Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says automation and artificial intelligence are increasingly affecting jobs.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says automation and artificial intelligence are increasingly affecting jobs.
The Government has announced $14 million funding to train up lower-skilled workers as their jobs increasingly come under threat from artificial intelligence and automation.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Education Minister Chris Hipkins on Thursday announced a boost to programmes looking to improve the reading and maths skills of workers.
"Automation and artificial intelligence are increasingly affecting jobs meaning New Zealand needs a population with high-level literacy and numeracy skills," Ardern said.
The fund is open to employers who have generally lower-skilled staff and pays for them to hire specialists to come in and teach.
The money is spread over four years and adds to about $30 million allocated towards workplace education programmes to 2022.
A Productivity Commission report in April noted previous studies predicting nearly half of New Zealand jobs would come under threat from automation, and that the risk was significantly higher for lower-skilled employees such as drivers and labourers. However, it concluded that because of the difficulty of forecasting technological change it was not useful to make a single prediction.
It found about 38 per cent of adults wanted to take part in more learning but couldn't.