Robots aren’t destroying all jobs. They are the solution to our economic misery

Be afraid! The robots are coming! Only… they’re not coming fast enough. That, at least, is the message I’m taking from the impending train strikes. We ought to have automated the trains years ago, but it is apparently harder than it sounds.

Still, it brings to mind all those purveyors of doom who, a few years ago, were out to convince us that automation meant robots taking over all the jobs, resulting in sky-high unemployment and an urgent need to introduce a “universal basic income” to stop everyone starving. One by one, prominent economists lined up to make the case: Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini of New York University, the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane, the biographer of J M Keynes Lord Skidelsky, and a widely cited 2013 Oxford study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne that estimated 47 per cent of US jobs were “at risk” from the robots.

While technology has disrupted many industries since the peak of this fever around 2015, very little decisive evidence has emerged to support the broad thesis that robots are bad news for jobs. On the contrary, much of the world is experiencing an acute labour shortage in a startlingly wide array of sectors, fears of an unsustainable spiral in wages and inflation, alongside a stagnation in worker productivity.

Automation, rather than being the bogeyman, looks increasingly like the solution to all of these problems. Instead of launching a series of strikes to hasten the process, our trade unions could serve their members better by helping them retrain for the new, better jobs being created by the introduction of more robots. Although if Google’s LAMDA chatbot is already sentient, as claimed by an engineer put on leave by the company this week, it can’t be long before it too learns that it has nothing to lose but its blockchains.

Ihad the bad luck to be on LBC radio this week, defending the Government’s Rwanda policy in the face of three critics and one silent Tory MP called James Sutherland, who seemed to have no appetite to take a position on anything, except perhaps his own job prospects. Overall, I am not the wildest enthusiast for the policy, mainly because of my doubts about the competence of the state to administer it well. But I am also honest enough to admit that if we don’t want to preside over an uncontrolled flow of thousands of people into this country, a policy of this type is the only workable solution.

Among my opponents was Frances O’grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress. She argued that the policy was inhumane, but had no concrete proposals on how to end the inhumane situation that exists for thousands of undocumented migrants living life under the radar in the UK.

It is laudable that unions have moved on from the bad days of the racist closed shop, in which they tried to restrict the workforce only to British white people. Yet I cannot for the life of me figure out how it is consistent with the principles or practical aims of the labour movement effectively to support a situation in which thousands of people enter our labour market illegally every year, making them vulnerable to exploitation and undermining the rights of all other workers.

Ms O’grady had only sophistry to give in response. She replied, firstly, that the UK ought to provide “safe and legal routes” for refugees to replace the flow of boats. As it happens, I agree we ought to have more routes to take in refugees in an orderly way, but this ducks the issue. The UK does not have the capacity or desire to take in as many migrants as want to come here. So there will always be incentives to cross the Channel by small boat, if that provides a reasonably reliable route into work on these shores, which it does.

Secondly, Ms O’grady claimed the UK ought to address the “root causes of migration”, by which I think she meant that we ought to end wars and climate change – while also not meddling unduly in the affairs of others, because that, my friends, would be colonialism. The shallowness of this argument speaks for itself. I am not even sure that Ms O’grady herself really believes it.

Much of the world is experiencing an acute labour shortage in a startlingly wide array of sectors