Merryn Somerset Webb

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.

And, you know, anyone who can say with confidence they know what the jobs of the deaf tomorrow might be, that's a fanciful notion, I think, in this environment.

Nonetheless, are we equipping our young people, and indeed some not so young ones, with the sets of agile, malleable, fungible capabilities that

as distinct from specific skills to enable them to ride the rapids or whatever the new technology waves.

So no, we are not.

And that's what I'm talking about.

You know, playing our cards right means equipping our young people with those agile, fungible capabilities.