Azeem Azhar

And it's not as if the Ford Motor Company or

AT&T was closely allied so strategically with the firms that went before.

So it feels like this industrial transition has different characteristics.

And perhaps it is just that bits are bits and you're building on bits.

And so what else can we expect at this time?

I would love to talk also about something that I think is quite close to your heart that is, I think, quite difficult to navigate right now, which is

What should we think about what happens to the workforce under the speed of this kind of AI transformation?

And I will start with a little sort of pitch of how I see the state of the nation, which is that companies are really, really eager to...

make productivity improvements, and these tools can automate large parts of roles, right?

They can automate many, many tasks.

And so the natural outcome for workers will be either suppression of wages or it will be loss of jobs on the flip side of that productivity gain.

And that the question is not whether new jobs will get created because historically we've all always created new jobs.

And we've seen work from some of your colleagues in the field of academic economics to show that most jobs in the US are in categories that didn't exist 60 or 70 years ago.

But I suppose the question that I have is,

that I wonder about is what is the likelihood that the economy will create enough new jobs in those categories for there not to be some kind of schismatic dislocation as this technology rolls out?

How have you thought about that?

Well, it's fascinating because 15 years ago, the story was AI was going to come after routine jobs in offices.

And what we have seen is

the souped-up autocorrect, it doesn't really matter how it works in theory.

If it's working in practice and doing much more than that, it will have an impact, is enabling lawyers and software developers and creatives in all sorts of areas.