Sadiq Khan is to warn in a major speech that artificial intelligence could destroy swathes of jobs in London and “usher in a new era of mass unemployment” unless ministers act now.
In his annual Mansion House speech, the London mayor will say the capital is “at the sharpest edge of change” because of its reliance on white-collar workers in the finance and creative industries, and professional services such as law, accounting, consulting and marketing.
Khan will argue that “we have a moral, social and economic duty to act” to ensure that new jobs are created to replace those that will disappear, with entry-level and junior jobs the first to go.
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.
However, he also sees huge potential benefits from AI for public services and productivity across the economy, arguing “AI could enable us to transform our public services, turbocharge productivity and tackle some of our most complex challenges”.
However, he will warn the assembled business leaders that if the technology is used recklessly, it will “usher in a new era of mass unemployment”.
He will say there is a clear choice: “Seize 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.”
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’s jobs market. It will also offer free AI training for Londoners.
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.
Across the UK, up to 3m low-skilled jobs in trades, machine operations and admin roles could disappear by 2035 because of automation and AI, according to a November report by the charity National Foundation for Educational Research.
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 of job types can use AI for at least a quarter of their work.
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. “Human collaboration and judgment remain essential for knowledge-intensive work,” it said.
The financial research firm Forrester released its own study on the same topic, which found that AI and automation would have a “more modest impact than expected” on US jobs through to 2030.
The problem, it said, was that companies were “over-automating roles due to AI hype”, which, it said, may lead to costly reversals and reputational damage in the future.
“Many companies announcing AI-related layoffs do not have mature, vetted AI applications ready to fill those roles, highlighting a trend of ‘AI washing’ – attributing financially motivated cuts to future AI implementation,” it said.
Khan will argue in his Mansion House speech that the UK and others have been too slow to respond to new technology in the past and that the growth of social media has led to a youth mental health crisis, a surge in online abuse and a dangerous rise in misinformation.
Separately, Susan Langley, the mayor of the City of London, said on Thursday morning she had noticed that some finance workers were wary of coming to London from abroad because they worried about their safety.
However, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The City of London is one of the safest cities in the world. There’s this perception that you’re going to step out of your office and be swept away in a tsunami of crime.
“It’s completely wrong. Competition for investment is really fierce at the moment, and I think any kind of unfounded negative sentiment that’s being pushed out there really risks undermining the UK on the global stage, and we just can’t let it happen.”
