More than 1m young people are out of work, and AI is about to wipe out millions more jobs. What should we do?

Thousands of stationary black cabs had gridlocked the length of Whitehall, halting traffic around Westminster and the West End.

It was June 2014, and drivers were protesting against a newly-launched private hire service called Uber .

By the following summer, France had cracked down on Uber’s ride-sharing option after disorder saw cars overturned, windows smashed, tires set on fire .

Cab drivers in Paris said they were being undercut by the taxi app and its various services, now ubiquitous in cities across the world, while back home there were complaints about supposed differences in regulations, making competition unfair.

The emergence of new technologies and the threat they pose to jobs has caused unrest throughout history. But anything that has come before could all pale in comparison with what is to come.

Economist Carl-Benedikt Frey, associate professor of AI & work at the Oxford Internet Institute, paints a bleak picture on how he believes artificial intelligence (AI) will impact the future of work in the UK .

Looking back on the anti-Uber protests, he told The Independent : “That was not a technology that was going to replace them (drivers); that was a technology or company that meant more competition.”

As for the future, “I think civil unrest will come long before mass unemployment ”, he added.

The fear that AI will “replace” humans, whether merely on a professional level or in a more fatal sense , is held by many.

In May, research by King’s College London (KCL) revealed that more than half of the British people believe AI will create widespread unemployment – and one in five think it will do so at such a rate which would create civil unrest .

According to Dr Frey, backlash towards AI – whether that is on an environmental level or through the construction of vast data centres – shows it is a “tremendously unpopular technology, even without having produced anything like mass unemployment”.

That sentiment will only deepen once its impact on incomes and livelihoods takes hold further, with new AI models increasingly capable of more and businesses drawn in by their cost-cutting abilities, he believes.

Dr Frey explained: “If AI threatens to reduce people's incomes, even by 5 per cent or 10 per cent – 10 per cent being roughly the amount by which Uber reduced incumbent drivers' incomes - you can see unrest from that as well.

“Taxi services as a share of the entire economy is relatively small; generative AI is a general-purpose technology that will touch on many different industries and occupations, if not all of them.