London Tech Week’s focus on AI - from a £12 million investment in AI for SMEs to AI bootcamps for graduates and more - has reflected the pressure to compete in an AI era.

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As this digital revolution progresses, the job economy is changing, but the mantra that AI is taking our jobs is simply not correct and is potentially fuelled by an undercurrent of classicism.

When the Luddites famously started to break the first machines of the Industrial Revolution in 1811 in England, fearing for their job as textile artisans, the “Bourgeoisie” would describe them as “ignorant workers”, with no understanding of basic economics.

More than two hundred years later, with the rise of GenAI, it is no longer the blue-collar workers who fear for their job, but the white-collar workers. This time it is the “bourgeois” who live in the anxiety of an uncertain world.

Since ChatGPT introduced AI into the everyday lexicon, it has been clear that we would experience an unprecedented revolution. The rhetoric that immediately began to dominate social discourse has been that AI would render most jobs insignificant. Furthermore, whilst other technological revolutions ended up being creative destruction, ‘this time it was different’.

But is that really the case? Or are we more fearful, more concerned about destroying the status quo, because this time it’s a different ‘class’ of people being impacted? This time it’s the desk workers, not the physical labourers, who risk losing jobs, and suddenly there is alarm.

Artificial Intelligence relies on humans - and more humans than ever.

AI is a human creation and still relies on humans to evolve. First, we have those who build the infrastructure, like data centres, which accounted for almost all of the United States’ GDP growth in the first half of 2025........

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