Can We Be Great Again? Jeremy Hunt on why tech can save the British economy

0:02The Telegraph.

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2:05Can We Be Great Again is the new book by Jeremy Hunt, Why a Dangerous World Needs Britain. Welcome back to The Daily Tea, Jeremy. Why write it? Because we are so gloomy and pessimistic and we think it's all over for Britain. And the truth is that we've got lots of really big problems, but you look around the world and so does everyone else. And actually, you know, we need a little bit of perspective and there is tremendous potential, nowhere more so actually than the British economy, which is, you know, and I'm not going to get it well. You may challenge me on my own record as Chancellor and happy to have that discussion, but this isn't really about one person's record or another person's record.

2:44I think the fundamentals for the UK economy are way better than we in Britain think. And so I wanted to give the case for the defence. And the case for the defence has never been stronger than when it comes down to tech. You think Britain can be or is on its way to being the next Silicon Valley. And to discuss that, we've got two very special guests. Claire Barkley is the president of Enterprise and Industry, EMEA at Microsoft and chair of the new Industrial Strategy Advisory Council. Welcome, Claire. and I should say live broadcasting remotely from Western Australia is Rohan Silva, chair of Founders Factory in Western Australia, former advisor to David Cameron.

3:25Are we tech geeks in the Daily Tea today? Was it fair for me to say that, Claire? I think that's fine. There's a lot of optimism about tech, so I do share that view with Jeremy. All right, well, let's get straight into it. Is it credible to say that we are on our way to becoming the next Silicon Valley? We can become the next Silicon Valley. I don't think we are. But if you said to me, how is the UK going to pay for the NHS and the cost of defending Europe with what Putin is up to and these huge pressures on public finances, not over the next, you know, six months or a year, the sort of stuff we read about in the papers, but over the next decade or two decades, our big opportunity is to become the world's next Silicon Valley.

4:08And I think one of the things that is least well known about the British economy is that over the last decade, we have become the third largest tech ecosystem in the world. In 2022, we became only the third after the United States and China to be worth more than a trillion dollars. And there are lots of challenges and things that we need to do to realize that vision. But the comparison point I would make for Daily Tea listeners is what Nigel Lawson did with Big Bang in the City of London in 1986. And he did some really bold regulatory reforms. They didn't actually cost the Treasury any money at all.

4:49Interestingly, he was only able to do those because we were outside the single market, because the single market hadn't been invented at that point. At the moment it was invented, regulatory decisions were handed over to Brussels. but he had that control and he unleashed reforms that turned the City of London into the second biggest financial centre in the world. Tax revenues from financial services now pay for half the cost of the NHS. If we do the same for tech, and this is going to need real ambition, boldness, sorting out lots of things, But if we do the same for tech, once again, we could have something that helps to, you know, bring on the bacon at a time when public finances are really tight.

5:32Well, we'll get on to your productivity calculation in just a moment. Claire, is Bill Gates still your boss? No, he's not. No, but how big a presence? Because when I think of the tech bros, sorry, Claire and Rohan, I do just think of America. I think of San Francisco. I think of people like Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg and all the rest of it. Are we packing a decent punch on tech in the UK, Claire? We're definitely packing a decent punch. And I think whether it's Microsoft or any of the other big tech companies, because of the points that Jeremy has raised, I mean, the UK, because of the universities, the skills, the startups, the unicorns, this is a market where all of the big tech companies are.

6:14And for Microsoft, this was one of the first markets that we came to outside of the US. Why do you think that was? Because of the vibrancy of the industry that's here, the availability of the skills that are coming out of the universities. And therefore, that attracts the startups. It attracts the ecosystem effectively around it, which creates vibrancy and economic return. So for Microsoft, it's a hugely important market. Jeremy and I actually partnered last year on a huge investment, Microsoft's biggest investment ever into the UK. It's the biggest investment we made in our 40-year history in Microsoft for building our AI data centre infrastructure, mainly because of the opportunity that we see in the UK market.

6:55Rohan, I mean, Jeremy has referenced 1986 and Nigel Lawson. David Cameron was quite a while ago when you were advising him. how much has changed since then and now in terms of the UK's foothold in this industry? An awful lot. I mean, it's a funny thing to kind of remember all the way back in 2010 when David Cameron became prime minister and Jeremy Hunt became minister for DCMS. London in particular was a little bit of a backwater on tech. Berlin, Stockholm were probably ahead of us. And I think what should give us great kind of confidence, you know, as everyone's been saying, London, Britain is now a really great sort of tech centre, really strong.

7:40But that has really come about because of a sort of very deliberate things the government has done. Tax breaks to drive investment, entrepreneur visas to attract talent, a real focus on clusters like London and Cambridge, really specific stuff, opening up government contracts to tech companies. It's all quite nerdy, all quite boring. Don't get me started at the pub on this stuff or everyone else will leave. But it should give us a lot of confidence, I think, that the government really can drive change. And there's a technologist called Buckminster Fuller, and he said the best way to predict the future is to design it.

8:18And I think credit to successive governments, including Keir Starmer's government right now, everyone's put tech, over the last sort of 15 years, tech is really front and centre. And it's driven so much positive change. And I think if that can continue, and as Jeremy says, the ambition can just kind of ratchet up that much more. I really think, you know, anything's possible. It's really, really exciting moment. People say that the escalation of tech over the last 30 years, you know, from Tim Berners-Lee deciding that there was this thing called the internet to where we are now means that the next 30 years we will witness more technological change than we've actually ever witnessed before I don't do you do you agree with that analysis like it just escalates and escalates and escalates beyond anything we can contemplate now Claire yes absolutely I mean the pace of change you know imagine it in industrial revolution terms the pace of change that we've seen now is outpacing anything that we've seen.

9:19And this is, you know, I've worked in the tech industry for over 30 years. And I mean, I've never seen anything like it. And so I think it's so important now that the UK grasps this opportunity. I think, as we've said, like, we've through previous governments and the current government, there is a lot of focus on this. But I think if we don't move fast, we will miss the opportunity. And we have to leverage all the incredible assets that we have and kind of the groundswell of interest and excitement that there is around the UK, certainly for many of the tech startups and larger scale ups that I work with, they know they have to be in London because that's where they're going to find skills and capabilities.

9:55So now is the time to capitalise on that. And obviously there's a big conversation around AI, artificial intelligence and how that will change the dynamic. But there are concerns, there are legitimate concerns, because if you are, Rohan, just to quote you, a tech geek who bores people in the pub about coding, you're great, you're brilliant, this is wonderful, you've gone to Oxford, you've gone to Cambridge, you've done a computer science degree, great, you're going to get snapped up by Claire, go and work at Microsoft or one of the rivals and have a great life. There are very many people in this country who don't have those skills.

10:28We had a survey even this week suggesting that fewer graduate jobs were being offered because they were being taken over by AI. A lot of administrative jobs are also being taken over by AI. And as we know, on the factory floor, AI is going to have a huge impact. So for people who aren't that level of degree education, they are legitimately worried about the march of technology, aren't they, Jeremy? And how do we help them? Because we hear the government going on about, oh, it's going to create so many thousand jobs in tech. It seems untangible and unreachable to many people. Well, first of all, we do need to recognise that there is an issue here.

11:07Sir Demis Hassabis, who is probably one of the three most influential people in AI in the world, who's a Londoner, who set up DeepMind, which is Google's, now become Google's AI branch. He always says that this is going to be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution and 10 times faster. But from our history, and there's quite a lot of history, as we've discussed in previous Daily Tees, can we be great again? We have always thrived as a country when we march headlong into the future and don't try and stop it in its tracks like King Canute. And I do think that Britain is one of the countries, in fact, the IMF, when I was chancellor, they did a report on the UK and they said that AI is one of the big upside opportunities for the UK.

11:58And there was a fascinating conversation between President Macron and Rishi Sunak, when Rishi Sunak was prime minister, in which Macron said, we've got the best AI in the EU and you've got the best AI in Europe. So even the French recognize that we have a lead. And why is this? It goes back to what Claire was saying. Outside the United States, we have the most respected universities in the world. And there's been another totally unsung revolution in our universities over the last decade, which is that starting with Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial, but actually going out to all the leading universities, they have started to back spin-outs in exactly the same way that Stanford and Harvard and Yale have done for many decades.

12:46In fact, if you talk to entrepreneurs, they will say now there's not much difference in a conversation that you would have with someone at Imperial to someone at Stanford. They're all in a kind of international market. And that gives the UK enormous attractiveness for people who are trying to set up businesses because they can get that support. We also have outside the US the largest financial services sector so they can get start-up funding. The issue we have is what's called the scale-up funding when you get to the next stage. So you've got a company that's worth perhaps 10 or 20 million and you want it to be worth 500 million or a billion because what happens at that stage is that you're more likely to get funding from a Canadian pension fund than a British pension fund.

13:32And then you might end up saying, I'm going to list in New York rather than list in London. So the reason that our tech success is a bit of a world's best kept secret is because we don't actually have very many British global tech giants. Yeah. And that's the next thing we need to crack. But, and I want you to come back on to the point I made about the kind of working class is worried about AI, Rohan? Yeah, I mean, look, it's a really legitimate worry. I remember writing a piece for The Telegraph back in 2015 about, you know, will robots take our jobs? And it's a really understandable fear. There's an economist called Tyler Cowan, an American economist, and he wrote a great book called The Average is Over, which looks at how one of the impacts of AI may well be that jobs at the top end, if you're lucky enough to, you know, to be employed as a kind of partner in a law firm or as a elite computer programmer, you know, your salary may well go up an awful lot because your company, the company you work for might need fewer people.

14:32And the evidence is that if you look at the latest wave of AI startups in the US, they're hitting, you know, big revenue numbers with fewer employees than was the case with the previous generation of startups. So there is something seemingly going on there. Tyler Cowen also suggests that sort of bottom end, lower paid end of the labor market, there'll be potentially lots of jobs that won't be automated and the middle may get hollowed out. I think there is a big, big role for government in responding to that and being proactive. I think one of the big things government can do is to really invest much, much more in adult skills and retraining.

15:12I think the world is, because of technology, because of AI, becoming more and more unpredictable. The idea of a job for life, I think, is something that has not been around for quite a while for lots of people and I think will become more and more scarce. And so, you know, government, you know, as is the case in Scandinavia, giving proper funding to people to retrain, to reskill throughout their career, you know, feels like the sort of ambitious, positive way, as Jeremy says, of leaning into technology change, not trying to stop the tide, but equip people to kind of flourish in it. But you can't, it is very, very real, I think, that risk.

15:55And it's something we've got to respond to. Claire, we don't want to be Luddite about it. But I mean, if you're your young Gen Z or Gen Alpha, that's completely and utterly sort of computer literate and across all this stuff and went to Coda Dojos as a 12 year old, you're absolutely delighted. You are chomping at the bit. You want to come and work for Claire at Microsoft. not quite as attractive a prospect to your sort of 38-year-old who might have slightly missed the tech wave and isn't as confident in some of these skills. I mean, what kind of people does Microsoft want to recruit these days?

16:31I mean, I think the reality is, and I think maybe just building on the previous points it's made, I think the idea that everyone can get skilled in this is something that we could all, together with government, that we could embrace. I think the idea that jobs will change, You know, even for the Gen Z that are doing computer science training, and my son has just finished his A-levels doing exactly that. And even that, the world of coding is going to change, you know. So it's not just sort of the 38-year-old that might have missed it. I think the world is going to change quite significantly. And so if you think about the idea of AI-enabled coding, that will mean that people who were experienced coders or even coming into the workforce coders, their work will change because AI will be generating quite a lot of that code.

17:16But that doesn't take away from the things that you need in terms of creative thought and problem solving and how you think about that, which is kind of what the skills that have been taught. So I would say for the 38-year-old person that perhaps hasn't got into tech, there's still a ton of opportunity to go after. And actually, I think some of the announcements recently from the government in partnership with big tech firms to really think about how do we do something more purposeful on skills, There's a ton of training that's available. But I think if you're that person, sometimes it's a bit difficult to know where to go.

17:47Well, the weird thing about it is that there's this tech revolution happening. And actually, computer science isn't prioritised in schools. I think I remember somebody saying to me from a tech company, you know, what we'd ideally like to do is take the kids at 14, 15, whatever, and have them just train in a Microsoft academy. Because actually what you're learning in the national curriculum isn't suitable. Having said that, that's also quite disturbing because we're then giving so much away to tech. All right, well, don't do drama, don't do history, don't do English lit, because actually you should be in a room coding.

18:19I mean, Jeremy, is the national curriculum, are we equipped from an educational standpoint? I appreciate what you're saying about Oxford, Cambridge, and indeed LSE and Herial and other universities, but are our kids actually ready for this? Well, it's the right question to ask. And my worry in the way our education system works is that it's actually quite straightforward. Half of school leavers go to university. And on the whole, because of the transformation standards in state schools and the fact that our universities are so good internationally, I think those half generally get a pretty good education.

18:55But I really worry about the half that don't go to university. And I would say they get better basic skills in Switzerland or Singapore or Germany than they get here. And I would focus not so much actually on computer science, but on basic skills. We still have about 100 ,000 people, school leavers, who embarrassingly leave school unable to read properly. 100 ,000 a year. Now, we can't possibly know what jobs people will be needing to do in 10 or 20 years' time. But with basic English and basic maths, you can have some confidence about their ability to train, to teach themselves online, a new set of skills that they may not have.

19:38Without that, there is a real risk that they're going to be marooned and, to say something topical, marooned on welfare. And so that is where I think the focus needs to be. You're nodding at that, Claire. Yeah, no, and I think actually, if you imagine the reskilling I was talking about, if you don't have the basic literacy of reading and maths, it's very difficult for you to then start to layer on digital skills. So I think, I mean, I would just concur with what Jeremy said, like the half of this population that are either not going to university and they're not leaving school with basic skills.

20:11I think, you know, the world is going to move extremely fast. Digital skills and AI skills are going to become prominent. So I think making sure that we do that and then complement that with skills and capability to go after. And on the other side of the coin, Rohan, from the tech giants themselves, a need to show perhaps more responsibility. There are many that kind of have this fear of a dystopian future with AI at the heart of it. Maybe they're like me and they've watched Terminator and they think that the machines are going to take over. And I know that does sound quite laughable. But then when I look at some of the examples you've listed in the book, Jeremy, you know, the computer that was taught to play chess better than a grandmaster in four hours.

20:53The computer that was taught to play Chinese Go better than the world's best Chinese Go player again in a matter of hours. This is frightening stuff. Are there enough checks and balances? rohan yeah look i've got a friend who runs an ai company in london and he told me i think only half jokingly that he never ever criticizes ai via email just in case what do you mean by that explain that he just means that you know when and if the terminators take over he doesn't want any written trail that he was he was on the wrong he was anti-machine yeah yeah he's kind of kidding But I think it's a really interesting kind of experiment happening right now with the UK outside of the EU, because the UK's approach on sort of AI regulation, I think, is really, really sensible at the moment.

21:45It's to say, OK, cool, we'll sort of lean into the opportunities. And when bad things happen, as they undoubtedly will, as with any new technology, we'll take action. So the British government has been really quick in responding, for example, to sort of so-called deep fake porn. So people creating horrible sort of porn images and videos featuring real people without their permission. It's awful stuff. And so the government's clamping down on that. Great. If you compare that, though, to the EU, which has introduced really, really awful AI, anti-AI legislation. For example, amongst all the kind of daft things in the EU's legislation, they're restricting the power of AI models.

22:32And this legislation goes into effect officially at the end of this year. And already the fastest models in America and China go way beyond the EU's limits on what's allowed in the EU. And so you've seen sort of meta Facebook and others, Apple, saying we can't even launch our latest AI stuff in Europe, in the EU. And, you know, I think that would be, you know, it's so catastrophically bad. And if you look at the 50 biggest tech startups in the world, only one is in the EU. And that's even really before the kind of AI wave has kind of passed through the world. So, you know, you see what the kind of fear, you know, manifested in regulation and legislation can do and the negative in the EU right now.

23:27So, you know, I think really the way the UK is kind of working, which is to say, you know, bad things will happen. They always do with any new technology, but let's not stop all the good things happening. Think of all the ways AI can improve our health system, the NHS, our schools, as well as the economy. And, you know, I think we've got to be, as Jeremy is saying, points out in his great book, you know, we've got to be open to that. Sure. Not rule it out from day one. I mean, I don't certainly want to get into a discussion. It's for a podcast for another day to talk about kind of tech harms on children, online harms, the pernicious nature of smartphones.

24:07but I appreciate where you're coming from Rohan but lots of people just will not trust the tech giants Microsoft and others included Claire because they'll have children that have literally in the case of poor Molly Russell killed themselves on the basis of what they've consumed online it was this genie that was released from the bottle parents couldn't put it back in there are parents very fearful about the march of this stuff And not just, by the way, because they're accessing harmful content, but just brain rot, the pernicious nature of a student at university just being able to chat GPT, an essay, hand it in and go down the pub.

24:48Claire, I mean, and I know I'm using very sort of anecdotal examples, very motherly examples, but those are the key concerns that people have. You can have too much of a good thing, can't you? You can have too much. Things can happen too quickly. No, I agree. And obviously, this is a very serious concern. Maybe I'll reference this in two ways. I actually think the way the government started with kind of the safety forum followed by the opportunity forum was actually the right way to go about it. Because I think if you, you know, there is a lot of opportunity to go after. But if you don't get the guardrails right in order for how you go after it, you don't want to go to the extreme that the EU have gone, because then that will make those countries uncompetitive.

25:27but you have to kind of get the guardrails right between the risk and the opportunity. And then I think as far as the tech company is concerned, if I speak about Microsoft, I mean, we partnered actually with Jeremy and the government at the time very closely on all of the kind of safety, ethics, regulatory recommendations that you put round it, the safeguards that we put into the release of our own technology to make sure that exactly the line between safety and opportunity is very well adhered to. because obviously we don't want to be responsible for any harmful intent from any of our technology.

26:02And that for us is like an absolute paramount for the way that we do it. Equally, you want to make sure that the very opportunity that Jeremy talks about in his book is untapped for the UK. And there are so many things. If you think about even government services, and I know Jeremy wrote about that within the chapter, you think about the inefficiency for the NHS and the opportunity that you have there. You think about delivery of social care. You think about even things like administration for Redbox in the way that that documentation is prepared. There's so many things that could save such significant money for the UK that could put us, you know, put the wonderful civil service in a just much more efficient way.

26:43And that money can then get reinvested back into the things that are going to drive growth for the country. I mean, health is a great example, isn't it? Because on one hand, and let's be honest, you will have dealt with quite a few failed digitisation projects within the NHS. On one hand, there is a convenience for somebody like me to get an online appointment whenever I want. I can just slip into one of these booths here at the office, speak to a doctor, have it resolved in 10 minutes. Brilliant, probably because I've got private health cover paid for by the Telegraph. The march of tech has meant that people have not been able to get in to see their GP face to face.

27:17They will then think this isn't progress. This is regressive. A lot of tech people consider to be regressive. Parking apps. Just put a coin in the meter. You can understand that frustration, Jeremy. Totally. And I've absolutely no problem with people talking to their GP on their iPhone. But why have we given up people having their own GP? because I think there's a world of difference to talking to someone that you know anyway in the flesh, but the convenience of just doing it online so you don't have to travel and talking to someone about your health who you don't know from Adam. And that's why I think one of the most important reforms the NHS needs to do is to go back to people having their own GP.

27:57But let me talk about health because I'm a glass half full person. I think there's a great opportunity for the UK, but I'm also a dad and an MP and I'm actually very hardline. And I would ban all smartphones in schools for everyone under the age of 16 to ban it. And the reason is... Ban them completely? In school? Ban them from being in schools or being taken to schools because I've seen it with my own kids. And I do think the tech companies, not Microsoft in particular, but generally have been absolutely outrageous in not dealing with the addictiveness of doom scrolling. Yes. And I find it terrifying that I can put my 11 or 13-year-old daughter on an iPad at the weekend.

28:40And they are literally zoned out for two or three hours. And, you know, it's as if they don't exist. They're just completely absorbed, filling up their minds with rubbish. And what really makes me angry is the way that some of the big tech billionaires in California, so they wouldn't allow their own children to use their own products. Yeah, there's like internal memos in TikTok going, this is like crack people. Keep it away from your teenagers. Xi Jinping won't even allow TikTok in China. No, quite. Because he thinks it's so corrupting. And then we wonder why Chinese children are doing better at English maths than every other educational measure.

29:15So if I was going to say one thing that I think that the tech community, look, we have, as Rohan says, it's really interesting. There are things that are really positive. For example, we've dealt with plagiarism for the creative industries. When I became cultural secretary 15 years ago, the big worry was people downloading music illegally. And we found a way around that. We are dealing with access to porn for young children. And everyone said that was totally impossible. But we are dealing with that. And age verification is coming in. We've now got to deal with the addictiveness issue because that is the single biggest worry.

29:50Rohan? Yeah, I mean, look, here in Australia, where I am right now, the government is banning kids under 16 using social media, which I think is great. You know, Jeremy talks about doom scrolling. He's totally right. I'm guilty of that myself. But also, you know, social media, you know, the writer Jonathan Haidt, his book The Anxious Generation does such a great job of describing, you know, the bullying, you know, the status anxiety of young people, very vulnerable, sensitive young people in the age of Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat. at the Australian government I think totally to their credit they said just should be banned for under 16s and you know in the same way you know under 16s can't smoke and do a whole set of things Jeremy's completely right too you know smartphones should not be allowed for under 16s they should not be allowed in schools they shouldn't be allowed for under 16s you can have a dumb phone if you if your parents want to contact you but you know you absolutely shouldn't shouldn't have a device in a pocket as a 14-year-old that can access pornography, social media, all these other real, real potential harms.

30:58And I actually think big tech, to be honest, would welcome that clarity because right now they're sort of getting lots of flack, some of it legitimate, some of it not. But actually, the government just needs to set the rules and then big tech can follow them. Claire, would you like more clarity? I mean, are we doing well on leading on regulation on this issue because we've got a number of different bills in parliament i'm getting confused online harms bill the children well-being bill that seems to cover a little bit of tech but it won't go as far as to banning phones in schools government is saying no schools are doing that for themselves other pieces of legislation here talk about some watering down of some of the regulations on tech in response to the trade deal we've just done with donald trump in america i think that the regulatory side of it is really really important to get right and certainly from a microsoft standpoint, we've always partnered extremely closely with the government and with the regulators, including the online harms bill.

31:56So it's not a big part of our business, unlike some of the other tech companies. But still, I mean, in terms of the principles that we went about, we partnered very closely with Ofgem in the creation of that bill, in how that could be implemented, how we would manage it, etc. So I think it's important that we get to that point of clarity. And then And maybe, as I said, like making sure that you get the safety side of it right, but also coming back to the optimism side of Jeremy's book, that we get that we get the opportunity right. Because this is really about growth and prosperity for the UK.

32:27And this will be a once in a once, certainly once in our lifetime opportunity as the opportunity rises and accelerates to make sure that we leverage all the very great things that the UK has to go after.

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34:28Well, let's get on to growth and prosperity, Jeremy, because you make the point in the book that if we just increase productivity by 1 % to 2%, in fact, you do the maths for me, What are you saying about productivity? Well, here's the interesting thing. I mean, you know, we have the public sector, which, you know, the Daily Telegraph, amongst others, rightly calls out for being incredibly inefficient compared to the private sector. And productivity growth there is about 0.7 % a year compared to about 2 % in the private sector. So I asked the Treasury what would happen if we increased public sector productivity by, say, half a percent or a percent.

35:10So it was getting close to private sector levels. And they said, well, if you did that, amazingly, debt would stop going up as a proportion of GDP, even if we need to spend more on the NHS and defence and social care and all these things. In fact, you could even start to bring debt down. You could start to bring taxes down because of what Warren Buffett calls the power of compounding. If you just got the public sector onto a trajectory. Now, the NHS is a brilliant example because that is about half the public sector's output. And if we made doctors more efficient, for example, with some of these very effective AI programs that can mean they don't have to fill in a patient's notes.

35:53It gets done automatically. They can just speak into a microphone as they're walking between patients' beds. At the moment, doctors will spend a quarter, a third of their time at the end of every day filling out notes. These things can have a massive impact on productivity. Now, it's all very techie economic stuff. The point is for ordinary voters, what really makes everyone cross is Rachel Reeves coming back for more tax rises. Now, do this properly and there is a chance that won't happen. But this is the, I'm going to say, the only party political thing we've said so far today. If you give in to union demands for pay rises, as the government has done right from the get-go, without asking for any productivity improvements in return, then you lose the chance to do that.

36:40So I think putting£9.5 billion on the table for pay rises when they arrived last July was a huge mistake. and that was a big moment to say if we're going to put up public sector pay by billions and billions of pounds paid for through all of our taxes then we want to see driverless trains like they have on Docklands Railway. Why can't we have that on the tube? Why can't we have that elsewhere on the railway system? We want to see reforms in the way the NHS works, these very outdated contracts that some doctors are on and so on. I'm just ticking my little Tory bingo card. down with the unions, make people redundant, pay doctors less.

37:23I thought your bingo card was, if this is all so brilliant, Jeremy, why didn't you do it yourself? That's your normal bingo, bingo, bingo. I am loving your ability now to start asking yourself really good questions. Please do answer that, former Chancellor. I think we actually made some good progress in many of these areas, not least the fact that we do now have this enormous tech sector. but look there are lots of things when I was health secretary I wish I had gone further and faster for sure I did launch well I did get the NHS app off the ground which I think has been brilliant but I can look back now and I still think there is lots more that I could have done so I hold my hand up and say I didn't do everything that I could have done but I would also say that there is lots now that West Streeting can do and that Rachel Reeves can do and And, you know, there's all the sort of daily battles.

38:15I want to just, maybe this is my final comment, but I just want to give you a final optimistic thought about the British economy because I think this just encapsulates why the gloom is overdone. There are lots of banks who predict how big global economies are going to be in the next three, four, five years. But there's only one consultancy I found called the Centre for Economics and Business Research that predicts how big every economy in the world is going to be over the next 15 years. And they're totally apolitical, totally independent. So the UK now, sixth largest economy in the world today.

38:54Where do they say the UK economy will be in 2039, which is as far as they go? Most people think with all this doom and gloom, we're going to fall out of the top 10. We're going to be far, far down the pecking order. We're certainly not going to be up with the leading economies in the world. In 2039, we are still sixth largest economy in the world. I thought you were going to say third or something. Well, hang on, but wait, I haven't finished. We create Silicon Valley. Hang on, we haven't finished. And they say we're going to start to close the gap with Japan and Germany. And why do they say that?

39:28It is partly because we have a very strong services economy. We have very big strengths in AI. We have huge potential in technology. And these are all advantages for the UK. And why do I think this matters? It's not just because I'm happy as a Brit that, you know, we're not doing quite as awfully as... As France. As occasionally your columns might suggest, Camilla. Occasionally. France, by the way, drops out of the top ten by 2039. Ah, bad luck, Macron. Mon Dieu, quelle catastrophe. But the reason I say this is because this is a really dangerous world. And economic strength links to political clout.

40:03and I think what we don't want to do is to retreat into our tortoise shell and say it's all over for Britain when actually we could be getting out there shaping the world. No, we don't want to be retreating into a tortoise shell. The tortoise on the front of this book has got a union flag on its back. All right, so now you're channeling your inner presenter of Tomorrow's World. Let's go to Rohan and make a prediction for 2039, I think you said. What will the tech sphere look like in the UK in 2029? What great innovation will we all be obsessing over by then, Rohan? Well, what is it someone said?

40:39Predictions are often difficult, especially about the future. I think that what are people in tech really excited about right now? I think it's two things. They're both going to sound maybe a bit mad. One is robotics. So, you know, AI meets robots. in the home. My wife is desperate for a robot that can do the ironing and the washing up and everything. If people at home Google Optimus robots, this is Tesla, Elon Musk's car company, Tesla. If you look at Tesla's share price, it's incredibly high, despite all the Elon Musk's adventures in politics over the last few months. And the reason for that, big part of the reason is people are betting on Tesla's robotics company.

41:26And they've got these humanoid robots called Optimus that seem really close to being launched. And why make them humanoid? Well, the world has been built for sort of humans, stairs and devices and things. So I think robots in the world around us in 2039, it sounds outlandish, but I think a lot of people in tech are betting big money that that's going to be something that's real. And the second thing, I think, by 2039 that feels really interesting and plausible, if science fiction-y, is interacting with devices in a totally different way. And in particular, sort of brain-computer interfaces. Big, big investment by the US military over the past kind of few decades.

42:13And that's now spilling over into the private sector. So, you know, worth looking at companies like Neuralink, which is already starting to have paralyzed people being able to kind of move limbs again restoring sight to some to some people who've lost lost their sight all through kind of brain computer interfaces so yeah two things that sound science fictiony but then again 2039 is an awfully long time away and um you know if you think about i'd say to my six-year-old you know when when i was your rage I couldn't say hey Siri played this song on Spotify and he thinks my god what kind of what kind of backwards world.

42:54What a boomer honestly Rohan. Yeah what a boomer I am. I'm looking upon Rohan's predictions there with the sort of angst that you might associate with someone who with the greatest respect to Microsoft still can't use an Excel spreadsheet. Goodness me we've come a long way since the word doc haven't we we have indeed where's microsoft going to be in 2039 what are you going to be working well what what's interesting is um what rohan's talked about i mean i'm i we're working with companies that are doing exactly this right now they're in the early stages of it so there's a swiss based company which is a company called innate which is uh developing using ai machine learning for recreating the human brain for applying in certain industrial situations so So that, you know, one of the things, human brain's an extremely intelligent thing.

43:44And so using that to really make sure that if you're applying it in kind of either manufacturing, in complicated financial services, that they're doing that. And actually, one of the other companies we're working with has literally just launched a humanoid robot for use in manufacturing and other sites. So it's starting already, that kind of innovation. But I think as I start to think about the sort of opportunity for the UK, what I what I hope and dream and wish will be true in 2039 is that actually we've captured the use of AI for transforming the opportunity for the country that if you think of everything from healthcare that Jamie articulated very well you know the potential for what that can do for either people with disabilities blindness etc but actually even just for the regular person that's kind of having any disease or has got illness etc I do think that the revolution in healthcare could be incredible.

44:38I also feel quite strongly despite some of the conversations we've had about what will it mean for future skills and jobs I feel like AI can play such an important role for rising the opportunity for everybody so it won't just be people that have gone to university that have that opportunity it will provide access and personal tutoring to every single kid in the country and that will be something that actually can rise the opportunity for all. But I think there are a few things we've got to do in order to capture that. We have to get the skills piece right and I think the partnership between government, industry and universities is extremely important.

45:15We have to get the infrastructure right. We haven't talked a lot about that during this discussion but if you don't get the right infrastructure in the country with the right energy in order to run it then none of this kind of AI advancement and revolution will be possible. Down with Ed Miliband's net zero plan then? No, no, actually, I mean, I think all of the investments, certainly that Microsoft and many of the other tech companies are doing, is a net zero investment. This is about green energy. But we are going to need to produce a hell of a lot of energy. But we're going to need to really change the game.

45:43I know that's a separate chapter. I know. Let's not get into wind tramps and solar power. And then the final piece, I would say, is just regulation overall. I think we touched on that well. It said, like, you've got to get this balance between opportunity and risk. And my final pitch is I think government themselves have to be the best users of AI. They often talk about the things that businesses have to do, but I think if they can lead from the front with the use of technology, some of the pilots we've run recently, they're saving months of time with the AI technology that is possible. And so I think if I think of 2039, in order for us to be number six or higher, I think some of these things need to be true and it's in our fingertips to be able to do that now this is a positive way to end this podcast i was envisaging myself in 2039 walking around like linda hamilton with a pump action shotgun trying to take out uh the machines maybe we won't it won't come to that final question to jeremy did you use chat gpt to write any of this book jeremy hunt i did not any ai at all because I know you were once a tech entrepreneur yourself.

46:49Yes, I didn't. But I'm writing another book on economic growth in the UK and I used ChatGPT the whole time. Did you? I am using it. This is the innovation in your own... But I'm not saying write a chapter but to check facts. It is extremely good, saves a lot of time and I've been bowled over by it. On that bombshell, Jeremy Hunt, Claire Barkley and Rohan Silver. Thank you very much indeed for joining us on this very techie but very interesting daily tea.

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