The content explores the societal and individual impacts of rapid technological advancement, particularly AI, emphasizing the need for inclusive integration, proactive adaptation, and a focus on equitable outcomes and human well-being, while also touching on the unifying power of sports and the fundamental importance of access to basic services like electricity.
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The insecurity that we’re all experiencing,
the fact that people are waking up
and some new technology is landing on them
in their jobs without training, without them having a say
– of course they’re going to be anxious.
Of course they’re going to be feeling insecure
about what the future holds.
And so I think we really need to stop and say,
who are we doing this for?
What are the results we want, and how do we get there?
Well, we get there by including workers in the process.
Whenever you have a new technology coming about,
especially a massive general purpose technology
such as artificial intelligence that permeates
the economy and revolutionizes the way
things are done in every sector of the economy,
there’s going to be a lot of creative destruction.
When the power loom came about,
it devastated the fortunes of the handloom weavers,
who had been very well-paid, highly-skilled craftsmen.
It’s hard to imagine anybody nowadays
whose life would be better off materially
if the power loom had never been invented.
And the problem of course is making the transition.
And that’s something where all of society,
I think, has to help,
mainly just out of basic considerations of fairness
and equity.
The challenge we all face,
I think each of us here representing very different jurisdictions,
is the technologists and the private sector
and business is much faster, so much faster than government.
That’s always going to be the case.
And in the age of AI,
multiply that by a multiple of 10x, 50x, maybe 100x.
So government has really no chance in catching up,
unless from the beginning,
government is going hand in hand in that journey.
Using data from ADP,
we found that those in the youngest group,
aged 22 to 26, in the most exposed occupations,
call centres, software,
we ranked all 900 occupations based on their tasks,
that age group actually had about a 13% decline
in employment relative to before LLMs.
Especially in 2024 and 2025,
we started seeing that effect grow bigger.
The older age groups did not have that effect,
so the overall effect was fairly muted.
And some encouraging information,
if you sliced it based on people who are augmenting,
using the LLMs and generative AI to augment their work
versus people who’re using it to automate work,
what we found was that the augmenters,
those who are learning new things,
had growing employment.
So they both had more output and more employment,
so more shared prosperity.
Sadly, that was a minority of the folks,
but if we can get more people doing that
maybe that’s a potential path.
But a huge part of what has been lost
is actually ensuring that the places
where most people actually live
actually remain integrated into and a crucial part of society.
Part of what was real when the middle class was thriving,
at least in the United States, is that
that’s where the business leaders lived also.
Everybody’s kids were going to school together.
Everybody had a stake in the success of the same places.
And as we’ve moved to a situation where
there is this divergence and you have essentially
a thin class of people whose stake is much more tied to
that same thin class of people elsewhere in the world,
it leaves everybody else behind, yes, in economic terms,
but in a broader social sense
that you don’t solve through redistribution,
you don’t solve by building the data centre.
You actually need an economic model in which
the incentive is to go back to living and working together.
So you can’t sort of talk about this in the abstract.
You’ve got to use it.
You have to trust it, you have to use it,
you have to learn even how to put the guardrails to trust it, right?
You can’t just be afraid of it.
In fact, that’s why I think
you’re going to see that challenge of,
why am I not seeing immediate results in productivity?
Because you have to do the hard work.
There could be sector-wide differences,
but it’s going to fundamentally be
because of the leadership will in an organization.
If I was to talk to a class of undergrads right now,
I would be telling them to get
really unbelievably proficient with these tools.
I think to the extent that even those of us building it,
we’re so busy building, it’s hard to have also time
to really explore almost the capability overhang
even today’s models and products have,
let alone tomorrow’s.
And I think that can be maybe better
than a traditional internship would have been,
in terms of you’re leapfrogging yourself
to be useful in a profession.
I’ll go to electricity. I’m not going to do a sports analogy,
but I think we’ve wired the house and turned on the lights,
but we have not explained to people
that now they could heat the home,
they could cook in that home using electricity,
they can have entertainment.
And so the capability overhang is massive.
Even if models improved zero from today,
there is still so much productivity to be had,
just with what’s in people’s hands.
I’m constantly surprised,
even when I meet economists at places like this,
that there are not more professional economists,
professors, thinking about what happens.
And not just
sort of on the way to AGI [artificial general intelligence],
– the job displacements
are one question, we’re all worried about the economics of that,
but maybe there are ways to distribute this new productivity,
this new wealth more fairly.
The things that keep me awake at night
is there are even bigger questions
than that at that point, to do with meaning
and purpose,
and a lot of the things that we get from our jobs,
not just economically, that’s one question,
but I think that may be easier to solve strangely
than what happens to the human condition and humanity as a whole.
I think we as even a global community
have to get to a point where
we’re using this to do something useful
that changes the outcomes of people
and communities and countries
and industries, right?
Otherwise, I don’t think this makes much sense, right?
In fact,
I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission
to actually take something like energy,
which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens
if these tokens are not improving health outcomes,
education outcomes, public sector efficiency,
private sector competitiveness across all sectors,
small and large
And that, to me, is ultimately the goal.
We want to solve all disease, cure diseases,
come up with new energy sources.
I think as a society, it’s clear we want that.
I think maybe the balance of what the industry’s doing
is not enough balanced towards those types of activities.
I think we should have a lot more examples,
AlphaFold-like things that help
sort of unequivocal good in the world.
And I think actually it’s incumbent on the industry
and all of us leading players to show that more,
demonstrate that, not just talk about it,
but demonstrate that.
I have engineers within Anthropic who say,
‘I don’t write any code anymore.
I just let the model write the code.
I edit it. I do the things around it’.
I think, I don’t know,
we might be 6 to 12 months away
from when the model is doing most,
maybe all of what SWEs [software engineers] do end to end.
And then it’s a question of how fast
does that loop close?
Not every part of that loop is something
that can be sped up by AI, right?
There’s chips,
there’s manufacture of chips, there’s training time for the model.
It’s easy to see how this could take a few years.
It’s very hard for me to see
how it could take longer than that.
Over 500 million Africans lack access to a grid.
Which is crazy in an age where we’re talking about
quantum computing, advanced AI and nanotechnology.
A million people every day are switching on a light,
watching TV, charging their phones,
having a cold drink from a solar-powered freezer.
Easy Solar is on a mission to light up lives
and end energy poverty
and our vision is really simple:
to make electricity affordable and accessible for all.
Sadly, it’s not today.
My personal journey began really when I was a teenager,
and we had rolling blackouts in my household,
and I remember the first time
I had to study for my high school exams by candlelight
because we didn’t have anything in the absence of the grid
and I realized how much of a privilege electricity was
and that was really the original spark
of trying to solve this problem
that was so endemic across the African continent.
Technology can be great,
but you really have to embed yourself in the way
communities think and interact with energy services.
So almost household has even a basic feature phone.
They’d sometimes walk a kilometre or two
and leave it at the person
in the nearest town [to charge it].
And sometimes the phone would get lost,
but often they would just get it back at the end of the day.
And so we really tried to understand
what are the daily activities people are doing,
and then really pricing that
cost of the system
so that they’d be saving every week
and so that money was in their pocket,
that they could reinvest in education,
reinvest, you know, in a better basket of goods.
So people don’t just stop with a solar home system,
but they can maybe access other equipment
that can help them start a business in the future.
One of the biggest lessons
through sports is that you can’t take your success
to your head and your failure to your heart and that is,
I think, a very important lesson in life.
I believe cricket, or any sport for that matter,
but for me, cricket was something that I saw
that people can come together for.
There can be a lot of differences in your mindsets
and your belief systems, in what makes you happy or sad,
but when it comes to cricket, especially in Asia,
whether you’re coming from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan,
any other country you name,
this one sport can gel everyone together.
When you’re playing sport,
you appreciate how different characters, different
personalities bring so much to that one game
and that one team.
So understanding that your differences
are not necessarily a bad thing.
We can work around our similarities
and the differences can really add value to our lives.
When we were growing up,
there were hardly any women athletes
we could look up to, especially in cricket.
I do feel anyone
who’s taking a path that has not been
there before or they are making a new path for themselves,
this thing is very key, it’s critical
that you make your own community.
Sports at a grassroots level gives you
an opportunity as a girl to take decisions,
to build teams, to be around teams,
which a girl who has not been given
that opportunity might not enjoy at that age.
So for both boys and girls,
I think it’s crucial that they participate in sports.
It’s a way to make them learn about collaboration,
about understanding different peoples, different personalities.
You don’t have to be a captain to be a leader,
you can be a leader in any form in a sporting team
and that leadership can pave a huge
part of the journey.
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