Robert Peston

speaker

5,884 appearances 45 recordings 5 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 2d ago

Robert Peston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 45 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 9.

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The Rest Is Money · 307. The world’s most influential economist: how we can deliver "worker-friendly AI" · 23 Aug 2026 podcast

He says all technology can be shaped to make it more friendly to workers.

And his current obsession is to do this with artificial intelligence to prevent AI.

From eliminating millions and millions of jobs and make us all dependent on handouts from the state.

So what is his worker-friendly AI and is it deliverable?

In part two of my interview with the acclaimed economist, I find out.

Here it is.

Darren, in our earlier episode, you were saying that we do have the ability to shape how new technologies are deployed, which is, you know, counter to what I say many of our leaders have believed over the last 20, 30 years.

And you are absolutely focused on how artificial intelligence can be shaped so that it does not do what many fear it will do.

Do which is to eliminate vast numbers of jobs and whether you know as a period of disruption or permanently leads to massive unemployment.

So talk me through what you think is necessary to avoid such a potential jobs.

And I wanna d drill into that in a minute or two, but just to paraphrase, you genuinely believe

that it is more practical

to essentially stop

These juggernauts b uh you know, essentially uh investing hundreds, I mean more than a I mean, I think there's gonna be more than a trillion dollars this year invested by just three

uh companies uh in the development of generative AI with a view to, they hope, reaching artificial and general intelligence.

You think it is more practical to stop that juggernaut than to prepare for a world where we would need essentially a super tax

on these AI companies in order to deliver universal basic income to the millions and millions of people who won't have a job.

So let's talk a bit about pro-worker uh AI.

Uh uh and we, you know, as as certainly an alternative path to the sort of slightly fatalistic one of, you know, everyone's gonna lose their jobs and we've got to have universal basic income.

Um I mean, in my own case, just as a sort of one, I think, semi-optimistic uh case study, uh, you know, uh you know, I find the you know, the AI that I use massively increased.

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