British banking giant to cut 15% of jobs to AI. The left needs a vision for tech.
British banking giant Standard Chartered could cut more than 7,500 jobs and replace them with AI and automation. More broadly, analysis from Morgan Stanley has found that UK companies that had used AI for a least a year had net losses of 8% of jobs over only the last 12 months. This was the highest level among countries analysed.
Where’s the left’s vision?
AI and automation is actually an opportunity for progression. But the left needs an alternative vision for how the technology is implemented.
Speaking of the job losses, the CEO of Standard Chartered, which is Asia focused, said:
It’s not cost-cutting. It’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital ​with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in
“Lower-value human capital” is quite the way to view workers. But the chief executive does make the point that, with AI and automation, capital will essentially become labour. If one has the investment to automate, one has the labour.
Replacing menial jobs with AI and automation can be progress. It could liberate people, enabling them to be creative, establish skills they never had the time for, study, participate democratically and socialise.
But people need some kind of citizens’ dividend from robotic labour in order to survive with less hours or no job.
Study suggests AI netting job losses
In its analysis, Morgan Stanley found that the UK experienced the worst rate of net AI job losses in 2025, compared to other countries. Japan was second with net losses of 7%, then Germany and Australia with net losses of 4%.
So far, UK companies had an average productivity increase of 11.5%.
The research suggests that AI is not actually creating jobs at the same pace as it is replacing them. And the left needs a modern vision for the technology.
Featured image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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It’s almost a religious belief, and definitely a myth that new technology as always leads to job replacement following displacement. But that hasn’t happened since the late 80s. Jobless figures have always been manipulated, and your recent article highlighted the almost 10 million people not working or looking for work. The left have never been emancipatory, as they rely on the right and are subordinate to it, and are bereft of alternatives ideas to the wage system, which is continuous with slavery. Centring and feverishly elevating work is toxic to humanity and all life on earth. The left has squandered its time in political office, as soon as it found itself in parliament it was seduced. A true alternative to the right would’ve dismantled parliament, ended elections and instituted a multitude of networked assemblies, at village, town, city and regional and national level, to collectively make contextualised decisions, with sortition used for specific projects. All funded. Politics needs many involved in decision-making, to avoid capture by wealth and the creation of oligarchy, the current state of the UK. The left chose paternal centralised hierarchy, a roght eing structure, and consequently its own failure. Sad really.
When did we have a left wing government? I must have missed that