AI is Hitting UK Harder Than Other Big Economies, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 54
The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of AI and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests. From a report: British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% -- the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley. The research surveyed companies using AI for at least a year across five industries: consumer staples and retail, real estate, transport, healthcare equipment and cars.
It found that British businesses reported an average 11.5% increase in productivity aided by AI. US businesses reported similar gains, but created more jobs than they cut. It suggests UK workers are being hit particularly hard by the rise of AI, as higher costs and taxes also weigh on the job market. Unemployment is at a four-year high, as rises in the minimum wage and employer national insurance contributions squeeze hiring.
It found that British businesses reported an average 11.5% increase in productivity aided by AI. US businesses reported similar gains, but created more jobs than they cut. It suggests UK workers are being hit particularly hard by the rise of AI, as higher costs and taxes also weigh on the job market. Unemployment is at a four-year high, as rises in the minimum wage and employer national insurance contributions squeeze hiring.
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Well brexit is another factor in Britain's poor economic situation
Re:STFU (Score:5, Insightful)
I know we like to hate on AI a lot here, but while I'm sure it's contributed to shifts in the job market it's incredibly disingenous to claim AI is responsible for the entirely of the UK's current employment woes, and frankly I'm not even sure who would really benefit from making that claim. Companies using it as a convenient excuse for layoffs because of other reasons on the otherhand... Yeah, I can totally see that.
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Brexit is a factor for sure. The UK's economy has generally underperformed compared to its peers since the result was announced
No it hasn't. The most comparable EU economy to ours is France and has been for decades. The UK has continued to perform either slightly above or below France as it always has.
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Based on what? GDP?--maybe, our biggest export is probably financial crime. All of those GDP gains ain't going to people. Average French person has it a lot better than we do here...
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and various inflation busting public and private sector payrises
Those occurred in many instances several years ago, but also after years of rises less than inflation which, by your logic, should have been a boost to the economy but didn't seem to be.
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It is only a good thing for the individuals whose interests have been promoted by the Brexit government - and we are all well aware who those individuals are. Needless to say, your name is not on that list, but on the invoice.
Re: STFU (Score:1)
Confederation, not federation.
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What do you mean?
For starters, Brexitannia lost 6 to 8% of its GDP to Brexit.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w3... [nber.org]
If you think that a major loss like that will not result in job losses you don't understand how the world works.
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Because brexit has been associated with a number of lagging economic indicators. Here the ostensible cause is 'AI', but hard to know to the extent that is true or more of a smoke screen for a broadly less competitive economy.
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To get back in the state at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Where a big country found (already after 1870, check that date) that he didn't need to respect the neutrality (internationally agreed upon) of a small country with a small army.
Re:STFU (Score:4, Insightful)
According to the demented/evil/both backers of Brexit, it's not that the UK Brexited, it's that they Brexited wrong.
Of course, that means that people shouldn't have voted for Brexit when clearly nobody knew what it actually meant.
At least Brexit is a useful lesson for the world - don't let stupid people decide complex issues, and half the population are stupider than average. Or 52% of those who voted, in the case of Brexit.
Re: STFU (Score:1)
In what way did brexit do that? It only resulted in the British being fucked over by a smaller set of assholes.
The cover up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nobody appears to be verifying such claims such that those who want to blame bots can. They are simply surveys. No executive likes to admit to a sales slump because that puts them in the crosshairs, so if they can find a relatively safe scapegoat they will.
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I was wondering where the hell these garbage numbers that flew in the face of all other evidence came from - executives' assholes.
Re:The cover up (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. At this time, it has become pretty clear that outside of very special and limited applications, use of LLM-type AI is between a small gain in productivity (but quality may suffer and you may just fail to educate the junior people you need tomorrow as senior ones) and a definitive loss. There are tons oof people deep in denial, but any actual research is clear on the effects.
LLM-type AI is used as pretext to get rid of people and to decrease investments. The ages-old (pretty dumb) reflex of those trained in economics, but not actually understanding it. Since almost all of them are doing it, that creates a herd effect and eventually leads to a really large crisis.
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It's not really clear, because there are LOTS of "very special and limited applications". Consider what the automated check out stations at supermarkets did to the checkout clerks.
OTOH, it's also probably largely lies. But you can't scrap the "probably largely", and those are pretty vague.
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At least for me, as I go to the store, there are about as many people manning the checkout lines as before. Though the lines are shorter. Used to have to wait a while for my turn at the cashier, but now either:
a) I can go through self checkout but there's still an attendant hovering nearby no more than say 5 self-checkout stations to deter theft/assist with exceptional situations
b) Go through a short line to a traditional cashier (the other day there was a line about 15 people deep for the self checkout l
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They introduced self-checkout here a few years back. You get about an 1% discount if you use it, but you have to sign up for it. No reduction in personnel at all, it is all about getting your data and what you shop for. The more advanced version (only in some places) has you carry a scanner, so they can nicely detail-track your movements on top of that.
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I normally find most of the check out lines unmanned. Perhaps it depends on the time of day.
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An general LLM is a very bad match for a special and limited application. It is basically the dumbest way to attempt to do it. What you want instead is a small, locally running model. That has the advantage that you can also put your trade-secrets in, without them ending up with Big Tech.
It is also hilarious that the one of the two really open LLMs (including weights) comes from Europe (Apertus from Switzerland), the other is OLMo 7B from the Allan Institute, a non-profit in the US. All others do at the eve
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The thing is, LLM is only one type of AI. All it does is try to handle language. Train it differently and it's not a LLM, but it can do quite well at, say, protein folding. (Note it's guessing how the protein would fold, but that used to be the domain of experts. After you get the guess, then you go and check, and the AI is doing as well, or possibly better, than the experts were doing.)
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While true, the primary advantage of an LLM is that it can usually handle language and can directly interface with a non-expert regarding communication with AI. Anything else it does comes with a hallucination risk and the current crop of LLMs are typically also trained to use emotional user manipulation.
You can throw that advantage out the window, but then completely different ML approaches and even algorithmic approaches are likely a better match. Which may be the sane approach in many cases anyways. LLMs
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OK. Basically an AI can be trained to do anything that a person can do **IF THERE IS A WAY TO CHECK THE ANSWER**. If the AI can't get good feedback, it can't learn to handle the problem correctly.
This is why I think that AGI is going to require embodiment, and LOTS of sensors. And it still often won't reach the same conclusions people reach. (Consider the arguments that even men and women have, and their goals/sensoria/brains are extremely similar.)
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Not really, at least for LLM-type AI. There are rather bad limits to creativity and complexity LLMs can handle. Some recent research: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.075... [arxiv.org] https://machinelearning.apple.... [apple.com] https://www.psypost.org/a-math... [psypost.org]
Incidentally, I have some limited research myself that fits these observations (unpublished).
That said, LLM type AI plus Fact-Checker would at least eliminate the hallucination problem, but probably at the loss of most of what LLMs can do, because fact-checking (here: some for
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If you train it on the internet, it will be almost as reliable as the internet. (Almost. Not quite.) And if you train it to always give a responsive answer (and not say "I don't know") then it's going to generate hallucinations even when the internet doesn't lead it astray.
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True. Add that the usual Internet search experience is that for an even a tiny bit advanced query, you get 10 ads, 10 sources that are wrong, maybe one source that is half right and maybe, sometimes a source that actually gets it and in a rare case one source that not only gets it but also provides enough explanation that you can verify the claim, it is no surprise that LLMs do not do well.
lol no (Score:2)
Tax the workers, pay the "idle" (Score:1, Troll)
Just as with the trans issue, the parole issue, social media issues, psychology is being used by governments to make important decisions as if it was a SCIENCE based on facts while it very clearly is not, so life-changing decisions are being made based solely on the feel
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You're right there. After studying psychology, all I really learned is that we know remarkably little. What we do know is mostly based on the "asking a bunch of college students"-method, then applying statistics to somehow make it valid. You invent a construct, write up some leading questions in a brief questionnaire, and administer it to a small self-selected sample of the population. You then use some basic statistics to "validate" that a pattern exists, and make up some plausible-sounding but completely
Tax the robots (Score:4, Insightful)
I know you've got your hand full of guns and your pension plan from the government that you pretend you earned whatever and you sit around all day watching right wing media and getting angry and that's lots of fun.
Those guns are not going to protect you from tens of millions of people with nothing to lose and neither are the police because when we hit 25% permanent unemployment there won't be enough money to pay for those police.
You'll kill the first guys. Maybe even the second. The third guys are going to shoot you in your arm and then you can't hold your rifle. The next batch of going to get your wife. You can probably get another anyway. The last batch though one of them is going to put a bullet right in your head.
Because that's the problem. They only have to kill you once and you lose. You have to kill them over and over and over again to win.
Society collapsing sounds fun when you're approaching it with the mentality of a 12-year-old.
It's not a lot of fun when it's actually happening. Ask yourself if you would like to live in Iran right now.
So you better figure out a solution or you better hurry up and become old and die before all the shit you're dumb decisions made come to bite you in the ass.
Because you are in charge and you are responsible for all of this
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If you remove all the jobs that are doing nothing useful or even harmful to society and the planet... we'd have almost no jobs already. I find it funny that people will claim there are plenty of jobs to be created for the infinite consumer economy as if everybody has enough income to buy multiple storage units to hold all the junk they've bought. Ignoring resource and pollution limits we've already been exceeding by many times. We already have a crazy huge industry of personal storage in the USA and houses
I know but you can't abandon those people (Score:3)
I think they will eventually figure out the right solutions but the problem is it's not by a huge margin and voter suppression means you can silence enough of them to get really bad policy through.
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Bill Gates came up with that solution.... A guy who circumvented the system at every turn to get richer. How can you believe corporations are going to be HONEST about what is classified as a robot job?!
If you adapt to the games, you'll end up with abstractions trying to measure output of specific tasks and quantify the number of "jobs" so you can tax those. In the end, the only foolproof solution will be to tax the produced output... a sales tax, income/profit tax or similar... maybe even a smart thing lik
I'm well aware it's a 12-year-old's solution (Score:1)
It all goes back to the old Ronald Reagan comment, if you're explaining you're losing. I can't explain to the American people better solutions they just aren't capable of understanding them. This is a nation of people who looked at Donald Trump and said let
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As usual, you are correct.
I'm not his puppet account either... I've been on here since around 1997. No, it's not my one of puppet accounts either. I'm just glad to have somebody posting... If rsilvergun leaves it'll just be the 5 of us left and the bots.
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To be completely serious... Plato described the problem with all democracies; it's human nature.
Best summary so far I've seen is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] and yes thoughtless people are morons (12 years olds.) Success allows for people to be more lazy and thinking burns serious calories. The higher the rise, the quicker the fall... Technology is making it worse. The problem with Star Trek is somehow they got people unrealistically motivated; we all know if they even progressed to holodecks ever
AI or Al? (Score:2)
I have to admit, when I saw the headline my first though was, "how is Alabama affecting Britain's economy?"
Unemployment has been rising for a while (Score:2)