The age of AI could spark a new era for working classes

While middle-class professionals grapple with an automated future, there’s a quiet and important recognition lingering, writes Zoé Beaty: someone still needs to fix your boiler

- Zoé Beaty

This much is true: the machines are coming. The machines are coming, and they’re probably after your job. Artificial intelligence is now barrelling its way into boardrooms, its wild capabilities harder and harder to ignore. AI can manufacture, enter data and analyse it. It can write (very good) copy, drive vehicles, and tend to vexed customers on automated company chat boxes. Already, AI is replacing translators, creating ad campaigns, drafting contracts and making dents in basic graphic design with chilling ease.

Under the weight of progress, there’s no doubt that the desk economy is teetering. If the apocalyptic predictions are correct, as many as 300 million full-time jobs will be lost or degraded by artificial intelligence in the coming years; 10-30 per cent of jobs in the UK are considered highly automatable.

It’s nothing new – since the early 19th century, when the Luddites made their name raging against the machine during the industrial revolution, fear has closely followed technological progress, and for good reason. But this time, another kind of work is standing firm against the tide. And, some argue, it could signal the beginning of a different kind of revolution altogether.

White, middle-class professionals have usually presumed themselves safe in the face of technological advances that, in the past, have largely appeared to threaten those in unskilled labour. Over the years, traditionally working-class roles in production lines and clerical work have been steadily taken over by machines; think self-service tills or AI-powered robots running factories. But now, as AI takes hold this time, it’s the middle classes who are facing the threat – or actually losing jobs to technology.