Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2019
Daniel Johnson is right to identify the need for skills in that area, but it goes much further than that. Although we need people to have the skills to be able to be part of the development of the technology, an even bigger challenge is ensuring that we have the skills that will add value in the next few decades when things such as AI replace jobs, which is one of the risks that we need to have a robust conversation about. In particular, softer skills are critical, because they will not be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots.
There are two challenges. We have to ensure that we have digital, computing and mathematics skills. I take digital skills seriously, and I can talk about a number of strategies that we are deploying to boost such skills. One of the key discussions that we need to have is how we prepare our young people, in particular, to have the skills of the future when jobs as we know them will be significantly changed.
It is important to recognise that the economic value of data to Scotland lies not just in the creation by tech companies of new products and services but in their adoption across all sectors to improve the competitiveness of our companies and create even better public services. For several years, we have been working to realise that opportunity through a number of data-driven initiatives and projects.
For example, the Scottish Government, the national health service, the Scottish Ambulance Service and other partners have come together to tackle the deadly issue of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Every year in Scotland, more than 3,000 people have a cardiac arrest while not in a hospital, and fewer than one in 10 survive, with people in deprived areas having the worst outcomes. By linking our data, we have been able to understand the issue in unprecedented detail and track progress against our goals, and now more patients receive bystander chest compressions, and more survive.
There are other examples of data being used more smartly to solve the challenges that we face.