It's that scale of profound change that we're on the cusp of again. Right now, we're in the early adopter stages of the artificial intelligence revolution, but we can discern an outline of the type of change that’s ahead of us. I was blown away by the robot who was able to cook a meal by just being shown a 'how to cook' video on YouTube without any direct human input. Researchers at the University of Maryland did this experiment two years ago now, and they're planning to use a similar deep learning approach in areas like military repair. Elon Musk at Tesla thinks that a car manufacturing factory without any human workers is within reach. Amazon are trialling a shop without workers, where you're automatically billed when you leave the store. These are all game changes, changing the way we behave. Amazon, Airbnb and Uber are all demonstrating how quickly technology can change how we shop, sleep and move from A to B. And they're up-ending business models in the process. You won’t find the largest global retailer on the high street. The world’s largest accommodation provider doesn’t own a single hotel. And the largest taxi firm doesn’t own a single car.

As the director of the Confederation of British Industry in Wales points out in a recent article, in 2004, Blockbuster had 84,000 employees and had revenues of $6 billion. In 2016, just 12 years later, Netflix employed 4,500 people and made $9 billion. It's called disruptive change for a reason, and it's evolving quickly. In the early days of the internet, it was about tasks like finding information or listening to music, but now technology is moving to anticipate our needs. Innovation expert Alec Ross points out that robots used to be stand-alone machines carrying out basic tasks. Now they're all connected to the cloud and are learning as they go, not just from their own experiences, but, because they can be linked to every other similar machine across the world, they learn from each other and adapt in real time. He calls it a quantum leap for the cognitive development of robots.

It's the equivalent of you and I being able to tap into the combined brainpower of every other human on earth to make a decision and to do so in a split second. Imagine how much smarter we'd be. Imagine how much better we'd be at making decisions. That's what's happening with robots. It is extraordinary. And it's also terrifying. For an economy like ours, there is a disproportionate number of jobs that are vulnerable to automation, but this change is unstoppable and we must get our heads around it and adapt. I wouldn't swap my digital alarm clock for a knocker-upper, just as nobody would turn back the clock to a world lit by candlelight or horsepower. So, too, we shouldn’t try to halt automation; we should harness it.

'The graveyards are full of indispensable men'

Charles de Gaulle famously said, and of course it's human nature to resist change. None of us wants to face up to the fact that our job may be made obsolete. But it's our responsibility to ensure that this wilful blindness is not replicated at a national level. When Gerry Holtham recently suggested at an Institute of Welsh Affairs event that we might get rid of GPs altogether because technology could do their job for them, the professions jumped on him. Both the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Physicians denounced him. Like the guild of craftsmen from the days of old that orchestrated the banishment of William Lee in 1589 because he'd invented a knitting machine, we must not let their desire to protect their trades stop us from harnessing these changes.

'Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects' 

Queen Elizabeth I told him. 

Let’s be clear: the threat of job losses will pale into insignificance to what will happen if we don’t take advantage of the possibilities. We know there is a shortage of doctors and that demand is rising and public spending is falling. We know that many of the new technologies are more accurate than humans and that patients in many cases would prefer to be diagnosed by a machine. So, let's free up overworked paramedics to do what only they can do and let's harness technology. And this is my plea in this afternoon’s debate, Cabinet Secretary: if we face up to the enormity of the challenge that is upon us, we can use it to improve public services, to free people from dangerous or routine tasks. But if we hold back, there's a danger that the downsides of change will dominate the debate and create a climate of fear.

Atos and other consultancies are as we speak touting themselves around cash-strapped councils offering to save millions by cutting routine jobs and replacing them with automated processes. If we allow this approach to take hold, all talk of automation will be seen by the workforce as a cost-cutting exercise, and it needn't be. If we harness it, we can use new labour-saving devices to free up staff to work on the front line, to improve public services. That’s the debate we need to have. And Government needs to mobilise, right across its whole breadth, to face up to how we can use these new technologies to help tackle the problems we know we face—[Interruption.] Yes, I'm happy to give—