Alison O'Connor

Alison O'Connor is a political commentator with the Sunday Times.

Alan Barrett is a research professor at the ESRI.

And Seanna Cohen is executive director of the independent think tank TASC.

Good morning, everyone.

Morning.

Alison, this is different according to the front page of the Business Post.

AI is coming to get us and we seem to be waking up.

And Alan, unpredictable.

I know you guys have been doing a lot of work on this in the ESRI.

Yeah.

But it is kind of unpredictable.

And John Byrne Murdoch, you know, that very good young data journalist in the FT, he's basically saying all the time, he's looking at the numbers all the time and he's saying we just don't know.

Because number one, everyone says the amount of computer programmers has not declined, actually.

Right.

Overall, he made an interesting point recently, which is that everyone thought that ATMs would be the thing that would put bank tellers out of business.

But in fact, it was the mobile phone.

So we just you can never tell, can you?

So the four hyperscalers who are meta, alpha, grid,

Microsoft and Amazon are investing three quarters of a trillion this year in AI.

So we're winners in the current status quo.