The UK government will work with supplier Anthropic to build an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for job seekers, despite its chief executive’s doom-laden views of the job market.
Yes, we see the irony too.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said that Anthropic will help the government to build and pilot an assistant that will help support people in specific situations, starting with “providing custom career advice and help to lock down a job”.
The pilot is planned to start later this year.
Earlier in the week Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei published a magnum opus detailing among other things how he expects AI to disrupt to the job market.
“The short-term transition will be unusually painful compared to past technologies, since humans and labour markets are slow to react and to equilibrate,” he wrote of the speed of AI development.
The breadth of tasks AI will do “will make it harder for people to switch easily from jobs that are displaced to similar jobs that they would be a good fit for,” said said. “In the end AI will be able to do everything, and we need to grapple with that.”
The job seeker pilot is one of several announcements from the government as part of what DSIT called “a week of focused action” on AI. This includes commissioning a group of Brit AI experts to develop open source tools to support public services with Meta providing $1 million (£730,000) of funding for a fellowship programme run by the Alan Turing Institute.
The projects will include AI analysis of video and images of transport infrastructure to help local authorities prioritize repair work and AI services that can run offline or within secure networks to help protect sensitive data.
DSIT also announced it was opening access to a set of online AI training courses through an AI Skills Hub, with the aim of providing 10 million workers with skills in the technology. The hub can be accessed by setting up an online account and includes free courses by universities as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Hartree Centre.
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However two-thirds of the 36 free general beginners’ courses lasting an hour are provided by technology vendors with 11 from Amazon, eight from Microsoft and seven from Google.
One review of Microsoft’s Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot described it as more an advertorial for Copilot than a training course.
The Department for Education said it is working to set up AI-powered tutoring tools to provide children with one-to-one learning support, co-designed by teachers, which will be available to schools by the end of 2027. ®