John Burn-Murdoch

I think that partly for the reasons we said about how AI could potentially shape the sort of social discourse and that kind of things in a healthier way or at least a less unhealthy way than social media.

I've also written about how there's early suggestive evidence that people's screen time and social media time may be falling, which I think would be very beneficial if people then start using that time to interact face to face.

I think on housing, you know, it's always possible for things to get even worse.

But I do think we're now having a conversation where there's an appreciation that this is something we really need to address and fix.

And there are

governments and policymakers in all sorts of different parts of the world starting to increasingly take this seriously.

Yeah, I'm optimistic about that.

I guess the...

pessimistic side that I'm competing against there is if AI does turn out to have this sustained negative impact on young people's employment, that would be a material negative shift that it would be very hard for all of these more subtle sociocultural shifts to wave away.

But yeah, look, I try, I completely agree with you.

The incentives here are to tell sort of surprising negative stories, but I do try to

remain fully aware of that and look for the positive and more optimistic stories where they exist.

Look, again, there's going to be so many answers to a question like this, but certainly two big ones that I would point to immediately are, one is the sort of planning and permitting system here, which really makes countries like the US, where that's also a conversation, look like rookies.

You know, the restrictions on house building in the UK are extraordinary.

There are huge areas of land around London, around Manchester, around Birmingham, our major cities, where you are simply not allowed to build.

called the Green Belt.

We apply similar restrictions or similarly severe restrictions to building infrastructure.

We have some of the highest infrastructure costs in the world and the longest delays in the world affecting transport, affecting energy.

That gives us some of the highest energy prices in the developed world.

All of these make it harder for people, companies, you name it, to locate in the UK or in the most productive parts of the UK.