I realised that I'm just going to touch on one of the bullet points of roughly 20 something I governance challenges that Alan mentioned.
So if you want to have your the relevance of your research being put in perspective,
you go to the Future of Humanity Institute and you find out that you actually win just a very,
very tiny small question related to all of the challenges that there are out there.
And so the the topic that I'm going to focus on is what this artificial intelligence and automation and mean for the labour market.
And for those of you who follow the debate and discussion, well, basically two very opposite views out there.
One is that there's going to be this employment apocalypse.
Artificial intelligence is going to take all the jobs. I'm commonly associated with that one.
And there's the other perspective, which is that if we only look to history and we should feel quite reassured
because automation has been progressing for centuries and perhaps even millennia.
And what I tried to do in my recent book is actually to go back and look to history
and what has happened to people and their lives as the jobs where and displaced.
And the question I try to ask is, should we feel that reassured if the future of automation mirrors the past?
Now I'm sort of covering roughly 10000 years of history in the book, and I'm not going to cover all of that in 15 minutes,
but I intend to at least give you sort of a glimpse of the things that are covered in the book.
And so and the first story in the book has to do with the fates of the Lamplighter
and several hundred years ago and the streets of Oxford weren't around this time.
The lit by lamp like this, walking around the streets with air torches and letters and and two lamp artists.
The arrival of electric lights was an enormously disruptive event.
And as electricity that was increasingly regulated from substations, the jobs were made redundant.
And for lamplight, this who essentially supported themselves and their families and and on these jobs,
they were naturally not that happy with what was happening.
And in Brussels in 1987, Lamplighter took the streets in fear of losing their jobs and smashed the electric streetlights.
And this situation escalated, with the police being sent out the loud protests and an operating police headquarters,
and the army had to be sent in to resolve the situation.
Well, there's a tendency to ridicule people like the lamp of being backward and Luddites.
And when we do this, we tend to focus very much on the very long run of technological and economic progress.
So up until roughly 18:00, growth across the world was fairly stagnant.
And that is not to say that nothing happened. There was a lot of innovation and progress going on, but per capita incomes didn't rise significantly,
and incomes per capita did only really take off when the first industrial revolution with the first
machine age with the mechanised factory that allowed us to produce with more with fewer people.
And as a result of mechanisation over the past 200 years, the average person in Britain is now roughly three times better off than they were in 18:00.
Adjusted for inflation. And if we only look at incomes that, if anything, understates the transformation that has taken place because needless to say,
the consumer baskets the people have access to today is very different from the consumer basket that people have access to in and out of it.
So most people then could only dream about all of these goods and services that are now part of everyday life for us.
And a lot of these things are not even accounts for the GDP statistics.
So consider, for example, what you would pay for anaesthesia.
If you undergo heart surgery, the mouth would be almost infinite, right?
And its contribution to GDP is basically zero.
And if that is not evidence of a lot of progress,
consider the fact that producing those higher incomes and producing all of
these additional goods and services has become a lot more comfortable as well.
And during the first industrial revolution, a significant share of the workforce was in coal mines.
Caverns and explosions were part of everyday working life long.
The sea is often part of the work package. Today, most of us work in air conditioned offices.
And if we look at sort of the sector transformation that, if anything,
understates the progress that has taken place because a lot of individual jobs have been transformed as well.
And so back in nineteen hundred at farm labour over the fields for nothing more than animal power today,
a farm labour in Britain was set in his or her tractor and listen to the music of his choice.
So working life has gotten a lot better. The question is what's happened to all those people that went through this transformation?
And if we go back to the industrial revolution and look what people said about it back then, I think we can find some instructive answers.
And so in eighteen forty eight, Benjamin Disraeli, before he became prime minister of Britain,
published a novel in which one character remarks that I see cities people with machines.
Suddenly, Manchester must be the most wonderful place of modern times.
And the very same year, Frederick Engels published his book on the conditions of the working classes,
which was written during precisely a stay in Manchester, and an analyst had a very different take on the matter.
He argued that machine rarely set to downgrade people. It puts them in the repetitive motions of the machine,
which he deemed to be a natural and only serves to put pressure on workers wages and potentially even displace them from their jobs.
Now we all know that he was not quite on target about the future,
but he was actually fairly on target about the period he lived through because for roughly seven decades, even as the British economy took off.
Wages are stagnant and probably even falling at the lower end of the income distribution.
And the wage data for this period is not great. But if you look at other sources of data like consumption or biological and indicators of well-being,
such as heights, we find that the courts born in 1850 were actually shorter than the course, all in 1750,
and part of the reason for that is that people's nutrition was adversely impacted as they were
displaced from domestic and industry and passing to economists and economic historians has always been.
Why would people voluntarily have agreed to participate in the industrialisation process if it reduced their utility?
Well, the simple answer to that is that they did not.
They rioted against the mechanise factory on several occasions, their petition to parliament to block the introduction and of machinery.
And how did the British government respond? Well, on several occasions, actually, by sending our troops against the riots and the army, for example,
that was sent out as a Luddites was larger than the army that Wellington took against Napoleon and the Peninsular War in 18 08,
and the love that riots that will tend to focus on, well, part of a long wave of riots that swept across Britain, continental Europe, India and China.
Resistance to mechanisation has actually been more of the historical norm, rather than the exception.
Now the point is obviously not that, you know, we are about to live through all of this history again.
But I think it's at least put some of the current concerns in perspective.
And what we do see today is that since roughly the nineteen eighties with the computer revolution,
inequality in Britain and the United States has been approaching levels not seen since the first industrial revolution.
And clearly, there are many variables that have shaped patterns of inequality.
But technology is certainly one of the key factors.
And and the technology today could not be more different than the steam powered machines of the first industrial revolution.
But what they do have in common with computers is that they are replacing in a
variety of tasks the way that spinning machines replaced artisan craftsmen.
Computers are now replacing a variety of jobs and in the labour market, and it is certainly true that computers have been with us for a long time.
The first electronic computer was developed at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1947, but it consisted of 18000 vacuum tubes and 30 tons.
And as a result of that, it didn't have much impact on the labour market.
And this has been true with all technologies. It's taken a long time for the technology to become sufficiently good and
sufficiently cost effective to have a real impact and on jobs and people's lives.
And for some of us, computerisation has been great for me as an academic.
I could do more statistical analysis, I can write more papers and I can export my ideas and thoughts to the world.
And but for a lot of people,
especially those with lower levels of skills and especially men who used to work on the assembly lines in factories, it hasn't been great.
And if you look at data from the United States, what you see is not just that inequality is rising,
but the wages of prime aged men with no more than a high school degree has actually been falling in real terms since the 1980s.
And as I mentioned earlier, the income distribution is shaped by a lot of factors.
But if you want to explain why particularly prime aged men are lower levels of education have seen their wages fall.
Globalisation and automation are the prime factors, and of course, they're very much interrelated without computers.
It would be completely unfeasible for businesses to relocate or restructure supply chains in ways that they can take advantage of cheap labour.
And in countries like China, and we have already seen a backlash against globalisation.
But automation has had very similar effects on the labour market.
And if you want to understand why President Trump won three key swing states that
they've been won with it by the Democratic candidate every election since 1992.
And automation is one of the key reasons Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania old Rust Belt states,
which have been both heavily hit by automation and globalisation.
You can debate the relative merits of these two variables,
but they are both driven by technology, and they all both reflect what has already happened.
Looking forward, the rise of China has taken place.
It's not going to happen one more time.
But looking forward, the potential scope of automation is getting much bigger because all of this relates to sort of the RULE-BASED era of computing,
with the programmer specifying what the technology should do at every given contingency,
with various machine learning techniques becoming more pervasive but gradually sort of going beyond the automation of
routine rule based activities into a variety of things like machine translation like diagnostics like document review,
like even potentially driving cars. And beyond artificial intelligence.
I think one reason that a lot of people underestimate the potential scope of automation is that it's not.
The technology doesn't need to be capable of doing what you do in your job in order to replace you.
We didn't automate away the jobs of land places by building robots capable of climbing lampposts.
What didn't automate the way the jobs of non-racist by building robots that would walk out of the house shot down the words
carry buckets of water and wood into the home and heat it on the stove and then perform the motions of hand-washing.
We did that by inventing an electric washing machine.
Now I've spent about eight years of my life discussing the 47 percent and the future of automation,
so I'm only going to mention the fact that we think that a lot of occupations and industries and are in fact affected by the expanding
scope of automation in particularly retail and office support tasks and tasks related to transportation and material moving.
And when we published this study 80 years ago now roughly.
And we also published a very detailed list, about 700 to occupations and there are lots of exposure.
So automation, so everybody can look at sort of what those predictions are and can compare retrospectively how things are going.
And one, occupations that we were constantly tasteful was that we found that fashion models
and are exposed to automation and the models on this picture actually don't exist.
They've been created through generative adversarial networks and they actually have their own Instagram accounts.
Now, needless to say, the future of the labour market is not just going to be determined by the first order effects on automation,
they're going to be a lot of second and third order effects, the much more harder to predict.
But we know that early success and historic right. So when factories electrified early on, for example,
all that's factory on the street was replacing the steam engine with an electric motor as the central power source of the factory.
Well, this shifts and counter chests remain intact.
And it took engineers a little while to figure out that while you can actually equip every single machine with.
His own electric motor, and then you can sequence those machines, according to national flow production, which gave rise to mass production,
allowed Henry Ford to be produced a Model T as a at a sufficiently low price for it to become the people's vehicle.
And those techniques then spread from industry to industry.
That's an enormous expansion of manufacturing as prices come down and the demand for manufacturing goods went up.
And if you look at the first automobiles, there basically looks like a horse carriage rides.
So what we did was essentially replacing the horse with an internal combustion engine and to drive it.
And it took a while for people to figure out that we needed a complementary infrastructure.
We need traffic laws and have raised a lot of jobs in retail, in and around commerce and so on and so forth.
All of these were secondary effects that nobody could imagine at the time, but it really reshaped the economy.
And but all of this in the end of the day depended on the exception and of this new technologies.
And I do think that Leon TIFF was onto something when he suggested that if a
horse is going to join the Democratic Party and voted what happened on the farm,
it might have turned out differently. They could have used the political clout to bring the spread of the factory to a halt.
And this is essentially what a lot of us tried to do, and a lot of people did quite so successfully for centuries before,
because usually governments sided with angry workers rioting against the mechanised factory.
If you want to understand why Britain was first industrialised rather than France, this is actually one of the prime reasons.
And because machinery resistance in France occurred very much also during the really revolutionary era,
but governments didn't have the political clout to squash the machine riots in the same way that the British government did.
And you see, also in China, machinery riots were actually quite successful up until the turn of the 20th century.
So this sort of historical patent has actually been one of resistance to these technologies.
Now do we see this happening again?
Well, we can at least highlight some examples, so we didn't actually suggest that 47 percent are planned to be automated.
It's not a conspiracy, but these are nonetheless and people striking against the introduction of autonomous cargo trucks in Los Angeles.
These are truck drivers in the state of Missouri demanding legislation to block the introduction of autonomous trucks.
And more broadly, a recent Pew Research survey suggests that the majority of Americans now think that there
should be limits to the number of machines that businesses should be allowed to implement.
And so do I think that, you know, we're going to see a lot of resistance to mechanisation in the future.
The simple answer is, I don't know. But it has been the historical norm.
And if people don't see the benefits of technology in the short run, the show may have some incentives to resist it.
And we should also remember that when economists speak about the short run and not very
specific about what the short term is and this kind of matters whether it's 20 hours,
20 days or 20 years in the context of the first industrial revolution, it was seven decades since the 1980s.
Wages for certain groups in the labour markets falling consistently. And it's not my sort of health this state of affairs.
So I think we need to sort of think about what policies we need to help people and in this short run, and I do touch upon them in the book as well.
I think I'm probably running out of time, so thank you very much.