Callum Williams

speaker

83 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 14 May

Callum Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Intelligence from The Economist · Fired alarm: AI hype versus labour-market history · 14 May 2026 podcast

For example, if you look at something like agriculture.

There's been very profound technological change in farming really over the past thousand years.

But what you can see in England, which has the longest run data on agriculture employment, is that the share of English people working in agriculture has been falling for like eight hundred years.

Then there's a very interesting question of are there any examples where technological disruption actually did happen quite quickly?

And one interesting example here is the middle of the 20th century, both in the US and the UK.

During this period you have the first computers, the spread of plastics, shipping containers, new manufacturing methods, that kind of thing.

And if you look at the amount of job disruption that took place at the time, it was actually really high.

It was much higher than it is today, and it was much, much higher than it was during the Industrial Revolution.

And of course the funny thing is that people today look back on that period as a golden age for workers.

Totally.

So grads are definitely suffering right now.

For the first time ever, the unemployment rate of new grads is higher than the overall unemployment rate.

That is historically quite unusual.

The question is though, why is that?

And there's a lot of debate about this, but what is clear is that the labour market position of new grads started to weaken long before Chat GPT came along.

So this does not appear to be something that's happening because of AI.

It appears to be something that's happening because of other things.

And so that's not to discount the troubles that many new grads are going through.

It's just to say it might be a bit hasty to blame AI for that.

Okay, so let's assume that it really is going to be a completely new thing.

Showing 41–60 of 83 · page 3 of 5