The Future

Intelligence – The ability to think, reason and understand - Collins Dictionary

Artificial – Objects, materials or processes that do not occur naturally - Collins Dictionary

Before looking at the future of the British economy, now that it is no longer an industrial nation, it is worth understanding the two elephants in the room of economic progress. Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

Artificial Intelligence

A recent MSN news item reported a survey result that said that that 31% of U.S. teenagers said that talking to AI companions is at least, if not more, satisfying than talking to their friends. AI companions are designed to take on a specific character, unlike general use chatbots such as ChatGPT.

The first thing to make clear is that, as of when I am writing, August 2025, there are no artificial intelligence systems in operation. The reason lies in the Collin’s dictionary definition at the top of the page. Intelligence is the ability to think, reason, and, most importantly, understand. Current systems have no understanding. They cannot carry their knowledge and skills across problem domains. The grandmaster level chess playing system cannot turn its hand to facial recognition and the scary facial recognition system cannot play chess. They are expert systems, not intelligent systems.

There is a huge investment in artificial intelligence, some $25.2 billion in 2023 and rising. It is not hard to see why. The first group to crack the problem stands to reap huge financial rewards. Insurance companies now have expert systems to generate quotes, but a system that could converse with clients as well as generating quotes and keeping tax records would mean an insurance company with no employees and therefore no building costs. Likewise, legal firms are experimenting with expert legal precedence search systems but, with AI, the complete legal firm would sit within some data centre. I have no idea how a courtroom would function in such a situation. There would probably not be a courtroom. Interpretation of medical images is well developed, but a system that could also search for likely causes and converse with a patient to fill out a diagnosis and the prescribe treatment, would see a large reduction in medical training and hospital equipment costs.

AI may take another 20 years to achieve, or it may be rolled out next year. What is certain is that, when it comes, it will arrive quickly and, as a society, we won’t be ready for it. Legislation and commercial controls will not be in place, and it will just be used to make a few tech lords even richer.

Robotics

Japan is testing AIREC (AI-driven Robot for Embrace and Care) to care for elderly people. AIREC can gently turn a prone person on their side.

Artificial Intelligence has been with us since 1956, but robots have a much longer history. The mythological bronze man, Talos, guardian of the island of Crete, was the first mechanical man to be written about, but he was soon killed off by Jason and his argonauts. Since then, we have been fed a regular diet of golems, homunculi, and automata, including ideas from Leonardo Da Vinci, until Karel Capek, in 1920, introduced us to genuine robots in his play “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”

For something to be called a robot, it must have six degrees of freedom in its movement. Forward and backward, side to side, yaw and pitch. A robot arm may be fixed at a point but is can still exhibit the six degrees of freedom in its work related movement.

The first industrial robot was a picking arm, built out of Meccano parts in the 1930s. But the first robot to be used as part of a factory production system, was UNIMATE which was installed By General Motors in 1962. The first robot with an autonomous control system was installed in Sweden in 1974, to grind and polish pipe bends. By 2023, the International Federation of Robotics estimated that some 4,281,585 industrial robots were in operation worldwide.

The Changying Precision Technology Company factory in Dongguan, China, which produces parts for cell phones has almost completely automated production lines, using robotic arms. The factory also has automated machining equipment, autonomous transport trucks, and other automated equipment in the warehouse. Previously, there were 650 employees at the factory. With the new robots, there’s now only 60. Luo Weiqiang, general manager of the company, told the People’s Daily newspaper that the number of employees could drop to 20 in the future.

What do the humans do?

If artificial intelligence comes to fruition and robotics continues its steady march, then how do all the people whose jobs are gone make a living. Presumably, a few people with still be needed to assist the robots in building huge data centres and the nuclear power stations needed to run them, but what about the reast of us? Needless to say, not many people have bothered to think about this. A universal wage or fight each other for food scraps, no one knows.