Rethinking country effects: robotics, AI and work futures in Norway and the UK

• Date: 01 November 2019
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Caroline Lloyd,Jonathan Payne
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12149

208 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 34:3

ISSN 1468-005X

Rethinking country effects: robotics, AI and

work futures in Norway and the UK

Caroline Lloyd and Jonathan Payne

Current debates around robotics and articial intelligence (AI)

are dominated by concerns over the threat to employment, amid

widely varying estimates of potential job losses. Countries are

expected to fare differently, but there is little comparative re-

search that goes beyond analysing industry and occupational

structures. This article rethinks ‘country effects’ by exploring the

role of institutions and social actors in shaping technological

change in Norway and the UK. Drawing upon interviews with

technology experts, employer associations and trade unions, it

examines their perspectives on public policy support for the de-

velopment and diffusion of robotics and AI, along with potential

consequences for employment, work and skills. The research indi-

cates signicant country differences and the continued relevance

of institutions, interests and power in analysing country effects.

Keywords: robotics, AI, institutions, trade unions, employ-

ment, skills, Norway, UK.

Introduction

There is currently much discussion around the implications of robotics and articial

intelligence (AI) for employment and wider society. Whether it is self-driving cars, 3-D

printing, machine learning or big data, we are said to be facing a ‘Second Machine Age’

(Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014) or ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (Schwab, 2016),

with devastating implications for jobs (Ford, 2015). These narratives recall earlier pes-

simistic predictions of a ‘jobless future’ and the ‘end of work’ that never arrived (Rifkin,

1996), only for today’s technological Cassandras to warn ‘this time it is different’

(Wajcman, 2017: 120).

Many such accounts are heavy on speculation and anecdote. Even those attempting

to quantify the number of jobs at risk arrive at widely varying predictions; simply

compare Frey and Osborne’s (2017) gure of 47 per cent for the United States to Arntz

etal.’s (2016) nine per cent. The few empirical studies that look cross-nationally indi-

cate that countries will fare differently, but no consistent pattern emerges. Where there

is greater consensus is on the types of jobs and workers most susceptible, notably ‘rou-

tine’ manual and cognitive tasks and the ‘low qualied’. Although jobs requiring ‘cre-

ativity’ and ‘social intelligence’ are deemed relatively safe, some argue that AI will

hollow-out ‘middle-class’ professional occupations on an unprecedented scale (Ford,

Caroline Lloyd (lloydc4@cardiff.ac.uk) School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Build-

ing, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Caroline Lloyd is a professor of work and em-

ployment at Cardiff University. Her research interests include international comparisons of skills and

work organisation, low wage work, and robotics, digitalisation and the future of work.

Jonathan Payne (jpayne@dmu.ac.uk) Leicester Castle Business School, The Gateway, Leicester LE1

9BH, UK. Jonathan Payne is a professor of work, employment and skills at De Montfort University

and Director of the People, Organisations and Work Institute. His research encompasses the political

economy of skill, job quality and workplace innovation.

Robotics, AI and work in Norway and the UK 209

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

2015; Susskind and Susskind, 2015). The creation of ‘new jobs’, while acknowledged,

has quickly become subsumed by headlines of mass unemployment, spiralling ine-

quality and societal collapse.

There are voices that warn against treating technology as a determining force, insist-

ing that the impact on the quantity, quality and distribution of work depends on ‘the

priorities of the holders of social and economic power’ (Howcroft and Taylor, 2014: 1;

Spencer, 2018; Fleming, 2019). This article draws on approaches that emphasise the

role of institutions, power and interests in shaping whether and how technology is in-

serted into an economy and workplace. A technology may exist but employers will not

necessarily adopt it. Even where technology is taken up, the impact on the organisa-

tion of work, skills and job quality will be partly inuenced by employer objectives,

and contestation or negotiation by workers and any representatives (Beirne and

Ramsay, 1992; Edwards and Ramirez, 2016). Given national differences in institutional

and regulatory frameworks and power relationships, we might expect the pace and

shape of technological change to vary between countries.

International comparisons that address the challenges in different countries are ‘sur-

prisingly lacking in the vast volumes of research on the fourth industrial revolution’

(Neufeind etal., 2018a: 540). There is a critical gap in analysing how these technologies

may play out and the scope for social actors to shape different outcomes. Institutionalists

approaches, such as ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and ‘national in-

novation systems’ (Edquist, 1997) have attempted to theorise country differences in

innovation, although they have yet to be applied to robotics and AI. These theories

may provide some insights but, as with the models of predicted job loss (Frey and

Osborne, 2017), they lack signicant engagement with issues of power and interest.

This article seeks to contribute to an analysis of ‘country effects’ and the role of insti-

tutions and actors in shaping technological change through a comparison of develop-

ments in robotics and AI in the United Kingdom and Norway. These countries were

purposefully selected for their starkly contrasting economic and industrial relations

institutions, and role and power of the social partners. If institutions and social actors

are important in shaping the development and use of technology, we would expect to

nd some differences emerging between the UK and Norway, even at this early stage.

The article draws on the views of ‘key experts’ involved in research, development and

implementation of robotics/AI, and ‘key stakeholders’ in employer organisations and

trade unions. The aims are, rst, to compare their reections on the emerging public

policy and institutional supports for the development and diffusion of robotics/AI

and, second, to explore perceptions of the pace and shape of technological change and

the implications for work.

The article begins by critically examining studies that have sought to estimate coun-

try differences in jobs at risk, before considering potential contributions of the VOC

and NIS approaches to a discussion of ‘country effects’. Key contextual features of

Norway and the UK are then presented, including existing data on the use of robotics

and AI. Next, the research methods are outlined. The sections that follow bring to-

gether the interviews with key experts and stakeholders to compare views on national

policy and institutional supports for robotics/AI, and their impact on employment,

work and skills. The article concludes with a discussion of country differences and

suggests avenues for future research.

Predicting country differences

Attempts to measure the impact of robots and AI on employment have been domi-

nated by a few studies seeking to predict ‘risk of job loss’ (Arntz etal., 2016; Frey and

Osborne, 2017; McKinsey 2017). The most widely cited is Frey and Osborne’s work,

which draws on a group of ‘experts’ assessing whether individual occupations could

be replaced by a robot or AI. They conclude that nearly half of jobs in the United States

are at risk of automation over the next two decades or so. An important counterpoint

is Arntz etal.’s (2016) OECD report which argues that a job comprises multiple tasks,