Jobs will robo cop it

BREXIT’S ALL BAD SNOOZE Working class men face worst hit by androids

A FIRST in Parliament this week as a robot gave evidence to the Education Committee.

Pepper – cute name, cute robot – answered questions about artificial intelligence and got a round of applause for its performance. So does this herald a new era of androids in Parliament?

“I don’t think so. It would be very uncomfortable to be surrounded by hundreds of faceless automatons. Especially when there’s a risk of them going haywire,” said the robot.

Pepper’s appearance was the highlight, according to everyone, but the rest of the committee was pretty interesting as well.

Risk

The discussion of artificial intelligence led on, naturally, to the prospects of robots in the workplace.

Some of the stats are quite scary. In 20 years or so, 30 per cent of UK jobs will be done by robots.

Broken down, they are jobs in which men outnumber women by a ratio of three to two.

And for every one of those jobs done by graduates, there are five done by people with lower qualifications.

So more bad news for working-class men, then.

In fact that’s the second bit of bad news in the past couple of weeks.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies found men qualified up to GCSE level are more likely to be at “extreme risk” from the trade deals made after Brexit.

The IFS says clothing manufacture, transport equipment and car THE invention that sums up the sorry state of human affairs best is probably the snooze button.

You know the one? You set an alarm for 6am with the express intention of getting up early, eating breakfast, taking the dog out, doing your exercises.

But it’s cold. So you reach out manufacturing are the areas that are most “exposed”. So it’s a double hit. There is, however, a bit of good news. Stats like these mean politicians have cottoned on to the fact that the working class – ignored for so long – are the key to the next election. It’s why Jeremy Corbyn spent Thursday in three Leave-voting East Midlands constituencies. So Mr Corbyn went there to say: “I understand why you voted Leave but a Tory Brexit is not going to help with what’s coming.” It is an interesting strategy,

MURDER is up 14 per cent, knife crime 12 per cent, robberies 22 per cent, sexual offences 18 per cent, car theft 7 per cent, burglaries 2 per cent.

But Theresa May says this has nothing – I repeat, NOTHING – to do with the falling number of cops and cuts to forces. I’d be interested in hearing your theories. Email me and if I bump into the PM I’ll pass your views on.

Assuming no one’s nicked my computer. from the duvet and hit snooze. Again and again.

My record is two hours of snooze. That’s being woken up every nine minutes by a loud beeping. This is not good for you. In fact, they do it to people in Guantanamo Bay. This is currently the Theresa May approach to and one we’ll see a lot more of. Labour’s pitch is becoming increasingly tuned to reaffirming their commitment to their traditional heartlands.

Because the Tories have no domestic policies to speak of, we’ve yet to see what their offer is.

Expenses

But Westminster can smell an election and the Budget next Monday will give more clues as to where the Government think the key votes are to be won.

Anyways, back to robots for a second. Brexit. At the time of writing, she’s in discussions about extending the transition period beyond 2020.

This is the negotiating equivalent of asking Brussels for “just five more minutes”.

And there’s more at stake this time than missing the bus. A couple of years ago my boss went to a talk about robotics in journalism.

He reported back on a test in which a robot was put up against a financial reporter to write a story about employment statistics.

Both the journalist and the AI machine were given the same figures.

Each turned in the same story. But the robot filed it 15 minutes faster than the journalist.

“It also,” said my boss, “didn’t turn up late, put in an expenses claim, or stop halfway through for a Guinness.”

Progress, I suppose. I WAS going to meet a union official at a King’s Cross pub and while waiting I got chatting to a woman from America on holiday with her husband. They had done that DNA testing and it had shown his ancestors were Irish and hers were from England. “It’s a relief to be in London,” she said, “All that Irish stuff really wasn’t for me.” We were in O’neill’s.