258. How AI changes everything we should teach kids

18:48Marc Warner:I mean, I wish actually, I wish we could recapture that level of clarity, particularly in sort of government work more regularly, because we know that the people in government can operate on those kind of timescales and achieve those kind of... That system was absolutely the best in the world when it was built over the course of about six months. And so, I mean, obviously incrementally with useful things almost immediately, but...

19:21Robert Smith:And this was the system that forecast essentially bed demand, NHS resource demand. Exactly. And what's happened? Is that system still in operation?

19:34Marc Warner:no that's one of the slight tragedies um of the of covid was obviously we'd spent and not we but the government had spent an enormous we as the country had spent an enormous amount of money on covid and when we needed to rein that spending into under control it was done fairly indiscriminately and so you know i would very very much like it if we had kept something like the early warning system going because it is clearly the future of public health.

20:05Robert Smith:Totally. I mean, it seems absolutely astonishing that it's been. I mean, you know, I mean, there's two things. One is, you know, essentially there will be another pandemic and it would be absolutely essential to have that kind of predictive model within the NHS. But why wasn't this system simply useful for assessing NHS demand on a normal day-to-day basis? I mean, it seems to me if it can do a crisis, it can also do normal times. So why is it gone?

20:39Marc Warner:Well, I mean, the future of public health, like we should have on the TV every day, you should get a weather forecast, a pollen forecast and an infectious disease forecast that should actually let you make good decisions about what you want to do with respect to your health. And that should be constantly being done with this wastewater surveillance. So you monitor sewage for the genetics of all the infectious diseases. You predict how much is going to be in every region across the country, in every city. And then you provide that information to the NHS, to companies, to citizens.

21:16Robert Smith:I mean, relative to outcomes, that's not, you know, The cost is insignificant. So why isn't it happening?

21:23Marc Warner:We have tried very, very hard in lots of different directions to try and get that to happen again. We are now, as I understand it, somebody told me, we are now behind Malawi in our ability to do this wastewater surveillance and early warning. It's such, to me, it is such a no brainer win. It is ultimately a piece of generational infrastructure like the motorways or the Met Office that we should be building now for our kids, for our grandkids. And at the moment, we're not. It's really depressing.

22:00Robert Smith:Yeah, it is. Can I just ask, therefore, on faculty AI more broadly, widely seen as an important British success story. But you did take a decision a few months ago, and the deal's going through now, to sell the company to, I don't know if it's the world's biggest consultancy. It's certainly an enormous consultancy. I think it's the world's biggest, yeah. I mean, it employs almost 800 ,000 people across the world, Accenture. I mean it's been reported you sold for I don't know a billion dollars plus which is why Steph used the unicorn tag about about you but why did this feel the moment for you to sell did you feel constrained in your ability to grow by your existing independence so I think there's a

22:54Marc Warner:few different elements that sort of figured into the decision. So the first and probably the most important is that we do think of AI in terms of this tremendous upside. Like it's going to change lots and lots of things. There's going to be a personal tutor for every kid, a doctor for everybody in their pocket. These kind of amazing, wondrous technologies, but there are also risks

23:24Marc Warner:of what good actors do. And there'll be malicious use by bad actors. We think of those as like the technical risks. And then there are political risks. There's the concentration of power that will come if we don't manage things correctly. And there's the risks of conflict as countries get increasingly concerned about others having access to this powerful technology. And so we kind of bucket those as the sort of the technical risks and the political risks. and to our mind the best mitigation that we can think of for those risks is the safe widespread adoption of ai so the safety building the kind of technical safeguards into the technology itself and then having it wide widely adopted means you don't get the same concentration of power and the same risk of conflict right now ultimately we think this is happening right now like if you have not used the latest coding tools you should just sit down and try them they are extraordinary anyone can now basically program in english and so you know autonomous cars are here they work they're going to come to london this year things like this and so with the best will in the world and let's you know i have hold faculty in extremely high regard but nevertheless if we did brilliantly for another five, ten years, we'd be a multi-billion dollar company and we wouldn't be able to touch the sides of safe widespread adoption at a global scale.

25:01Robert Smith:And so why does Accenture as a partner help you do that?

25:06Marc Warner:Because they are the biggest consultancy in the world. So immediately we have access to essentially every organization in the world, whether it's the labs themselves, whether it's, you know, country, like, you know, however many countries they're in across the world, essentially every important decision maker in essentially every large company in government, we can now help think through this problem and help build this technology out and it's like safe and widely. And you're going to be chief technology officer. What does that mean in practice? It means that we, I help set the strategy, the technology vision and the technology strategy for the organization.

25:50Marc Warner:which sort of leans everything in an AI first direction. I mean, you know, the chief technology officer role has evolved a lot over the last few decades. It used to be about sort of building computers in basements. Then it became about building software products. But I think with the latest iteration of these coding tools, it's going to become primarily an AI role and primarily about how does AI actually drive like the fundamental elements of your business.

26:17Steph McGovern:And on your point about the ethics around this, which clearly mean so much to you, you advocate, don't you, human-led AI over full automation. So why do you think preserving, I guess, human judgment is non-negotiable?

26:32Robert Smith:I was also interested in, I saw that Accenture is basically, as I understand it, training pretty much all its people to use AI agents. What does that mean in practice?

26:47Marc Warner:So the first thing to say is the deal hasn't actually closed yet. So we haven't started with them. But I think that is like broadly a very sensible step for every organization. If you haven't experienced these kind of latest coding agents, they're like superpowers. You know, anything you've ever dreamt of. So I've always wanted to build this particular type of planning software for myself so that I can just quickly build out what's called a PERT diagram, basically a Gantt chart. And just last night and this morning, I just started building that and I just built it in English. And like that power to put software in every, like the ability to build software in everybody's hands is remarkable.

27:32Marc Warner:And so I think everybody should be just getting their people started in this. And for some roles, it will make more sense than others. But there's like an activation barrier where if you don't play with these tools, you never quite get started. You don't know what they're capable of. And so you never get the benefits. So I think it's very sensible to just lean everybody into it to start with and then kind of let the dust settle and let the people who really get value out of it continue.

27:58Steph McGovern:You see the businesses doing well are the ones that no matter what their business, whether they think they're digital or not, is they're encouraging their staff to just find ways of using AI. and even on a personal level, my mom and dad were staying with me last night. So we're looking after my little girl and they were saying to me, what's all this about AI? We won't need it, will we? And I said, right, ma 'am, what's going on with you in your world? What's the big issue? She said, well, we'd love to get more people at Stockton Rambling Club. And I said, right, ask AI to tell you how you can do that.

28:31Steph McGovern:And she went, what? So then we did it. And honestly, now she's downloaded the app. She's like, right, I'm going to go to the committee meeting. I'm going to tell them all what AI has told us to do to get more people in Stockton Rambling Club.

28:42Marc Warner:I think that's a perfect example.

28:44Steph McGovern:Yeah, just using it, finding ways to use it in your life, then just makes you feel more comfortable about it.

28:50Marc Warner:Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

28:51Steph McGovern:So just to my question before, why is it you think that human judgment is still needed even though the models are advancing?

28:59Marc Warner:So I guess right now it's still true that the models can't, aren't powerful enough to do things without human judgment. So we're sort of in this intermediate period where I had to spend a lot of time saying, no, no, don't put the diagram like that. Do it like this. This is better than that. Add this feature, these kinds of things. And even though it can do the coding, it can't pull together the sort of bigger picture for me. So I think right now it's just necessary from a technical perspective. in the long run we have to find ways to stay in control of the models so but that's what i wanted

29:41Robert Smith:to ask you because you know there are plenty of people experts people actually at the cutting edge of creating models who are either warning that we're quite close to seeing very significant at numbers of human jobs replaced by AI or actually trying to do that. You know, they're actually in the business of trying to do that. I mean, that is going to happen, isn't it? I mean, you know, we are going to see jobs eliminated by AI, aren't we?

30:17Marc Warner:There's no question, but I think it depends on exactly how you see that or sort of what context you set that in as to how serious you consider that to be. So what do you think? I think of, I mean, AI is ultimately better software. And so I see this as part of a trajectory that we've been on sort of since the invention of the computer, where software has consistently replaced jobs. And so, you know, the number of secretaries over time has diminished and all kinds of things like this.

30:52Robert Smith:But you don't think this is the biggest leap, the biggest step change?

30:55Marc Warner:So I don't think it's going to feel like a single moment in time. Actually, my, and this is now, I wouldn't say this was like general wisdom, as in other people, very serious people have a different perspective on this.

31:12Robert Smith:Well, Dario Amadei definitely has a different perspective.

31:14Marc Warner:It's slightly hard to decode exactly what, exactly the details of what he's saying. he certainly thinks he'll say things like we're going to get a country of geniuses in a data center in two two three years um but what exactly he means by geniuses is like slightly hard to unpick and so i i don't think i can make strong statements about like what he means what i can say is i think this process is going to sort of be much more continuous so these algorithms are going to get better and better and better and every so often they're going to sort of get to capability levels that pop through into the mainstream and suddenly become like the chat GPT moment as the kind of most obvious example of this where those models were improving for quite a long time beforehand and if you were paying attention you could see that they were just getting better and better and better at natural language processing, the chat GPT moment was primarily when it became like a mainstream phenomenon.

32:26Marc Warner:And so that feels very like a step shape, but actually there's a more continuous background going on.

32:32Robert Smith:When you want your spring break to feel like, and your kid's pool day to feel like, and your hotel bed to feel like, Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like... Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed-sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs.

33:21Robert Smith:So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

33:31Steph McGovern:This episode is brought to you by Hargreaves Lansdowne. Now, if the last four decades have shown us anything, it's that change keeps coming. There have been so many huge economic events that have shaped our thinking today. Back in the 80s, we had Margaret Thatcher's deregulation of the stock markets. Then there was the dot-com bubble of the 90s, followed by the credit crunch of the noughties and the pandemic in the decade after that. Plus lots of other significant developments too. For over 40 years, though, Hargreaves Lansdowne has helped Britain invest through it all confidently, whatever is going on in the world.

34:11Steph McGovern:Join over 2 million Brits using the UK's number one investment and savings platform. Learn more at hl.co.uk. Investment returns vary. For claim verification, visit hl.co.uk slash platform.

34:28Robert Smith:Should governments, our government, other governments, be doing more to prevent, even if you think the most likely scenario is not a mega labor market shock, nonetheless, you're saying there is a trend of certain jobs over time being replaced by AI. economies will need to adapt new jobs will have to be created education will have to change do you think that governments are conscious enough of the role they should be playing in helping particularly younger people acquire the relevant skills for this new economy the slightly easy

35:12Marc Warner:answer is no I mean governments face enormous amounts of incredibly urgent day-to-day stuff and we know two things exponentials are really hard for humans and we know that long-term planning is really hard inside the like institutions of government as we've got them currently set up today and so it would be sort of inconceivable to me that we could be planning effectively for AI but it is worth pointing out just how hard a problem this is in the sense that on the one hand there will be people displaced on the other hand if we artificially limit our companies from doing from sort of making people redundant then they'll become uncompetitive and those people will lose their jobs anyway and so finding the exact like threading this needle of what's the right level of displacement and how do we make the best of that and cycle people round is actually a really

36:18Robert Smith:hard problem as well but so but just look at schools for a second at the moment schools are often saying to their pupils you can't use ai now that seems to me to be that's mad clinically insane

36:31Marc Warner:completely mad yeah i think it's absolutely insane uh to do that i i think that's completely the wrong approach. If AI makes it harder for, let's say, us to test people or whatever, we have to reconfigure the tests. We cannot take away the absolute best tools for learning that maybe humanity has ever invented.

36:55Steph McGovern:It's so out of date. You know, I've got a six-year-old who, you know, her IT lessons at school are just absolutely out of date with what she can do already in the house. Can I ask you then just, you know, Robert and I have talked a lot about the problem of youth unemployment, the problem of young people who are just disengaged with the jobs market, with education. What could what should they be doing to get a job? Like what if you were going to say to a young person now, this is what I'd learn to do. Is it coding? What is it that you should all of our young people should be doing to stay relevant?

37:29Marc Warner:So I think there are slightly different answers at different ages now. the technology is moving that fast so i think for my three-year-old there are different answers to sort of like an 18 year old today so we're about to go through this incredible transition of the kind of industrialization of software development so if you think about like the production of cotton before and after the industrial revolution before it was this incredibly artisan thing that meant there are very small volumes of it and you know it was very very highly prized and then after we can do it industrial scale it becomes like just you know the default um material for for clothing i think software development is about to undergo a similar transformation we have seen absolutely no lack of demand for software so i think there's just going to be this unbelievable elasticity and ultimately we're just going to build more and more and more but instead of it being this artisan craft it's going to be available to everyone all the time no matter what your software development skill is and there will be people who are better at understanding other people's problems and better at seeing the opportunities and better at specifying

38:53Robert Smith:what it should be there's obviously an enormous amount of debate about what they call recursion which is when the AI itself is better than humans at improving itself. How close are we to that?

39:06Marc Warner:So this is another one of those massive open scientific questions. It depends on your perspective. So my personal perspective, we are going to make programming really easy, but that is not going to have the like recursive effects on other parts of the economy that some other people think. So I would say, you know, in principle, if you, you know, you could take the world's smartest mathematician and say, well, why aren't they brilliant at gardening? They know maths, so they can just figure out gardening and they should have the best garden. Of course, real knowledge doesn't work like that. And I think there are good, good reasons why it doesn't.

39:56Robert Smith:A recursion, you think, will work within a very narrow area. So you set an AI, a task, and it will be able to self-improve within a very narrow area. But the idea of general intelligence constantly improving on its own in an exponential way, you don't think that will happen?

40:19Marc Warner:Well, I would say if you that I don't think if you put that intelligence in a box, it can just recursively self improve its way to brilliance at everything. What I think it has to do is I think it has to interact with the universe and it has to be able to test theory. So this is world.

40:37Robert Smith:This is the so-called world. Yeah, sort of embodied AI, some people will call it.

40:41Marc Warner:And so but I should say that this really like there are lots and lots of very smart people that would totally disagree with me. and that would say we are plausibly going to get this recursively self-improving AI within the next few years.

40:55Steph McGovern:So what are you telling your three-year-old just out of interest? And what should I be saying to my six-year-old about skills?

41:00Marc Warner:I think we already know huge classes of jobs that we do because we care about the experience rather than the outcome. So to take a slightly silly example to illustrate this, we can already move 100 kilos of mass over 100 meters much faster than Usain Bolt can run. Right. It's never about the economically efficient way of getting Usain Bolt over 100 meters. It's about the experience. It's about the competition. It's about what it means to us. and so you know magnus carlson the chess player already knows what it's like to have a job in a world where super intelligent systems can already completely dominate him at chess he will never ever be at our best chess computers no matter how hard he tries and so but actually when you start to think about it there's actually like quite a lot of these types of jobs so anything sort of artistic or artisan that involves like human taste or live music or live comedy or professional sport or you know podcasting or these kind of things there are like a million and one ways that we do things because we care about the process and that process is actually somehow importantly interwoven into the outcomes so the thing I'm thinking for my three-year-old which is kind of annoying for me because he's very good at maths and I know how to teach him that is that that sort of that job where you're pushing the frontiers of knowledge for economic value I don't think will I don't think that will be open to him in 20 years time but I can easily imagine a world where we we still do maths but we do it more as an artistic pursuit than as a kind of economic pursuit.

42:55Robert Smith:I really like that as a vision. I mean, obviously, obviously, it's conditional on us not becoming the slaves of the super intelligence.

43:03Marc Warner:Can I actually, yeah, just to make that point a bit more like, I do actually think that, you know, if you look back at sort of humanity and where it evolved, we are kind of egalitarian hunter gatherer tribes. And our instincts are very much geared towards that and in some ways to sort of force us to be part of this large industrial machine we have to like train those instincts out of ourselves so a lot of education some people would say is like you have to force people to think about themselves as part of a hierarchy so they can then fit into a kind of more industrial workplace but that's dead is that should be dead and i think that's the wonderful thing about all of this out the other side I actually think we'll we'll have much we'll be more human like people will look back on that on this period being like what you had to go to work and be told what to do by somebody you didn't like and like that was how you had to do it to survive it'll feel much more like coal miners do to us because they were the sort of silicon valley of their time but we look back on them as having to take these terrible risks and get sick to survive and these kinds of things.

44:20Marc Warner:I think out in the long run, looking back, we will feel similarly to those people as coal miners do to us. But I do think this bumpy period in the middle... So you believe in the world of plenty.

44:33Robert Smith:You do believe that this will generate significant amounts of income, better lives, better health and all the rest of it. But again, it gets back to my government point. that can only happen if 99.99 % of the profits don't all go to Elon Musk. Totally. The fruits of all this stuff are properly shared.

44:54Marc Warner:I think that's exactly right. What I'm saying is if you get the path right and you go out a thousand years, I think there's brilliant futures available, but it can be quite bumpy and quite path dependent on getting there, and there's no guarantees that it gets you there.

45:09Steph McGovern:Yeah, I also think it plays to the point that Robert and I often talk about, which is with education, is we often refer to the most important skills in life as soft skills when they're very much essential skills, which is what you're saying about communication and creativity and everything else is stuff we often sideline in pursuit of these, you know, pure academic roots. And actually computers, AI, everything's going to do that for us and we should focus more on all the things that make us human.

45:38Marc Warner:And one like one weird sort of perspective on all of this is Silicon Valley is actually commoditizing the very skills that it is particularly good at. And all the artistic skills that they don't prize so much are actually then going to become the much more like competitively valuable skill set. And I think there's definitely some truth in that. Yeah.

46:01Robert Smith:God, I hope you're right. I hope you're right. Can I just ask a slightly narrow, semi-patriotic question that I have to say is in the context of the really big ideas we've been talking about is probably a bit trivial. But we do talk on this programme quite a lot about both the sadness and potentially the economic cost of the UK of great pioneering companies like you selling out to overseas interests. I mean, you know, Accenture, Dublin based, I sort of think of it as American, but it's Dublin based. Was there a route where you could have stayed British and achieve everything you wanted to achieve?

46:38Marc Warner:Yeah, so we wrestled with all kinds of all kinds of possible futures. I ultimately I think it's true. You know, it's always a bit hard to say, so I don't want to over claim anything here. But I think it's true that if a couple of years ago, we'd had really ambitious British capital that would have come in and supported us to compete at the top levels of the world, we would have taken that and this wouldn't have happened, or at least wouldn't have happened in quite the same way. but even then let's say that did happen even then we still would have been faced by this dilemma of the moment where we decided that the mission was actually better served by having much more global scope and so maybe maybe if you wound back 10 years and we could have gone on a very very dramatically accelerated path which i'm not sure we would have been capable of as entrepreneurs But nevertheless, let's say we could have pulled that off and we could have been 50x, 100x the size by now.

47:45Marc Warner:Then maybe something could have looked different. But so I we wrestle with this. And I think there are arguments that this could easily be end up being better for the UK because faculty as a multibillion dollar company was never going to prop up the economy in any meaningful way. but this way we can do a bunch of we have this now global rate global reach global scale and are still going to be london-based all the people are going to be here all the skills are going to be here all the um all the money that flows through the ecosystem when you get an exit like this that tends to have lots of good consequences downstream is going to be here so it's it's really hard to know and kind of the thing we hung our hat on in making the decision was that ultimately the mission was best served by this and the mission of safe widespread adoption actually massively benefits the UK as well and so that was our sort of justification but we were definitely torn about it.

48:54Steph McGovern:Did you feel any pressure to go to Silicon Valley as well?

48:56Marc Warner:It would obviously be better to be in Silicon Valley when we were independent. It would obviously have been better to be there. We stayed for family reasons primarily and like patriotic reasons, not because we thought it was absolutely the most effective place for faculty. there's actually some slight subtlety in that in that to get the quality of talent faculty would never have had the same quality of talent in silicon valley as it did in london because silicon valley is so competitive and we had this weird access to talent but and we probably are

49:36Robert Smith:almost out of time there was one other question i wanted to ask you which is we do have unbelievable talent in this country and a lot of it's connected to our university system. If there were one thing that any government could do to essentially convert more of that talent into wealth generating projects that benefit the UK, what would that be for you?

50:09Marc Warner:That is a very, very big question. I mean, ultimately, I think the UK, there's really two things that you need to do to make the UK the home of the next generation of tech companies. So I guess let me just unpack some assumptions first. I assume that most economic growth is going to come through technology companies that grow really fast. I mean, that's what we see in America. It doesn't have to be true, but that's a kind of built in assumption here. And I assume that the best technology companies need the most talented, most ambitious founders paired with lots of very ambitious capital. And so if I was in charge, I'd be trying to make those two things happen.

51:01Marc Warner:I'd make it very, very easy for ambitious founders to move here with visas. And I'd like reduce the cost of them coming. And, you know, at the moment, they have to pay into the healthcare system in a way that makes it quite a big burden for a small startup and things like this. So I try and make sure we were really, really accessible to talented founders. And then I try and make sure we are very attractive to ambitious capital. And unfortunately, the only real way I can see to do that is to give essentially tax breaks to like fast growing startups that end up becoming very big. Now, I don't love that because I recognize that in some ways these people are going to become very rich and like taxing them less doesn't feel necessarily fair.

51:56Marc Warner:But I also think that in the long run, the country as a whole will look back on that and say, actually, you know, we desperately needed some growth in our economy. We cannot flood line. And that was the necessary consequence of or that was the necessary trade off to make.

52:14Steph McGovern:Yeah, that's really interesting because it would be such a hard sell to people here, wouldn't it? Like you say, it's about thinking about the longer term.

52:21Marc Warner:The only thing that I would say that makes it slightly easier is you would be giving tax breaks to extremely tiny companies when they were founded. So the actual break you'd be giving them would be minuscule. Ultimately, if they did become successful, then it would look like a lot more money. But that would be 10, 20 years down the line.

52:43Steph McGovern:yeah fascinating Mark thank you so much that's we could carry on for another hour I think but we should probably let you get back to your job

52:50Robert Smith:that was absolutely brilliant honestly so much gripping stuff that we covered thanks again and well good luck with your new life thank you very much lovely to be here

52:58Steph McGovern:yeah yeah thank you very much and that's it from us on the rest is money bye bye

53:02Robert Smith:goodbye

53:13Robert Smith:way to do sweet green. Wrapped and ready, these handheld wraps pack bold flavor and 40 plus grams of protein into something hearty, satisfying, and built for life on the go. From craveable sauces to satisfying textures, they're designed to keep you going without slowing you down. So put that fork down. Try the new wraps today in app or at order.sweetgreen.com. Available at participating locations only. Let's be real. Whether you're filming for TikTok, YouTube, or that one client who thinks viral means vertical, you don't have time to dig for decent stock. Storyblocks gives you unlimited royalty-free video, audio, and templates that actually look good.

53:55Robert Smith:Just drag, drop, done. Go to storyblocks.com slash explore, search the library, and see what you've been missing.

54:04Marc Warner:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door expertly cleaned. and you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.