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UNI General Secretary Philip Jennings took the union message to the world’s largest business festival and called for a skills revolution in the new world of work.

With Oxford University warning that up to 40% of all jobs could be lost to machines within the next two decades, Jennings told the world of digital capitalism that it was the responsibility of the business community to work with trade unions in order to guarantee a just transition for workers to new forms of employment.

Speaking at the International Festival of Business in Liverpool Jennings said that almost half of all jobs will see their primary skill requirement change in the near future. Reskilling opportunities and lifelong learning, he added, would help to stem the flow of unemployment set to result from a technological tipping point in which most jobs will favour machines. The UK parliament is warning that the digital skills gap is already costing the UK economy £63 billion a year in lost GDP.

Jennings also pointed to demographic changes that could act as a further catalyst to the jobs crisis such as a rapidly rising working age population. The global labour force is currently comprised of 3.1 billion people but this is likely to rise to around 3.5 billion by 2020 as the working age population grows in developing countries. Global unemployment is expected to rise by nearly 2.3 million in 2016 and by a further 1.1 million in 2017, according to the ILO. Vulnerable employment already accounts for 46% of total employment.

Jennings, who was taking part in the session Man and Woman vs Machine: How AI will steal your job, voiced his concerns over the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. He said AI was developing in a “values vacuum” and called for a regulatory oversight on the international level.

There are many unanswered questions that require a response with respect to AI. The job impact was clear, he said, but pointed to four other key dilemmas for mankind:

5 dilemmas of artificial intelligence for mankind

1         How best do we manage the economic impact of the number of jobs to be replaced by A.I?

2         How do we as a human race define the values and moral responsibilities that we bestow on artificial intelligence?

3         What regulatory oversight on artificial intelligence should exist at the national and international level?

4         Should the weaponisation of artificial intelligence be permitted?

5         How do we ensure that humans, limited by slow biological evolution, are able to compete with and avoid being superseded by A.I?

Philip Jennings had been invited to address the International Festival of Business in Liverpool two years ahead of the UNI Global Union World Congress which takes place alongside the festival in the UK city in 2018. The Future of Work will be a cultural theme of Liverpool City Council in 2018 and beyond. UNI global Union is cooperating closely with the council to help achieve the city’s aim to be a centre of knowledge and policy action on the workplaces of tomorrow.

Jennings is traveling to a major OECD summit on the digital revolution in Mexico this week with UNI’s message on adaptation, mitigation and a just transition. His aim is to influence global thinking and choices which cannot be left to the digital monopolists, he says.