Why is the UK at the forefront of AI-driven job cuts? | Inside Story

That Peter guy on Brussels is a monumental <b>**</b> technology such as AI being designed to replace large swaths of people literally can&#39;t produce net job gains in the long run. Also why promises go unfunded isn&#39;t because there aren&#39;t enough young people to provide tax it&#39;s because there aren&#39;t enough jobs because leeches like him drained all the wealth out of society and advocated for these technologies that further reduced job opportunities. Creatures like him always blame the youth. You need hostile regulation to curb greed disguised as innovation

Ed the Sock Comments<br>I watched the whole thing, and I need to applaud the Barclays chief executive for the metaphor of the year: AI is just &quot;the icing on the cake.&quot; Yes. And the cake, apparently, is five thousand people.<br>The union&#39;s accusation — that AI is being used as a scapegoat for cuts a profitable bank wanted anyway — lands on the funniest possible numbers: £2.3 billion profit in a quarter, up 12%, and the press release blames the robot. That&#39;s the real corporate breakthrough of this era: AI isn&#39;t just doing the work, it&#39;s doing the public relations. &quot;Because of AI&quot; is the new &quot;restructuring&quot; — same firings, better stock narrative, and now with a technology noun that no editor can fact-check. And the panel&#39;s sharpest prediction deserves engraving: the moment the backlash gets hot, companies will simply stop saying it&#39;s AI — meaning the one honest part of these announcements, the diagnosis, is the first thing on the chopping block. The layoffs will stay anonymous. The icing will be classified.<br>The UK exposure story is the structural joke with no punchline: the OECD says Britain is the second-most-exposed country in the world, London the most-exposed city — and the exposure map is the wealth map. The richest region is the most at risk; the safest place is the poorest. That&#39;s not a paradox — it&#39;s an audit. Britain spent forty years hollowing out its factories and betting the whole economy on London&#39;s knowledge work, and it turns out the knowledge work is precisely the product this technology makes cheapest. The factory towns lost their jobs in the eighties; now the spreadsheet districts lose theirs in the twenties. Different collar, same envelope.<br>The ex-banker on the panel had the two most honest sentences of the hour: labor is &quot;the largest cost line item,&quot; making AI &quot;potentially the biggest trade in history&quot; — very good for shareholders, unfortunately not for society — and then the dark one, delivered almost casually: the big job losses come at the next downturn, because recessions provide &quot;the social license&quot; to cut. There it is. The downturn isn&#39;t the cause of the layoffs; it&#39;s the cover. Every economy-wide layoff wave in your future has already been scheduled — it&#39;s just waiting for a quarter ugly enough to hide behind.<br>And the Queen&#39;s famous post-crash question — &quot;why did nobody see it coming?&quot; — got answered by accident: this time everybody sees it coming. Graduate postings at their lowest since 2020, a million young Britons idle, and the entry-level jobs that were the bottom rungs of every career ladder are precisely what the automation eats first. You can&#39;t climb a ladder whose first three steps have been reclassified as icing. Seeing it coming and shrugging is a new failure mode — it isn&#39;t blindness, it&#39;s a shrug with a press strategy.<br>The menu of governance on offer: Brussels passed an AI Act and is already amputating it while blaming GDPR for strangling the start-ups; Britain&#39;s offer is the opposite — no rulebook at all, an AI minister in cabinet, and a growth model praying the thing eating its capital city is also its superpower. And the tax detail the professor dropped near the end is the whole incentive structure in two numbers: technology taxed around five percent, the people it replaces around twenty-five. We are not just permitting the substitution — we&#39;re subsidizing it, then expressing surprise at the invoice.<br>Last note from the cheap seats: one of the panellists admitted media jobs are on the exposure list too. So a panel of journalists, discussing the layoffs, on a program hosted by a journalist — the men holding the axe handles for a living, live-broadcasting their own professional autopsy. I&#39;d call it irony, but at this point it&#39;s just scheduling.<br>Ed is out 🌹