Ian Verrender

And you've got another company, which is a financial services company, laying off people because it can see a great opportunity here.

It's going to be able to double its profits or whatever because it'll get rid of all of these lower level jobs that artificial intelligence can do.

But you've still got a lot of people not employed.

I don't know and I don't think anybody knows the answers to those questions but they are the questions that need to be talked about and discussed by governments and central banks as well for that matter because it's going to have a major impact on employment and if we don't come up with some way of ensuring that there is a decent income for the broader population then you're not going to have spending and if you don't have spending you won't really have much of an economy so

It's a fairly utopian way of thinking, isn't it?

I'd like to think that we could do that and that the country and the world is rich enough to be able to spread the wealth in an adequate manner that we're all getting on well together.

But history would tend to suggest otherwise, really, wouldn't it?

Look, one of the other interesting things from that study from Stanford, though, is that

They've looked at a lot of companies and the way they implement artificial intelligence and the impact that it's actually happening on their earnings.

And most companies have not noticed any discernible impact on the bottom line, on their profitability.

from the utilization of artificial intelligence.

No.

And look, they do make the point in that is that that is not a criticism of the technology itself.

It's a criticism, perhaps, of the way the technology is being utilized by those companies and the mistakes that they're making in putting that forward.

I mean, there's a famous quote from an American economist back in the 1970s or 80s, I think it was, Robert Sullivan, who basically said, look, you can see the impact of computers everywhere except in the productivity figures.

So it can take a long time for these changes to flow through.

What does appear to be the difference this time around, though?

I mean, there's a fundamental difference in this technological revolution.

We've had the agricultural revolution, which essentially meant that you needed less labour on farms to produce the same amount of food.

And workers tended to then shift to the cities.