Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of artificial intelligence on employment levels in the next (a) five and (b) ten years.

No current assessment has been made by the Department for Work and Pensions on the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on employment.

We are starting to witness AI’s impact within the labour market: transforming the workplace, demanding new skills and augmenting old ones. But there is uncertainty over the future scale of AI’s impact on the labour market. Given the recent rapid pace of AI development, government is planning against a range of plausible future outcomes and closely monitoring the data that will help track if we are heading towards any of these outcomes.