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Rohan Silva: It’s time to get creative and battle the rise of the machine

Race Against the Machine. That’s the title of a hugely influential book by MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson that looks at how technology is reshaping the economy and fundamentally changing the work we’ll be doing in the years to come.

Its conclusion is stark: millions of jobs will be lost as roles currently handled by humans are increasingly taken over by software and machines.

The Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, has made a similar point, predicting that as many as 15 million jobs are at risk from automation in the UK alone.

But before we all get too depressed, here’s some good news. Jobs that involve creativity are far less likely to be replaced by technology — because luckily for us, computers are mostly still hopeless at creative tasks.

This begs the question: where does creativity come from? Does it just happen randomly, or is it possible to build organisations that nurture this way of thinking and equip people with the skills to turn a creative idea into a product or a business?

If you want to know the answer, there’s no better place to go than the Royal College of Art, which was founded in the 19th century in response to the Industrial Revolution, which was destroying old jobs and ways of working on a scale similar to today’s technology changes.

What’s so impressive about the RCA isn’t just that it produces so many amazing graduates — such as artist David Hockney, film director Ridley Scott and former Burberry CEO Christopher Bailey.

This tiny school spawns more business start-ups than Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial College London, which all have far larger student populations.

And when you look more closely, you find that the UK punches way above its weight when it comes to the quality of our art schools and the creative ingenuity of their graduates, from John Lennon to Apple design genius Jony Ive.

But even though the creative industries contribute more than £100 billion to the British economy each year, the truth is that art schools have never been a priority for ministers, which means they’ve been relatively underfunded — and could be even better than they currently are.

A glorious exception can be found in Battersea, where a £50 million cheque from central government is funding the RCA’s expansion into a stunning new building by Tate Modern architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Just last week the Sigrid Rausing Trust announced a £15 million gift to support this project, showing how bold political action can inspire others to follow.

This is exactly the kind of leadership we need if we’re going to have any chance of winning the race against the machine.

Fingers crossed that we see more of it — and soon.