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.

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

I think one early sign would be that productivity growth is extremely rapid.

There is a general rule looking back over a thousand years of history that per person GDP growth of the most technologically advanced country never exceeds about two to two and a half percent per year.

So if America were to exceed that, that would be one sign.

You'd also want to see though a simultaneous jump in corporate profitability.

You'd also see people losing their jobs.

in large numbers, not just in specific industries, but across the economy as a whole.

So at the moment we're not seeing this.

Yes, it is true that corporate profits are doing quite well in the US at the moment, but the labor market is still very strong and productivity growth in the US economy is not bad, but definitely not historically unprecedented, far from it.

I mean, some people say it's all to do with branding, and I think that could be partly it.

These companies want IPO if the CEO makes some kind of blood curdling prediction about

job loss, it will get a headline and people will be more interested in the company.

There's part of me that thinks that people in tech do genuinely believe this.

And I think there's two reasons for that.

I think one is that I think a sort of corollary of Silicon Valley being so forward looking is that people there are actually quite ignorant of history.

And it's remarkable how little interest people have in previous technologies.

They're only interested in the technologies that are still to come.

And then the second reason I think, again, I think people on the whole in Silicon Valley have quite a poor model of how normal people use technology.

I mean, if you just read or listen to interviews with, say, the heads of OpenAI or Anthropic.

They really do genuinely believe that the average person wants to vibe code their own app.

Which is clearly not the case.

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