Simon Johnson
speaker
239 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Simon Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And perhaps they're just the owners of the capital, actually.
But everyone else is going to get pushed down to the poverty level.
And I think that's what we're trying to...
On the critical question you asked at the end, can we stop the displacement of workers?
That is very hard.
I was in Paris recently meeting, I'll call him a leading French industrialist, and he said, because of AI, I don't need 20% of my workers, but I'm not going to fire anyone because it's France.
However, I'm not going to hire anyone.
I have 5% attrition every year, so that'll take care of my problem.
I think the automation is coming anyway, Robert.
The new task creation is what we need to accelerate, and that's my own personal position.
But that's also, I think, a lot of what you'll see around the AI Economic Institute and the language we're using there is very much, how do we get onto that pro-worker path?
How do we try to shape technology and encourage technology to move in that pro-worker direction?
It's not easy, but I think we need to try it.
Yes, absolutely.
I think if you present the union with a plan to phase out jobs, of course, they're not going to be excited about that.
But if you've got better ideas, other ideas about ways you're going to create new tasks and build the business, I think that's a different conversation.
One of my grandfathers, Steph, ran a big steel mill in Sheffield at the peak of his career.
And I'm well aware that, you know,
The union history and the difficulties arose from that, and the fact that the steel industry declined, and there wasn't that much you could do about it.
So at the level of the economy as a whole, the government's job is to find ways to encourage that new task creation, raising and increasing the demand for human expertise.
Showing 61–80 of 239 · page 4 of 12
← Previous
Next →