John Burn-Murdoch

So one was the fact that American workers are using AI more than British workers.

Now, some of that is because of differences in the nature of those economies.

So for example, the tech sector where more people use AI is bigger in the US.

But even when you look within particular sectors, American workers seem to be more enthusiastic about taking on these tools and more positive about the impact it's having on their work.

John, if we could take away one thing from these findings, what would it be?

I think the main takeaway is that although it might be true that within particular jobs or workplaces, AI can kind of level the playing field and bring up some of the less skilled workers to a higher level, across the whole economy, it seems to have the opposite effect.

With

These people in high status, high pay, knowledge jobs, getting a lot of benefits from their AI use, whereas people in blue collar jobs or your sort of back office jobs are using these tools less and presumably getting less benefit.

So we have these two stories going on at the same time.

But if AI usage continues to have that pattern and does boost the productivity and perhaps earnings of people who use it more than those who don't, it could increase wage inequality.

Great to be here.

Right, so this one I should say out of the gate that this is something I've been wanting to look into for ages.

I'm fascinated by how the world changes.

I'm also fascinated by how we within the world change in response to that.

And one of the things I often come up against is

how few studies actually track the same people or any people across time in terms of who we are.

So what I wanted to look at here was, your listeners I'm sure are familiar with the concept of personality traits.

Some people are more extroverted, introverted, that's the most common one people grasp, but there are all these other traits.

And I wanted to see how people's levels, prevalence of these traits have changed over time.

I landed on this survey, which has been tracking Americans for just over a decade now.