With AI about to wipe out millions of jobs, what should we do?

As AI threatens to disrupt work at scale, debate in the UK is turning to how much social unrest could follow job losses. The article points to 2014 London taxi protests against Uber, and the later backlash in Paris, as examples of how new technologies trigger resistance long before mass unemployment. Economist Carl-Benedikt Frey of the Oxford Internet Institute says civil unrest would likely come “long before” widespread joblessness. A King’s College London survey found more than half of Britons expect widespread unemployment from AI, and one in five fear it would happen fast enough to provoke unrest. Frey argues backlash reflects AI’s impact on incomes—potentially from even 5% to 10% reductions—and its reach as a general-purpose technology. An IPPR report warns nearly eight million UK jobs could be lost without intervention.