Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I’m delighted to have tabled this debate today, along with my colleagues Hefin David, Vikki Howells, Jeremy Miles, and my friend David Melding—genuinely delighted. Just as we pressed last month that we must do all that we can to bolster the so-called foundational economy, we must also look at the external trends that are set to change our lives and our economies.

We’re in the early stages of a fourth industrial revolution, marked by our ability to combine digital technologies with physical and biological systems. Just as the first industrial revolution was brought about through our ability to harness steam power, the second by our capacity to generate electrical power, driving mass production, and the third industrial revolution was prompted by the development of electronics and computers, this fourth industrial revolution sees machines, data and algorithms becoming embedded into every aspect of our lives.

Our money is increasingly virtual; our homes are becoming smarter. Technology now controls our kettles, our boilers, even our ability to park. The healthcare we receive is set to be transformed beyond recognition as the ability to know your own personal genome becomes ever more affordable. Whilst we’ve become accustomed to our factories having machines where once there were workers, this automation will continue apace.

Technology has crept into our lives with stealth, to the point that it is now near impossible to imagine a world without it. The pace of change is phenomenal. Things I grew up with—floppy disks, cassettes, video tapes—are now meaningless. And, more so, their replacements—DVDs and CDs—are also already obsolete in a generation. Spotify and Netflix are now intuitive for younger generations, and both are driven by big data, which is not just a high-tech phenomenon; it is everywhere and it is shaping everything.

Our assumptions of what is possible are constantly being challenged. Just this week, we heard of Elon Musk’s ability to reuse a rocket. As he said:

It’s the difference between having airplanes that you threw away after every flight, versus reusing them multiple times’.

If the same implications hold true for space travel as air travel has had in our daily lives, they are huge. How soon before driverless cars, wireless electricity, 3D printing, and even space travel are as mundane as Netflix and e-mail?

There is much going on behind the scenes that we aren’t yet aware of. Change isn’t just happening in one industry, as in previous industrial revolutions, it’s happening simultaneously across multiple sectors, and this poses new challenges. The Bank of England’s own methodology suggests that within 20 years—20 years—as many as 700,000 jobs might be at risk in Wales from automation. Computers and algorithms can gather data from far wider sources to make calculated judgments on anything from tax returns to cancer treatments. I’d recommend listening on iPlayer, which itself didn’t exist 10 years ago, to Radio 4’s ‘The Public Philosopher’, which held an eye-opening debate on this very issue. What was stark was the total disbelief by the vast majority of the audience that any robot could do their job better than them, and the audible shock when they realised the possibility that they could. One example that stood out was the GP who’d listened as half the audience revealed they’d rather receive a diagnosis from a robot than a human, and one in four jobs in Wales is at risk like this.

Let’s be clear: this impact is gendered. The World Bank recently warned that, for every three male jobs lost, one will be gained. For women, the situation is far worse. They will lose five jobs to automation for every one job that is gained. Governments, business, and global institutions are struggling to keep up with the pace of chance, which is hardly surprising—this is unsettling. It’s our role, as policy makers, to prepare for that, and right now we’re doing a terrible job at it. To this end, I’ll be hosting a round table in June with some of Wales’s biggest employers across the public and private sector to discuss how we can brace ourselves for this common challenge, and I am delighted that both the Cabinet Secretary and the future generations commissioner have agreed to join. But, as well as preparing for the challenges, we must also be seizing the opportunities.

At a recent meeting I hosted with the manufacturers’ organisation EEF in my constituency with businesses, one manufacturer revealed to me that automation within his company had not only boosted productivity, it had enabled their company to take on more staff. So, automation needn’t always be seen as a threat to jobs, but as a tool for growth. And technological advances have the potential to create new sectors, which will spur new jobs. This is a hugely exciting time. Julie James, as the Minister responsible for data, recently attended a round table I hosted on the potential for precision agriculture in Wales. Now, precision farming isn’t simply about agriculture, and the fourth industrial revolution will not respect departmental boundaries. A whole new industry is being driven by our ability to collect and analyse data at speeds that were previously unimaginable. But Wales has a short amount of time to capitalise on the generations of knowledge that we’ve built up in farming, and apply these emerging technologies to grow an industry that has global potential. And to understand where these opportunities are—where our domain expertise, our USP, can offer us clear, competitive advantage—an immediate and urgent strategic review is needed.

Robotics and automation, cybersecurity, big data, the codification of money, the financial markets and genomics, are widely predicted as the key industries emerging from the fourth industrial revolution. And that’s what we should focus on. For too long, we’ve focused on conventional approaches, too concerned about not upsetting the apple cart. I still, for the life of me, do not understand how we can have nine priority sectors, because, when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. And I applaud the focus that has been brought to bear on Wales’s apprenticeship scheme, and we must do the same to our entire economic strategy, enabling the most efficient targeting of scarce resources. And there must be clear guidance on what this new industrial landscape demands in terms of approach, and this will require a deft hand, charting a difficult path through providing patient, goal-orientated finance and support, setting a long-term goal for which we’ll provide long-term support, but combined with an experimental approach to reach that goal. And let us be clear, Dirprwy Lywydd: we will fail along the way, and that’s okay. We must be open about it in order to learn from it. If we think back to many of the inventions I spoke of at the beginning of my speech—the iPhone, space travel, driverless technology—the origins of each of these can be traced back to long-term, patient Government finance.

Ostensibly, this blueprint, this difficult course, is what the ‘Innovation Wales’ strategy has set out to do. But, speaking frankly, this is a strategy that is only remarkable in its lack of ambition, and it urgently needs revision. I don’t want to look back in 20 years’ time and think, ‘I wish we’d done more’. I don’t think any of us do. So, let our challenge be today—and this is a challenge; it’s not a criticism—that we redouble our efforts to address the hurdles and embrace the opportunities, and that we do it fast. Diolch.