world of generative AI”.
AI’s impact is also clearly reshaping skills demand. LinkedIn data reveals a surge in hiring for roles like prompt engineer and responsible AI architect, with AI-native workers commanding salaries 56 per cent higher in 2024 compared with those lacking AI skills – up from 25 per cent last year.
A PwC report analysing nearly one billion job ads across six continents found that industries most exposed to AI are seeing triple the growth in revenue per employee compared to less exposed sectors.
Yet, the report found that while AI-exposed jobs and wages are growing, growth is slowing and mid-career workers face a rapidly accelerating need to retain and keep pace with new skill demand.
LinkedIn’s Kimbrough describes this as a process of “disruption” rather than outright displacement, with workers rotating skills generative AI cannot replicate – prioritising human-centric capabilities.