CHANCELLOR Rachel Reeves pledged today to put her foot on the artificial intelligence accelerator despite fears of a jobs crisis.

She is set to use an annual address to City bigwigs to announce a £500 million “sovereign AI fund” to back the industry.

The government is also to launch a £1 billion programme to buy advanced quantum computers.

Dan Tomlinson, ministerial deputy to Ms Reeves at the Treasury, denied that AI will lead to a jobs massacre.

Citing the precedent of the industrial revolution he claimed that new technologies would change the nature of work but not the amount of it.

“If AI does mean that a particular company, rather than hiring 10 people, can hire six or seven, that those three people that would have otherwise been hired have got new opportunities to go to,”  he said, without elaborating on where those opportunities might be.

Ms Reeves was to say that Britain had to “chart our own course” on AI and could not afford to “bury our heads in the sand” in a world “defined by technological change.”

AI is one of the three “big choices” facing the country according to Ms Reeves, for whom the other two are closer links with the European Union and growth in all parts of Britain.

Ministers are desperate to stimulate economic growth and otherwise have little in their locker beyond deregulation of everything from housebuilding to financial services, which has yielded meagre results so far.