297. How do we reshape our workforce in the AI era?
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Demis Hassabis does believe that AI will replace most of us.
And obviously for millions and millions of people, that's very scary. Any technology that replaces people will also augment the ones left behind. 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, you know, because of AI, I don't need 20% of my workers. A lot of this technology is being adopted because people like it. So Chad GPT, when it came out in November 2022, as far as I've been able to see, was being used in every corner of the earth within 24 hours. I think this is a national emergency.
I think it's been a national emergency for a couple of years. So is this just a phase thing that we're going through a period where potentially augmentation is the way forward?
Well, first of all, these are great questions. Let me try to unpack it a little bit. So I think this augmentation versus replacement is not exactly the right way to think about it because... We're proud to say that the rest is money is powered by Octopus Energy this year.
And Greg Jackson, the founder and CEO, is with us. Greg, I wanted to ask you about heat pumps. Octopus Energy now make them. Why not just import them from China?
You know what? We want to make heat pumps that work. that are designed for British homes and that are cheaper to run, cheaper to install, and actually cheaper for the hardware. And that's what we did. So, for example, Octopus created heat pumps that run at up to 70 degrees C, as hot as a gas boiler, so you don't necessarily need to worry about having, you know, excess insulation and changing your heating system. That sort of thing makes them much cheaper for British homes.
Nice one, Greg. Thanks for explaining that. Right, we're going to go to the episode.
Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Money with me, Robert Paston.
And me, Steph McGovern. Now, today we want to focus on how the UK can make sure that we all do well from AI and, you know, basically find out where are the good jobs in AI. Now, rightly, there is a lot of concern about jobs being lost and also about the money. being made and all going to the US tech giants. And the man tasked with advising the government on all of this is the Nobel Prize winning economist, Simon Johnson. He's a professor at MIT, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. And he's also now chair of the newly set up AI Economics Institute. So lots to ask him about, Robert.
Yes. And the big question is, how do we make sure if AI can't be stopped, We all get richer rather than only a few billionaires getting richer. It's the big question for our interview with Simon Johnson. And here it is. Simon, so we wanted to talk to you about how economies should adapt in this new world. What is the role of government? There's an enormous amount of anxiety as well as enormous amounts of optimism associated with so much of these technological developments. changes that we are living through. Just as a place to start, you've got some kind of advisory role for the British government. Just tell us what you're advising them on. And then both Steph and I, I suspect if you were to answer all our questions, we'd be here for a week, but we'll try and keep it reasonably concise.
But tell us, Simon, what are you doing with the British government at the moment?
Well, I'm doing two things, Robert. The first is I'm the chair of the newly created AI Economics Institute, which is I think the first of its kind in the world, actually. It's an effort to build an interface between policymakers and the evidence. So our job is to figure out what's going on and to answer questions. And we're not policymakers, but we are hopefully bringing outside and experts and experts from within government to bear on evidence. the problems that the government faces and wants to deal with. The second thing I'm doing is I'm chair of the AI Adoption Prize, which is a lot of fun. This is a sort of bottom-up initiative where we're trying to get British businesses and workers and unions to tell us what they're doing with AI and ways
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