![]() So today I am delighted to announce that we are launching the first £25m competition for 5G testbeds and trials projects. Travelling around the world I see much excitement at 5G, and I’m confident the UK will be at the front of the queue. We’re taking steps to cement our position as a world leader in future technologies of full fibre and 5G through the £740m of funding from the National Productivity Investment Fund that the Chancellor announced last year. It’s critical we have next-generation digital infrastructure in place. We can’t do this on our own, so our Digital Skills Partnership de-conflicts the huge amount of work going on in the private sector. For those already in work, the Digital Skills Entitlement provides free access to basic training and promotes lifelong learning. ![]() So we now have coding in the curriculum from age 8. We need a full spectrum skills response, from school to retirement. Allow machines to do the dangerous, boring, and repetitive, and ensure we humans have the capacity to do the creative, empathetic and interactive. Our goal must be to automate work, but humanise jobs. Our task is to support redeployment not unemployment. The risk to jobs comes from not adopting new technologies. And as the RSA so powerfully set out last month, the risk is not that we adopt new technologies that destroy jobs. Digital revolution brings with it disruption. ![]() Our strong view is that as a nation we must create the jobs of the future. The 4th Industrial Revolution will change the kinds of jobs needed in industry. Today I want to focus on just two of those areas: skills and infrastructure. We want Britain to be at the forefront of work in AI, and this report shows the way. It’s an excellent report which sets out what we need to do to support the enormous potential of AI while mitigating its risks. You will, for example, have seen that just yesterday we launched our review into Artificial Intelligence by Jerome Pesenti and Wendy Hall. Our Strategy covers infrastructure, skills, rules and ethics of big data use, cyber security, supporting the tech sector, the digitisation of industry, and digitisation of government. And inside that fits our 5G strategy, like a set of Russian Dolls. Our Industrial Strategy outlines what we’re doing to ensure the UK is a leader overall.Īnd our Digital Strategy, embedded within the wider Industrial Strategy, sets out the seven pillars on which we can build our success. The UK is already a world leader in key technologies – AI, nano and biotechnologies, and additive manufacturing to name a few. By its nature the fourth industrial revolution is more collaborative than the first. Now, in the fourth revolution, we are determined to use our strengths to play a leading part. But the UK has not had the monopoly on waves of industrialisation. Your work, bringing together as you do all the best minds on the planet, has informed what we are doing, and I’m delighted to work with you.įor the 1st Industrial Revolution, the UK could claim to be the ‘workshop of the world’ – propelled by development of the steam engine, it reached its pinnacle in the mid-19th Century. Because this technology is made by man, so it can be hewn to build a better future for mankind.Īnd I’m delighted to speak alongside so many impressive colleagues who really understand this, and alongside Professor Klaus Schwab who literally ‘wrote the book’ on the 4th Industrial Revolution. Our task, in this building and around the world, is to make this technology, this change, work for humanity. If you don’t much like change, I’m afraid I don’t have so much good news. This time it’s just got started.Īnd the nature of the new technologies is that the changes we are experiencing today, are probably the slowest changes we will see over the rest of our lifetimes. That time it transformed the world, democratised knowledge, and brought down the whole feudal system of Government. The reason is that the cost of storing and transmitting information has fallen, perhaps faster than at any time since the invention of the printing press. Yet put resources into the networks that now connect half the world, or into AI, and the effects are exponential. In the past, we’ve thought of consumption as a one-off, and capital investment as additive. The nature of the technologies is materially different to what has come before. So I applaud the creation of the APPG on the fourth industrial revolution, which surely is one of the greatest challenges we face, as a nation, and as a world. One of the roles of Parliament is to cast ahead, to look to the horizon, and tackle the great challenges of our time.
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