Merryn Somerset Webb

I suspect that's not really true.

And in fact, there aren't any graduate jobs because that parts of the UK are effectively in recession and people simply aren't hiring because the environment isn't good enough for it.

And

And we look at it and we're casting around for a reason.

But this may just be an entirely normal employment recession of the type that we've seen many times before.

And certainly when I graduated, there were literally no jobs available.

Yeah, I mean, the evidence we have so far on that, which is trying to kind of tease apart, if you like, cyclical unemployment, or in some cases, not so much unemployment, but unwillingness to post vacancies from the structural AI component, can't find much of the second so far.

Now, I think if you are a God-fearing CEO, it's much easier to tell a story about AI as to why you're chopping vacancies or indeed heads than it is because your business is struggling.

So I suspect it's being used as a defensive shield for a great many businesses when the truth is rather more mundane, which is about sluggish sales and elevated costs, of course, for pretty much everything, including people with...

national minimum wage and rights bill and all the, all the rest of it.

Um, so actually, you know, um, in the spirit of, of, um, a further optimism, I am optimistic about Andy and a steady, um,

That AI need not be the great job slayer that people worry about if we play our cards right.

How do we play our cards right with a technology that we know so well?

We know a lot about it, but we understand very little about how it will permeate the economy going forward, really, don't we?

You listen to the range of views on it, and we did.

I don't know if you listened to a great podcast the other day about LNMs and how they pretty much hit their ceiling already.

There's nothing more to come there.

And then, of course, you have the other approaches into attempting to find an AGI, which may take a little longer, but are fascinating.

So it's very hard to even understand how this will develop, let alone how it might embed itself in our economy.

No, that's all true.