The Jobs Juggernaut is reaching the dinner parties
Peter Kyle and AGI
First whispered over the fizz and the canapes, ‘Henry has just been made redundant, Jacob and Emily have not been able to find a graduate job’.
It's the new middle-class anxiety: Will my job still exist in five years? Will my kid’s degree be worthless before they graduate?
I first wrote about the potential Jobs Juggernaut heading for us 19 months ago.
One year into Keir Starmer’s government and things feel... stagnant. Not calm. Not stable. Just slow.
The vibe is civil service PowerPoint. We were promised a “decade of national renewal” - but so far, it feels like a long tea break. No big ideas. No drive. No clear optimism.
Labour’s central thesis seemed to be that competence and stability will create growth. That if you just stop the madness, the economy will start to purr again. It’s a very 90s philosophy - back when you had the Cold War dividend, North Sea oil, the internet resulting in a booming service sector into the 00s.
But today’s Britain doesn’t have those cushions. Growth is stagnant, productivity flatlined years ago, and the private sector seems too cautious to take the lead, fatigued from a hard five years to run a business. Competence isn’t enough. You need ambition. You need people pushing new agendas.
And right now, there’s very little of that.
Which is why a couple of comments from Peter Kyle last week stood out like a lightning bolt, first was he believes we can have a trillion pound UK company, although I did point out we might want to focus on getting a few more past the £20 billion mark.
Peter Kyle thinks we’ll hit AGI by the next election
In the interview for Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, Peter Kyle - Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology - said this:
“By the end of this parliament, we're gonna be knocking on artificial general intelligence. I think in certain areas, it will have been achieved.”
No hedging. No vague “exploring the frontier” language.
Just a clear statement: AGI - the holy grail technology - could be real, and operational, within four years.
And yet, no MSM outlet ran it. Not the BBC, not the FT, not even TechCrunch. Perhaps the boldest economic claim by a Minister the most important economic story of the next decade just slid under the media radar.
The jobs may go before the media clock it
Over the past 40 years, British politics has been defined by the fallout from deindustrialisation. We remember it because it was so visual: miners’ strikes, rusting mills, mass unemployment in the North and Midlands.
But this next wave won’t be so cinematic.
It won’t be punch-ups at picket lines. It’ll be death by a thousand Zoom logins - junior lawyers, copywriters, policy assistants quietly edited out of the workforce by a chatbot. And the symbolism? Well, we’ve already lived it this decade. Empty offices. Silent trains. A nation on mute. The roar just might not feel the same.
But, it is beginning to change, it is reaching the chattering classes, James Marriott wrote about it on his substack. James Kanagasooriam, has also written about the ‘collar flip’, it’s the same pain, just in chinos and quarter-zips instead of donkey jackets and hard hats.
Full Peter Kyle interview here:
A striking number of decision-makers still don’t get it
What’s most surprising is how many people in politics, media and public life seem to have used AI platforms at a very superficial level - not much beyond a glorified Google search. There’s a vague sense of AI being useful for summaries or images, but very little grasp of what it means for deeper work.
There’s an entire economy developing just below the surface - agents, copilots, synthetic media, auto-generated sales teams - and Westminster still thinks it's a story about ChatGPT writing poems.
Peter Kyle, to his credit, seems to get the scale of what’s coming. But if he’s right about the timelines, we’re going to need more than some digital apprenticeships.
This should be triggering a national response
What we need is radical thinking of the kind we last saw during the pandemic - when furlough, Bounce Back Loans, and the Kickstart scheme were pulled together in record time. There should be a new jobs guarantee scheme on the table. A sovereign compute and data strategy being discussed in the Commons. Serious rethinking of the welfare state and tax base.
We’re sleepwalking into a labour market shock of generational proportions - and Peter Kyle might be the only person in government ringing the bell.
Maybe, somewhere in Whitehall, there’s a team of wonks working in a bunker on this. Maybe they're mapping out AI displacement models and stress-testing Universal Credit flows.
I doubt it is happening yet, but I think it will be soon.
Thanks for reading, what do you think we should do about the future? Please do respond with your thoughts, I read every response that comes through.
Best wishes, Jimmy
P.S. , I am delighted to see Alex Depledge take a role with Rachel Reeves advising for a couple of days a week. Her first week was last week, which must have made for quite an interesting onboarding process as your boss becomes an global story crying in the Commons Chamber.
Big thanks to BGF and Endava for their support with these Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future episodes.
P.P.S - New here? First Subscribe, but also some of our archive is below:
Tremors in the Jobs Market (May 2025)
Big News and New Beginnings (September 2024)