#192 - Amy Webb - The Future of Work, AI & Human Labor

Summary

The Peter McCormack Show — Episode #192: Amy Webb - The Future of Work, AI & Human Labor

Date: July 9, 2026
Host: Peter McCormack
Guest: Amy Webb (Futurist, Founder, and CEO of the Future Today Institute)

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Episode Overview

Peter McCormack sits down with renowned futurist Amy Webb for a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion on how artificial intelligence and related technologies are transforming work, wealth, power, and the very fabric of society. The conversation moves from anxieties about job loss and technological acceleration, to systemic changes in productivity and power structures, the failures of government foresight, and the need for new models of value and regulation. Webb offers pragmatic, data-driven insights while challenging listeners to be active participants—“thinkers”—in the transition generation.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Accelerant Effect of AI: Humanity-Scale Reordering

• Main Idea: AI is causing a societal and economic shift as profound as the printing press, but with the added complication that AI can now self-improve and evolve unpredictably (00:00–09:06).
• Amy points out, “We could be looking at a future where the economy is thriving but has no use for you and your labor and what your contributions can be. Are we looking at a humanity scale reordering? I think the answer is yes, and I think we're starting to see that already.” (00:00–00:16)
• Peter likens the proliferation of AI to a technological ‘printing press’, but with even more transformative consequences due to automation and velocity of change (08:06–09:06).

2. Shifting Power and the New Thinkers vs. Think Nots Paradigm

• Main Idea: It’s not about which jobs will disappear, but who is adaptable and able to use new tools creatively. There will be “thinkers” (lifelong learners, tinkerers) and "think nots" (those who don’t adapt or stop learning) (13:50–18:07).
• “There's a professor at MIT that talks about in the age of AI, thinkers and think nots. The thinkers are people like you… the AI layer is a supplement… it is accelerating you. But there are people who… have stopped learning, and they've stopped trying to grow, or they're getting started with this technology too young and they haven't had the experience to learn and to gain new knowledge.” — Amy Webb (13:50)
• Skills traditionally undervalued—such as lifelong learning, curiosity, and strategic tinkering—become critical in this new era.

3. The Limits and Failures of “Reskilling”

• Main Idea: Government-led reskilling programs often fail for lack of foresight and recognition of existing value in people's current skillsets (19:05–24:21).
• Amy’s West Virginia coal miner anecdote highlights the disconnect between tech utopianism and real human capital. “Why didn’t the local community…have the foresight?... Instead of thinking through that, the local government paid some startup a bunch of money to come into town and have all these miners sit at desks… These amazing programs to teach the coal miners how to code all collapsed within two years. And then these towns were no better off than they could have been.” (22:46)
• What’s needed isn’t just new skills training, but a broader societal strategy for transition and recognition of existing, valuable skills.

4. Contrasting Approaches: U.S./UK vs. China on Jobs and Infrastructure

• Main Idea: While the West is locked in emotionally charged debates about job losses, China is strategically planning (five-year plans) to future-proof its population with infrastructure and education (25:21–29:09).
• “China is heavily investing in electricity, like power lines...making sure that every family has access to the Internet...that the education system is oriented...toward a world in which you have these [AI] tools.” — Amy Webb (26:34)
• The “fast follower” strategy: China lets the West take the risk in R&D, then quickly scales usable innovations at home.

5. The Collapse of Traditional Economic Structures

• Main Idea: Automation leads to ‘lights out factories’—truly human-less productivity that challenges the foundations of the labor-centric economy (30:18–36:16).
• “...it’s human capital which has always undergirded the economic structures...is no longer the driving force behind productivity and therefore wealth. Which means that you could have GDP going up and unemployment going up for the first time together in a wealthy prosperous community.” — Amy Webb (32:16)
• The “pyramid” of professional services (e.g., law firms) is becoming a “dot”—with vast implications for employment, education, and status (35:11).

6. Rethinking Status and Value in Society

• Main Idea: As material scarcity and labor value fade, status may shift to cognitive or communal achievements, not just possessions (38:48).
• “So the status symbols may be more cognitive. I don't know yet...I wonder if the status symbols of the future have more to do with just cognitive things that some people can do and others can't.” — Amy Webb (38:48)

7. Debt, Labor, and Future Wealth Distribution

• Main Idea: In a debt-based system where labor’s role diminishes, how is social order maintained? The AI “utility” is really a new kind of metered (and extractive) system (40:49–43:02).
• Amy introduces the concept of “contribution credit”:
  • Back pay for work training AIs (e.g., your data, creative output, behavior makes models smarter).
  • Forward pay for invisible, community-oriented work (e.g., caregiving, volunteering).
• “One of the opportunities in front of us is something I call a contribution credit...I cannot think of a moment in any history...where a community was stable without being productive. Productivity...is a wonderful way to stabilize and balance a community.” — Amy Webb (43:09)

8. Regulation: The Limits of Old Tools for New Tech

• Main Idea: Traditional regulation lags fast-moving technology—new, more adaptive frameworks are needed instead of binary "regulate or deregulate" thinking (86:58–93:01).
• Amy’s “fan car”/Formula 1 analogy illustrates the futility of trying to pre-emptively regulate what’s fundamentally unknowable until it occurs in the wild (90:06).
• “Current structures don't make sense for the world we're about to live in.” — Amy Webb (93:01)
• The answer isn’t more regulation, but perhaps new forms of reperception and “market-based approaches” to ensure public interests are served.

9. Positive Signals and the Acceleration of Cross-Disciplinary Innovation

• Main Idea: AI accelerates advances not just in digital, but also biology (longevity, healthspan), agriculture (drought-resistant crops), and adaptive, personalized medicine (63:31–68:16).
• “...artificial intelligence, when you link it with other things, starts to unlock totally other fields and give us optionality we just haven't had before.” — Amy Webb (65:22)
• The acceleration is overwhelming (“AI exhaustion”) but also leads to convergences and divergences—new kinds of wearables, ambient computing, and redefined infrastructure.

10. Planning for the Long Term: The Problem with “Plunder” and Short-Termism

• Main Idea: Western democracies struggle with short election cycles, populist demands, and regulatory capture, leading to “plunder phases” where productivity is sidelined by rent-seeking and bureaucratic inertia (80:39–88:08).
• The necessity for “reperception” to create new social contracts and mechanisms for incentivizing productivity and stability.
• “[The] answer...is not deregulate or more regulate. It is what could exist that is not regulation that has the desired impact. And that represents a fundamental reperception…” — Amy Webb (88:08)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Meaning of Change:
  “Why are we feeling the sensation of change and profound uncertainty? It's because we all live with these mental models...Our expectations for what reality is going to be wind up being pretty different from what reality actually is. And that gap is what makes us have these feelings of anxiety…” — Amy Webb (03:53)
• On Being a Thinker:
  “The thinkers are people like you. ...It doesn't obviate you, it is accelerating you. But there are a lot of people out there who... have in a way decided either AI is just going to replace them no matter what. And so they've stopped learning... those are the people who will actually be in jeopardy.” — Amy Webb (13:50)
• On the Transition Generation:
  “All of us are Gen T. We are all the transition generation...This is the hardest part for people to wrap their heads around because it means that there's no single policy. There's no single universal basic income. There's no single thing that's going to solve the challenge, because this challenge is going to be unfolding now.” — Amy Webb (36:29)
• On Contribution Credit:
  “My plan that I have been trying to get people in this country at least excited about is a contribution credit, which has two key components...back pay for your work, training AI, and forward pay for the invisible work that happens every day in our communities.” — Amy Webb (44:09)
• On “Reperception” and the Need for New Models:
  “We frame the conversations as regulation, no regulation in a binary. I think what we need is something not regulation, if that makes sense.” — Amy Webb (86:58)
• On Planning for the Future (the temple anecdote):
  “...200 years ago one of his family members planted the tree that took care of the tree that they knew at some point in the future somebody would need to use to repair the roof. ...That’s what we lack.” — Amy Webb (81:03)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00 – AI’s existential threat to labor & sense of control
• 09:06 – Printing press analogy & self-improving tech
• 13:50 – Thinkers vs. think-nots; value of curiosity and experience
• 19:05 – Failing “reskilling” and the West Virginia miners' story
• 25:21 – U.S./UK vs. China: contrasting strategic approaches
• 32:16 – The collapse of labor-driven prosperity and lights-out factories
• 38:48 – Future forms of status & cognitive capital
• 43:09 – Contribution credit: rewarding productivity beyond formal jobs
• 54:27 – Export controls, regulatory gatekeeping & hype in AI releases
• 63:31 – Longevity, synthetic biology & acceleration in biotech
• 80:39 – Flawed Western short-term planning, lack of a shared vision
• 86:58 – Need for “reperception”; why traditional regulation will fail
• 90:06 – Formula 1 analogy: regulation always lags disruptive innovation
• 93:05 – Wrap-up, appreciation, and the hope for future, more “human” time

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Tone and Language

• The dialogue is candid, sometimes humorous (teasing about “cocaine” voice; self-deprecating quirks), yet always intellectually rigorous.
• Amy Webb’s style is hyper-articulate, pragmatic, and data-oriented but empathetic to the anxieties and real-world struggles listeners may face.
• Peter injects populist skepticism, practical examples from podcasting/business, and a distinctly British flavor, reflecting listeners’ day-to-day fears and hopes.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a panoramic, sobering, yet ultimately optimistic guide to navigating the future of work and value in the age of AI. Amy Webb argues for “reperception”—the need to see old problems with new eyes, reward productive contributions in new forms, and move beyond binary regulatory debates. The “transition generation” is living through not just a technological shift, but a reordering of our collective purpose and social contracts.

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Notable final quote:
“The answer...is not deregulate or more regulate. It is what could exist that is not regulation that has the desired impact. And that represents a fundamental reperception.” — Amy Webb (88:08)

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For More:
Amy Webb’s work at the Future Today Institute, her books (including “The Big Nine”), and Peter’s future episodes explore these ideas further. Stay tuned for part two, if it happens, when Amy visits London.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Amy Webb]

We could be looking at a future where the economy is thriving but has no use for you and your labor and what your contributions can be. Are we looking at a humanity scale reordering? I think the answer is yes, and I think we're starting to see that already.

[Peter McCormack]

And it feels like AI has just become this accelerant that people don't know what to do with.

[Amy Webb]

The key difference with the technology that exists now, whether that is AI or related technologies like biotechnology, which is like biology and I kind of linked together these self improve and they can evolve in ways that we cannot predict in advance. There's a professor at MIT that talks about in the age of AI thinkers and think nots. I don't think the right conversation is specifically which job and which industry will be gone 36 months from now. I think the better question is who are the people that are more vulnerable. You could have GDP going up and unemployment going up for the first time. Together we are all the transition generation. The current structures don't make sense for the world we're about to live in.

[Peter McCormack]

This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron the AI Cloud for the next big thing. IRON builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is iren.com. all right, Amy, I've been so excited to talk to you. We seem to be moving into a new era where we're potentially looking at a reorganization of the operational system for society.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. So first of all, thank you for including me on your US tour. I'm happy to be with you in New York. I really am legit.

[Peter McCormack]

Thank you.

[Amy Webb]

I've been looking forward to this as well. Yeah. So are we looking at a humanity scale reordering? I think the answer is yes. And I think we're starting to see that already. We're seeing the nexus of power shifting a little bit and that depends on the country. But I think here in the United States there's definitely been this sort of battle royale pitting the financial sector against the tech sector against the government sector. And typically it would have been years past, like clear who the winner was. And this time, you know, I'm not sure what's going to happen because everybody seems to be exerting enough strength that the others are having to give and take a little bit in a way we haven't seen before. But also, if you go back maybe 10 years, there were a lot of like all the big consulting firms had their studies out saying, you know, truck drivers are all going to lose their jobs because of self driving cars and this is the year that it will happen. And I remember seeing those studies thinking like, did you just hire a bunch of analysts out of like none of this makes any sense. There's no model that would bear this out, you know, that being said, it's the white collar people whose jobs are fundamentally shifting, which is not what people had thought anyhow. This is all to say, what is a world model to begin with? So if we stop and think for a moment, why are we feeling the sensation of change and profound uncertainty? It's because we all live with these mental models for sometimes a really long time. And some of that comes from what we've observed, some of it comes from science fiction. And our expectations for what reality is going to be wind up being pretty different from what reality actually is. And that gap is what makes us have these feelings of anxiety and like we don't have any more control and we don't have any agency, which is not the case. But it's this sense of like, everything is changing and I can't do anything about it. Which all ties back to that question about, you know, the operating system of humanity and all of these things that are shifting. Yes, a lot is, but some of it is also just our perception, I think.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, we get a lot of emails into the show and talk to a lot of people about AI. There's also a regular program in the UK called Question Time where they have four or five politicians and the audience asks questions and they didn't do they answer?

[Amy Webb]

Wait, now I gotta ask you questions? Do they actually answer the questions or is it just gobbledygook talking points?

[Peter McCormack]

Well, it's interesting you should say that because I just built a website called show us Receipts which grades tweets.

[Amy Webb]

Awesome.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, so this is the power of AI. I built this in three days. It sucks seeing every tweet by a politician. It facts checks them against primary sources and it grades them as true, mostly true, misleading, false or unverifiable. I haven't put it live yet because there's some mistakes in there. So I'm fine tuning it. But with this Question Time program, I was like, well, I can take the transcript of the show and I can put that in as well and live fact check them while people are watching.

[Amy Webb]

Okay, so you just answered the question that you asked me. How is the world changing. So if we go back in this country to the 2020 election and the 2016 election. 2016 was sort of the zenith of Twitter functioning correctly, I would say. And people were still trying to inject misinformation botnets, which are complicated networks of automated systems that are responding to content and posting their own content. That was the beginning of. Maybe we should be fact checking this. And there are organizations in the United States like Pew and, and there were a handful of nonprofits, some news organizations trying to brute force what you are talking about with humans. So there were a lot of humans that were employed to do exactly what you just cranked out in what sounds like 72 hours.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

So that is a. And, and it's, you know, once you have it fine tuned and launch it, it's gonna be really good service assuming that the, you know, the labeling is accurate. So that's a. So but here's why this matters because A, obviously this says something about jobs, but B, this is almost like a real time thing that will exist. You will be holding politicians more accountable, which is great. Which is awesome.

[Peter McCormack]

Awesome.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

But the amazing thing with this and the six weeks I've had is because I can't code. HTML4 was the last thing I programmed.

[Amy Webb]

Well, that's a while ago, but I

[Peter McCormack]

just get instructions from Claude.

[Amy Webb]

I was just gonna ask, did you use clau to do this?

[Peter McCormack]

Yes, I use clue.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, so it's an easy and whatever. I hate the like term vibe coding because I think it's just one of these terms for right now that's going to sound stupid in a couple years.

[Peter McCormack]

I think it sounds stupid now.

[Amy Webb]

I think it 100% sounds stupid.

[Peter McCormack]

I'm a software engineer.

[Amy Webb]

Thank you. But the fact that anybody can just play around and have an output be a usable website is a fundamental shift in.

[Peter McCormack]

Should we do something really cool live? I wasn't planning to do this.

[Amy Webb]

I mean, maybe I've already. I should not say yes before I like, see what we're doing.

[Peter McCormack]

Let's see what we do. Let's see if this works. I wasn't planning this. Hi, Peter. One moment.

[Amy Webb]

Is that your voice?

[Peter McCormack]

Two things pressing. Peter, you've got sponsor invoices to Chase for real. Bedford Plaud advert question sitting with Alec. Kurt copied in. What would you like to tackle? That's me. Everything all right? Did I sound a bit off? Anyway, the two things pressing this afternoon you've got sponsoring voices. Calm down, calm down. What do I have on today? Do I have any meetings or anything? Today. Any interviews? Just the one thing. An interview with Amy Webb at 11. That's all I've got in your calendar today. Anything else? No, that's fine. Let me give you the background to that. Cause I only built that two days ago.

[Amy Webb]

Okay. Did you also. Did you give a little cocaine? Cause that's what it sounded like. Sound like your digital system was all coked up at the beginning.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, something went well. So I'm still fine tuning, but there's been a journey to this which has got me to the point where I'm so excited to talk to because it's been a profound six weeks, six weeks ago, I discovered Claude. I've built three years of work in six weeks with no ability to code and fundamentally change the way I work. And so the profound moment I've got to, and why I wanted to talk to you is essentially, this is the printing press for technology. And when I think of our listeners, there are jobs that are being wiped out. Coinbase got rid of them. Was it 17% of their staff square got rid of 4,000 people. And, and that anxiety people have about will my job exist? How do I keep my job? What happens if my job goes? That's the anxiety people are dealing with. I see all the opportunity, but I recognize the anxiety. And it feels like AI has just become this accelerant that people don't know what to do with.

[Amy Webb]

Let me. Let's click back a little bit before we go forward. So first of all, you mentioned the printing press. And this is this influential moment in time when if you go back to the Gutenberg press, at that moment in time, you would have had one or more, probably several people literally putting tiles together into a press so that you could much more quickly than a human scribe would have been able to do, mass produce, mass being small scale at that stage, leaflets and pamphlets and books and whatever it might have been. And that did fundamentally shift the course of humanity because it meant that there was much more supply in the marketplace of printed materials. And that galvanized education in new ways and religion and the places where people would learn how to read. So, so in a way, that printing press became a platform for additional innovation. It was in a sense, a general purpose technology, artificial intelligence. First of all, if everybody listening is sick of hearing about artificial intelligence, so am I. You are not alone. And we're gonna keep talking about it. But the reason I bring this up is because AI first of all is not a technology. It's an umbrella term for a whole bunch of different technologies. And in 1956, when there was not too far away from where we are right now up in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, there was a meeting over the summer for two months. A couple of research scientists invited all their buddies to campus and said, we've got this idea about a machine that can think. Now, this wasn't their initial original idea. Others had already posited this many decades before, in fact, going all the way back to Charles Babbage, who's English, and Ada Lovelace, who was doing most of the work and had created the first tabulation machine. So it was like the first computer. People have been thinking about this for a while, but they like got these guys together and said, let's really figure out what it might mean for a machine that can think. We didn't have an AI powered computer after that, but we had a lot of stuff in the public discourse, which then led to investment and to some degree, some overexuberance and technology that failed to materialize in the 80s. But that's how we get to now. AI is not a thing. It's a whole bunch of different things that involve the physical world and visual information and exactly what you just discussed. So AI is a general purpose technology and we're going to get to jobs in a second. But I just want to highlight the key difference between the printing press as an inflection point as a general purpose technology and AI. The difference is the printing press couldn't learn on its own, so it couldn't self improve. And the Internet, HTML4, HTML5, very powerful stuff, but it also doesn't learn on its own or self improvement. The key difference with the technology that exists now, whether that is AI or related technologies like biotechnology, which is like biology, and I kind of linked together these self improve and they can evolve in ways that we cannot predict in advance. So if you are sick about hearing about artificial intelligence because you keep feeling like you're hearing the same stuff over and over again, the reason it's good to be paying attention is because of that piece, the self improvement piece. Now Jobs, which jobs are going away? How soon are they going away? What does it mean for you? So what you just described, that you built your past six weeks of a journey of experimentation and learning and getting to the point where you called your digital assistant and that assistant just read out for you everything you need to know. It was made possible because of the technology, but mainly because of you. So but this is the part that people forget. So like Peter, you have had this unbelievable career. You are a polymath you are somebody who is. Well, I did. You did some research on me. I did some research on you before I showed up. But you've done all of these different things, which means you have a lifetime of experience and knowledge. So that when you sit down to figure out what am I going to do with AI, you already know.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

There's a professor at MIT that talks about in the age of AI thinkers and think nots, the thinkers are people like you. So you have spent your life learning and experiencing and now the AI layer is a supplement. Okay. Which means that it doesn't obviate you, it is accelerating you. But there are a lot of people out there who have in a way decided either AI is just going to replace them no matter what. And so they've stopped learning and they've stopped trying to grow, or they're getting started with this technology too young and they haven't had the experience to learn and to gain new knowledge. Therefore, in a few years, those are the people who will actually be in jeopardy. We both have 16 year olds. My daughter, we had. We live in an unusual situation Cause we have like a, you know, highly powered server rack in our basement and we basically built our own internal brain. We're super nerds.

[Peter McCormack]

So I have no surprise.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, so like my kid had her own dedicated network node, but we, you know, she thought she was out there exploring everything and we basically built a great Chinese firewall just for her. But she didn't have a phone and no social media or anything else. So this kid now has a vast amount of experience in her young 16 years and she's learned all of these things so that when she sits down to use AI, it is actually not write my essay for me. It's none of that stuff, it's more clever like what you're trying to do. She's tinkering with it, she's building, she's building with it. That is not true of a lot of her friends who had unfettered access to their phones and to social media, whatever else. I mean there are correlations here and they're just trying to use it to like, I just want to get this stuff done so I can go back to screwing around on TikTok. Those are the think nots who are going to have problems in the future. So at last, after 37 minutes, to answer the question that you did about jobs, I don't think the right conversation is specifically which job in which industry will be gone 36 months from now. I think the better question is who are the people that are more vulnerable. And it doesn't just have to do with the specific job they have. The first question is, is this a thinker or a think not kind of person? The thinker people are going to be fine because they're going to be agile and they will have accumulated those skills throughout life.

[Peter McCormack]

All right, check this out. This is Plaud. Now, one of the hardest parts of doing long form interviews is what happens after we stop recording. I could be sat here for three hours talking about AI politics, economics and all that civilizational stuff. And then immediately afterwards I need to provide a brief to my producer Connor. He wants to know what the title's going to be. The thumbnail, what clips matter, what's going to be the opening hook. And that normally means waiting for a transcript, digging through the notes and trying to remember what the strongest moments were when it happened. It never really happens like this. Usually a couple of days later, Conor is chasing me and I can't remember what we spoke about. So when Plaud reached out and they said they had a solution, I was interested. So I've been using this. This is the Plaud Note Pro. I just literally leave it here on the desk during an interview. And once we're done, I instantly have access to searchable text from the conversation. So instead of relying on my memory after a three hour show, I can immediately pull quotes, identify themes and send a proper brief over to Connor. And honestly, some weeks I'm doing three to four long form interviews. So Plaud has become incredibly useful. But it's not just for interviews. We're planning shows in the car. There's post show discussions and sometimes just random ideas after recording all those conversations we don't normally capture. So look, if you're thinking of using Plaud, obviously follow local laws and get consent when recording conversations. If you're a journalist or you're a podcaster, I think Plaud is something you're going to like. So if you want to find out more, please head over to plaud AI McCormack for 20% off. That is plaud AI McCormack. And plaud is spelled P L A U D. So how does a think not become a thinker? If they're listening to this, they're like, well, I don't want to be in the think not category. How do I get that?

[Amy Webb]

Well, if the person listening is actually not listening, but just downloading your transcript scripts and dumping them into ChatGPT to get the a couple of things they need to know. Those are your think nots I think everybody listening probably is a thinker because what you're doing here is asking challenging, probing questions. So by default, if you make it through an episode, you're a thinker. So I think people here are fine. If you want to play this forward, you have to be agile. So being in continual learning mode, especially in this country, we talk about upskilling people or reskilling people, which I think is, I think that's like a, that's a really condescending thing to say to somebody to re skill them. If you're 50 years old and you've had a lifetime of experience doing something, why would we discount all of the skills that you have? Can I take a quick side quest and tell?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, please.

[Amy Webb]

I mean, it's going to happen anyways, but okay, quick story. It's not going to be quick. I'll try to make it quick. So in this country, we had a lot of coal mines throughout the east coast. So Virginia, West Virginia, and coal just kind of went out of fashion over the past 200 years. Right. But there's still some operational mines in both places. In one concentrated area in West Virginia, just the mines started shutting down. And for a long time, like that mine, that was the town that was the central employer, generations of people had been, you know, from the same family had been working and that like that's it. And when the mines closed, there's no other industries, nothing else to do. So I think it was 2008, 2010, something like that. We were at the beginning of the iPhone era and not too long after people started talking about apps. Apps were the new thing. So somebody had the bright idea to take all of these miners who are now out of jobs and reskill them or upskill them and teach all these miners how to code. Okay, so we're talking about somebody who has spent his entire life operating heavy machinery, going into very confined spaces, having to physically move their body around, you know, first aid, like all of these accumulated skills and now we're going to put them at a desk and they're going to learn HTML4 or whatever it might be, right? JavaScript, and they're going to make apps. Now this is nothing against the coal miners. Could any coal miner learn how to code? Of course. It's not that hard. This is about not acknowledging the skills that they had spent their entire lives building and building upon. For those in generational families, who else might make use of those skills? Instead of thinking through that, the local government paid some startup a bunch of money to come into town and have all these miners sit at desks. And these people, by the way, were promised very high paying jobs at places like Salesforce. Right. If only they get through this, this training program. Forget the fact that you're competing against a marketplace of people literally 30 years younger than them, okay, Who've only ever been digital natives. Why didn't the local community instead have the foresight? So this is where the strategic foresight comes into play. It's not enough to marvel at the new technology. You have to plan for what it impl. If it was me, I would have said yes. There are these apps in mobile phones. More to the point, mines are gonna close, but we actually still need those skill sets. So they could have called a German company in, let's say auto manufacturing or heavy industrial or something and said, look, come to West Virginia, put up a plant here. We have highly trained workers who can continue to do the work, you know, that you need to have done. Or better yet, you know, these phones seem to be pretty popular. I bet we're gonna need a lot more of them. That probably means we need more rare earth metals. We've got some of that here in the United States. We don't have any miners right now who can really do that. Why don't we see if this group of people can also do that type of work?

[Peter McCormack]

But there was a very obvious flaw in all of that. Is that the one word you used was government.

[Amy Webb]

Well, sure, and I'm sure we'll talk about your. Yeah, but this is the point. The point is coming as a shock to literally nobody. These amazing programs to teach the coal miners how to code all collapsed within two years. And then these towns were no better off than they could have been. And that irritates me because government is charged with thinking about our futures. I mean, that is part of the gig. And to me that was an abdication of responsibility. I'm not saying that government should have come in with a very heavy hand and sort of put everybody into a government, none of that stuff. What I am saying is local governments, city governments, federal, whatever part of the job is, let's go into the future and figure out where it is we all want to be. And then backwards engineer that way, backwards engineer that given what we know to be true. So it's strategic foresight that is part of the responsibility of people in elected office as well as business leaders and everybody else. But.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, I never hold too much confidence with government run programs, but that could be a whole podcast on its own. But there's these Kind of competing ideas of what AI is going to mean for the future. There is. I mean, I listened to the all in podcast recently, and they were talking about certain areas where the AI has created new jobs. There's like an increased demand for programmers, even though they don't need to code anymore. But there's also the fear factor of people worrying about jobs going. And if jobs do go, it will be the people losing their jobs who will be looking to the government to say, what are you going to do for me?

[Amy Webb]

And so, yeah, you know, who's not having that conversation? So you're right. You're absolutely right. In the United States, in England, in a lot of places around the world, we are talking nonstop about jobs.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Which jobs are going away? Depending on who you talk to. It's either some kind of Pollyanna, you know, ultra utopian, all the. All these new jobs, thousands of new jobs will bloom. Right. Because that is what has always happened. And if you talk to the doomers who are increasingly loud because it gets more clicks on the Internets, you know, all jobs are going away and there'll be economic collapse. Look, I'm a pragmatist.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Which is to say just, let's all just acknowledge that we're in a transition.

[Peter McCormack]

Stuff's gonna change.

[Amy Webb]

Stuff's gonna change. That's right. I don't have an. Look, if anybody can predict the future for you, it's me. I am the best, I think, at this. And I am not gonna give you a prediction for jobs. Cause there's no way to use math to do it right now. There's too many variables in play. Let me tell you who's doing a better job of having the jobs conversation. China.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Amy Webb]

So if you go to China and you talk to people there, they are also talking about jobs in a very different way. So coworkers will talk about AI and their concern about AI. Their concern is not the AI. It is that they are not learning enough quickly enough so that they can continue to be competitive. People in China are not all at these sort of opposite poles wondering if their jobs are going to be gone or when they're going to go start learning the classics. Because they're all going to get universal basic income. Right. It's not that they're thinking much more specifically and in a nuanced way, what do I need to learn how to do a little bit better? How can I be a little bit more clever? How can I be more competitive? It's a very different orientation. It's the harder thing to do, the easier thing to do is to sit back and get yourself all, you know, riled up from a dopamine point of like, you know, like that's going to give you like a better dopamine hit, but it's also just going to sort of kick the can down the road. You're still going to have to deal with this.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, is that so? Are you basically saying China has more thinkers and less think nots?

[Amy Webb]

I think that China is a very large place, so I would hate to generalize 1.4 billion people, but I think the orientation there is a little different. So there is. So China has these five year plans that the government creates and then to some degree they get executed. And if you go back 20 years, a lot of scholars would say and policymakers, these 20 year plans were these bold proclamations and they were silly, nothing ever happened. But that has changed under Xi Jinping and they're actually executing now quite well on these plans. And the current five year plan is technically about AI and jobs, but it's mostly about infrastructure. So this is another key difference that people don't really know a lot about. So China is heavily investing in electricity, like power lines. They are working hard to make sure that every family has access to the Internet. They're also making sure that the education system is oriented a little bit more toward a world in which you have these tools that you can use along with the thinking work that you're already doing, which is a way of saying China is going to fast follow. They look at the United States as a free R and D lab. So they're looking at what's happening out in the valley where our large AI companies are based and hyperscalers are based. China's like, you guys go out and create all the debt you want and develop all the cool tools. We'll let you do that and then we'll take whatever it is that you've learned and then we'll make our own thing and we're going to spend all of our money to make sure that everybody has access to. So if you play that forward. So again, I work in strategic foresight. My job is to figure out, using data, where is the world going? Where will value be created and how will we participate? If I look at what we're doing here, what is happening in Europe, England's kind of over here in a question mark zone. From my point of view, we know that. And China seems to be the more coordinated effort toward answering those three questions in a way that benefits everybody and Look, I'm not saying China's making all the best decision. There's all kinds of problems there. I'm just saying the approach is quite different. So people are not as freaked out there about jobs as they are here.

[Peter McCormack]

So when you think, and again, I always refer it back to the people who might be listening, thinking about this and what they're considering with their lives and not me, because I know what I'm doing. But if they're trying to prepare for the future and think about this, there seems to be that because we live in a debt based system. Right? We live in a debt based economy. And you've talked about that.

[Amy Webb]

We live in a heavily debt based economy right now.

[Peter McCormack]

My God, beyond comprehension levels of debt. But if you start to think about the future, you've talked about how wealth and prosperity might not just come from labor. Elon Musk has talked about universal high income. I don't know what that means or if it's a reality.

[Amy Webb]

I don't know that he knows what that means.

[Peter McCormack]

But if the value is created elsewhere and it doesn't come from, from labor, have you thought much about what that means for the hierarchy in society? Because a lot of our status and hierarchy comes from what we earn and what we buy from the car we drive, the house we build. But if there's a fundamental shift to the operating system of society, how do we even square that? How do we even consider what that will mean?

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, let me come back to the question about how we present ourselves and status. Last, let me first address the. What does the economy look like going forward? So if you go back to Adam Smith and the pin factory, and for those of you who do not hang out over the weekend, you know, with a cup of coffee thinking about Adam Smith, the concept was if you have a bunch of skilled people in one place and each person gets very, very good, specializes in sort of one piece of making a thing. You can scale the things that are made as well as the prosperity and everybody kind of flourishes afterwards. It's a lot of labor going into productivity for a good or a service that somebody else then might buy. This is the foundation of the modern economy. One of the problems we have right now is that tools automate some of that productivity, some of that work. And it's not the same as a car factory where you can use robots to make most of the cars. Because up until recently, a lot of that automation, let's say, robots have been used in fairly narrow applications involving manual work and highly skilled, let's Say tactical manual work. The shift that's coming is that we're going to have automated systems that will supplement to some degree. But there are cases where we just don't need as many people making the things. Or in some cases we don't need people at all. So if I go back to China for just a moment, we at my firm have been doing a lot of original research around convergences, which is the macro forces of change and uncertainties and trends, sort of combining such that the output is something net new. And one of the convergences that we have discovered using this new methodology is lights out industrialism. So imagine factories that can operate for 24 hours a day, literally with the lights out, that can be just as productive as a modern factory. And that makes sense because you've got robots powering the entire thing. They don't need lights. Modern factories were designed all the way back to Adam Smith with people in mind, people at the center. You need lights, you need air conditioning or something, you know, you need all of these things. Well, a lights out factory could just be a box, literally dark, that is able to produce everything that you need. And if that's true, and we already see these things in existence, then that means that it's human capital which has always undergirded the economic structures that we live in, is no longer the driving force behind productivity and therefore wealth. Which means that you could have gdp. Increasing GDP is not the only important measure of the health of an economy, but it's a big one. But you could have GDP going up and unemployment going up for the first time together in a wealthy prosperous community. Normally those would be at odds. And that means that the people who own the lights out factories, you know, who own the new mechanism for labor, will do quite well. And it means others will not. So it creates a new type of divide, it creates new concentrations of wealth. It also means that we could be looking at a future where the economy is thriving, but has no use for you and your labor and what your contributions can be. So I think that that is concerning because it's not just the pin factory, it's also the law firm. In a lot of countries, law firms, especially here, the business model is sort of a pyramid where you have a ton of very young people at the bottom with a lot of billable hours, doing tons of manual work, research, similar manual style work that all sort of lead up to a handful of people at the top. And the idea is that over time you sort of climb that ladder up the pyramid. This shape is starting to look more like this. And pretty soon, by necessity, it's kind of going to be that, and then maybe it's just going to be like a dot.

[Peter McCormack]

So the AI is collapsing the pyramid.

[Amy Webb]

It is. And that's happening for professional services. So we're starting to see this happening in a lot of different places. So again, that begs the question, how does that reorder society? Because just as an example, last year in the United States we graduated, I think 36,000 new lawyers entered the marketplace. Only 300 people skilled at rare earth mining did. Okay, so if we go forward. Yeah, I know. The look on your face right now is exactly right. So if we go five years into the future, if we're graduating that many new lawyers every year, we already have a lot of lawyers. What happens to the people who should have been contributing in a productive way to the economy? Do they have the means to do that anymore? So we're going to have for a while. That's why this is a transition. There's not a light switch. All the jobs aren't going away tomorrow. Okay. We have to think differently. And this is where the nuance comes in. We have to think about ourselves as part of this great transition. So I think you're probably a millennial.

[Peter McCormack]

I'm a Gen X. I am Gen X.

[Amy Webb]

Okay, so that's. We're cuspers. So we're the cool people. Our daughters are, I think Gen. He's laughing. Are you a millennial?

[Peter McCormack]

He's a Gen Z.

[Amy Webb]

You're a Gen Z. I think my daughters, I think daughters are gen alphas. Although my kid tells me all the time she's Gen Z. It doesn't matter because all of us are Gen T. We are all the transition generation. So for the next few decades, we are all going to be transitioning from the economic structures, the social order, the world order that we were used to, to the thing that comes next. So this is the hardest part for people to wrap their heads around because it means that there's no single policy. There's no single universal basic income. There's no single thing that's going to solve the challenge, because this challenge is going to be unfolding now. What does that mean for brands and for status and for everything else? That's a really great question. I betcha if we go into the future, to some degree, status will be found in other ways. So I'll give you one example. So all of the weight loss drugs that are suddenly popular and inaccessible and available, what used to be unobtainable Being thin, that was a really hard thing to do.

[Peter McCormack]

I'm unaware.

[Amy Webb]

Well, it's genetics, right? Sometimes it's like you could be disciplined and calorie, restrict and drink and not drink alcohol and do all the best things, but reality, our biology is sort of pre programmed and you can, you know, and then that changes as you age.

[Peter McCormack]

I would like that excuse, but it's beer and cheeseburger.

[Amy Webb]

Well, okay, but for some people. Yeah, I know, but the point is now there is a way to reprogram yourself, which is partially how these GLPs work, so that you can be thin. So thin is no longer Unobtainium. Unobtainium. That's not even a. I was trying to make a marvel reference and I screwed up.

[Peter McCormack]

Hold on, wasn't that avatar? That was what they were mining.

[Amy Webb]

Was that what they were actually mining? Okay, that's a joke we have inside of our family, but you know what I mean. Yeah. Okay, so it's if you can now be thin, what's the next thing? You can't be toned and, you know, in shape and whatever. We're always going to be on a quest for things that other people can't have.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

So today if you have enough wealth, you can buy a designer bag. But at some point that may not be as desired. What may be desired is I know how to do all of the prompt engineering that you did to make your cool digital assistant that you can call into to get your. You know what I mean? So the status symbols may be more cognitive. I don't know yet. I haven't really thought this through. Kind of scenario. I'm actually doing the scenario stuff that I would normally do with my team just out loud ad nauseam. But I wonder if the status symbols of the future have more to do with just cognitive things that some people can do and others can't.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, well, I'm more interested in the hierarchy that's built through the financial system in that if we move to a world of more abundance and people don't have to work and perhaps there is a program that the government distributes money so you have something to live on. How do we distribute housing? How do people choose where they live, if we can build anything?

[Amy Webb]

Well, can I ask you a question?

[Peter McCormack]

Please?

[Amy Webb]

Do, do you think that's gonna. So do you what you just described, maximal abundance. Yes. Government's gonna redistribute the wealth and like and everybody.

[Peter McCormack]

No, I don't think it's gonna happen.

[Amy Webb]

Well, I mean, some people think it's gonna happen. What do you.

[Peter McCormack]

That's what they hope to do.

[Amy Webb]

What do you think?

[Peter McCormack]

I think we always have a world where there's a certain elite group of people who are wealthy or have power and there are controls and mechanisms for maintaining that, usually through debt, debt and inflation. And if you're close enough to the government money printer, you tend to benefit from a bit more. I tend to think about that. So actually I think the real question I'm asking you is in a debt based economy where labor is no longer contributing to the economy, how does the government maintain that the caste system, the order system, which is based on debt and the growth of the debt?

[Amy Webb]

Well, because. So that's interesting. You know, it's interesting. There is a debt based system that people exist, that we, some people who are using artificial intelligence have already found themselves in the middle of. And that is lack of tokens.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Right. So I don't want to get overly technical here, but if you use AI systems you have to have, you have to have enough of a mechanism to operate what's called inside of a context window. So basically once you start coding things or asking a lot of questions, the AI systems can only remember so much or they can only parse so much. So you can only dump so much stuff into. It just takes a lot of energy and compute to make it work, which means some people run out. So if you're on the free version of Claude, for example, you've probably found that after a certain amount of time you only get a couple questions, right.

[Peter McCormack]

24 hours. I've had a very expensive month. I spent about, I reckon I spent about $8,000.

[Amy Webb]

I was going to ask you. Yeah, but that's a good point. So it feels like we're doing all of this stuff for free. We don't have to hire an agency. But it's not right. You are very much being metered by. And it is a different form of attacks if you stop and think about it for a moment. Yeah, okay.

[Peter McCormack]

Well I thought of it more like a utility.

[Amy Webb]

Well, I think a lot of people would like for us to think about these systems as a utility, but in reality we're not being metered quite. You know, again, your local electricity service, that's one way distribution, they're sending power to your flat. Yeah. And you're paying for it. They are not learning about you in the process. So I would argue that the more like all of this work you did to create these cool systems and tools, you were not the only one who benefited there. Every AI system that you used. Whether that was perplexity for the fact checking or, you know, 11 for the voice recognition. I don't know what you use, but whatever you use. Right, okay. So whatever you did, they all benefited from you, probably more than you benefited from them.

[Peter McCormack]

I should have charged them.

[Amy Webb]

Well, that's kind of my point. One of the opportunities in front of us is something that I call a contribution credit.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Amy Webb]

Because. And I'll explain what that is in a moment, but let me set this up by saying I cannot think of a moment in any history, regardless of how far you go back, where a community was stable without being productive. Productivity, it turns out, is a wonderful way to stabilize and balance a community. If people don't have a purpose and if they are not being productive members of society, things tend to go poorly. Like, we've seen that over and over and over again. And if you want to just see if that maybe if there's a way to game it, Play civ. Do you ever play video games like Civilization?

[Peter McCormack]

But I know it. I know it. Okay, yeah. Command and conquer.

[Amy Webb]

Okay, so, like. But there's plenty of straight, like, things don't go well. Right. If people feel like they don't have a sense of purpose. So Universal basic income, when it has been tested, it has not worked in the long term. There are a couple places. So like, Norway found its oil reserves kind of, you know, recently. So there's a sovereign wealth fund, and some of that gets distributed. But Germany didn't, like, decide or not Germany. Norway didn't decide. Like, nobody's working again. Everybody kind of continued with what they were doing, but now they just have additional resources to play with. There have been a couple of places that have tried ubi, but ultimately it only works out when people are still contributing to their local communities in some way. So my plan that I have been trying to get people in this country at least excited about is a contribution credit, which has two key components. There are many more, but sort of the two big ones are back pay for your work, training AI, and forward pay for the invisible work that happens every day in our communities. I've written four books. I've been. I'm a public person, so I've been videoed a lot. Yeah, I'm just. I'm. My stuff is out there, and all of it has been hoovered up.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

And you've had the same thing happen to you by AI Systems.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Amy Webb]

I haven't seen it. What was it?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, so, I mean, I'm going to try and remember it because it was a while back, but I contacted him afterwards to talk about it because he said these AI systems are sucking up all the history of everything we've learned, built the entire history of humanity and monetizing it for a small group of people.

[Amy Webb]

Correct.

[Peter McCormack]

And in that process, we will be taking jobs away and we need to fight back against this. We need to have a discussion against this.

[Amy Webb]

But the fight back I don't agree with because anytime you show up for a fight, you're gonna get a fight on the other end. So that's actually not what I'm proposing.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, no, but I'm just more interested in the point that, like, I hadn't thought about it, is that essentially they're just sucking up the entire. Well, knowledge of human history.

[Amy Webb]

Sure. But it's more than that. So I've all of my books. There's a database that if you've written books, you can check to see they've. The main Corpus was about 150,000 books, I think. So my books are in it at any rate, but nobody called me first to see if that was cool or what my royalty was going to be. But let me ask you a question, Peter. Have you ever driven a car?

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Okay. And when you drive that car, have you ever used, let's say, gps?

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Okay, so guess who else? So if you've ever driven a car and used gps, this is another one of these things where you're not the only one benefiting. What's happening during that drive is being sent back to the company so they can continue to refine and fine tune. Point being, all of us, in some way, we are all contributing, some of us more than others. So in my case, just because of the volume of cognitive knowledge work, same with you. But in some way, we all have. I should get back pay for that work. There's also forward pay. So let's talk about teachers. Teachers in the United States effectively work for free. They're volunteers. They don't get paid very much at all. But I have a aging father and my husband has aging parents. I hope they never listen to this. This is gonna pop up on my father in law's feed and I'm gonna get an earful for having called him aged.

[Peter McCormack]

But does he listen to British conservative podcasts?

[Amy Webb]

You know what? He might, he might. We'll find out. I'll let you know next month. Anyways, so we spend a lot of time helping them. And my dad's got Parkinson's, so like there's a lot of doctors, a lot of stuff. I volunteer as a scout master, assistant Scout master for Scouts in the United States. We have the Boy Scouts. It's now just Scouts. We have one of the first all Girl Scout troops in the country. And I mentor, I think we've got 20 girls on our troop now spend a lot of time mentoring those kids and teaching them and helping them learn. And they spend a lot of time camping and all this stuff. A lot of us are doing invisible work that stitches our communities together. I would argue that this is not government top down work. This is the more bottom up stuff that connects us to each other. Okay, so we are seeing a lot of that going away for various reasons, some of which has to do with AI, some of which has to do with other stuff. So in the contribution credit system, what we're doing is acknowledging exactly what you said. Small group of people increasingly, and you know, those people are hyperscalers, increasingly concentrated wealth, government, hapless, you know, either trying to siphon some of that off or not. And here in this country, every four years somebody changes their mind and that's, you know, so let's just acknowledge the situation that we're in rather than it being a tax, which I think is not good, or rather than trying to regulate AI, which I think should, never, should not be done. And we can talk more if you want, about why I definitely want to. What this does, it's an economic and moral solution. Once a company is making measurable profit on these tools, then a small percentage of that is put into a fund. So such that it doesn't shock the markets. We've got a lot of companies that are trying to IPO now, so this doesn't impinge their ability to do that. We're just taking a small amount and putting that aside. And then if you are a productive member of society, you earn credits and the credits allow you to take from that fund. So economy really it's a different approach. It's. There's. And yes, I know there's like a zillion different potential ways to game all of this. I have thought through it.

[Peter McCormack]

But the general idea is more of a fluid economy.

[Amy Webb]

Correct. The general. And the idea came from. Right, so. So this is more of a earning credits system that doesn't immediately. So it's not just giving people money for not doing stuff, it's rewarding productivity. The jobs conversation is the first conversation to have. But ultimately we're going to be having a conversation about productivity because that impacts how people behave toward each other. So what we're doing is creating the conditions so that productivity continues to be rewarded during the transition when jobs are changing.

[Peter McCormack]

It is quite interesting if it can work in the way that you're talking about. We have at the moment, people just very busy, spend some maybe time commuting to work, spending time in an office with a screen moving data. One thing to another. If that is all being handled and automated and these people can go and do the things that maybe are being neglected in society, which is the environment we live in. You know, giving time to community groups and to your. Like a lot of people want to work with their local community and help people. And if that can be a new economy.

[Amy Webb]

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

[Peter McCormack]

I mean that, that does take us a little bit more towards that kind of the utopia that AI can deliver.

[Amy Webb]

Well, look, I don't believe in such a thing as a utopia, but what I'm more saying is this is a market based approach because at the end of the day, what do people. Look, everybody can be altruistic and good and everything else, but it's still money. Yes, ultimately. And that's. We should acknowledge it. You know, money is what drives decisions. It just is. So let's lean into what we know is the driver of decisions and figure out a way to address that so it should not be a top down regulation. We shouldn't just wave our hands and say well let fate do what it's will and let's plan effectively. And if we know what is important is people feeling like they have a sense of purpose and we know some jobs will go away and some new jobs will happen but there are going to be people left out of that transition and we know that it's all of this invisible work that historically has made our communities healthy then to me it's pretty obvious what we should be doing as AI emerges.

[Peter McCormack]

I like it. I do want to touch therefore on the regulation because you mentioned that and we have seen export controls on Fable which obviously were unworkable for anthropic and we've also seen this Release of GPT ChatGPT 5.6 I think with limited release which is them preempting the export controls. Part of the argument is that they didn't want to give tools to people to maybe hack into important systems. Also really to me I'm a little bit more suspicious. It's gatekeeping access to technology. Whether it's fear that what people will do to build things like I've built to expose the government or just because they just want to get a head start or they fear that China will reverse engineer some of it for their own desync models. I mean, I don't know the answer. I was just very frustrated. I woke up one morning and I no longer had access to Fable and I was doing some incredible things with it.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, so you are not the only one. There's a law firm, I forget which, there was a lawsuit. There's a company suing the government for cutting off its access to Fable and it turns out it was an AI law firm. So you're not the only one upset about these things. Let's address the China question first. My point, look, I'm not an expert in any of this. I just pay attention to some stuff. I would never call myself an AI expert or a geopolitical expert, but I do research for a living. And you know, when it comes to China, from my point of view, China's about six months behind us. That's about it. And that changes obviously depending on where everybody is in their development cycles. I think if we are not releasing models because we're worried China is going to catch up, then that is being silly. So that's the first thing. I think we forget that technology companies have a pretty long history of making proclamations and announcements and trying to backfill with facts later on, even in AI. So, you know, I will send this to you when you get back.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Because you will enjoy this. There were some hilarious. There were some ridiculous articles. So 1956, those guys, Dartmouth University, you know, they come up with all these crazy ideas not too long after. They're also now the same group of people. They're super networky. So they know people in Hollywood and they know people in business and all over the place. Everybody's kind of getting a little bit excited about these things. If you've ever seen 2001 A Space Odyssey, do you can't remember Hal. Yes. Okay. That was actually based. Some of that came from this meeting because the people who worked on all that stuff were friends by the. I want to say 19, early 1970s, maybe late 60s, early 70s. There were that group of Marvin Minsky. So some of those people were out talking to the media about the coming age of artificial intelligence. And they were. The spotlight on them was getting brighter and brighter and brighter. And they became celebrity, you know, celebrity technologists in their own right. They were making insane proclamations about machines that would simultaneously translate English into Russian and Russian into English. Remember? So the height of the Cold War. Now, if you go back in time and look at the size of a computer and the amount of compute in it, late 1960s, a mainframe was larger than the room that we are currently sitting in and had nowhere near the compute that would have been required to do what they were talking about. But the promise and the perils of artificial intelligence were so spectacular that there was an entire media cycle that lasted for quite a while where this is all anybody talked about. That hype cycle is not a recent phenomenon. In 2022. We've all forgotten this now, but OpenAI sent out a press release. I think it was February. They had this new thing called ChatGPT. I think this one was 3.5 maybe. And it was so powerful, they could not release it to the public. There's a press release where they say this, okay, so this is not the first time we're hearing from these companies that the thing they've built is so powerful, it is terrifying.

[Peter McCormack]

It's great marketing. It was methos when they came out.

[Amy Webb]

Of course it is.

[Peter McCormack]

We're just going to release it to a select few companies to begin with.

[Amy Webb]

So the point that I'm making is the thing that these companies are exceptional at is marketing and accumulating debt. That doesn't necessarily translate to what's happening in the real world now are some of These systems incredibly capable and powerful of doing some terrifying things. Yes. But also if you give me a fork. A fork can be a deadly weapon if you stab somebody in the neck with it. So I'm not trying to be glib. Obviously we don't know how some of these systems are going to evolve over time. But I think we have to stop with the breathless speculation and start to be much more pragmatic about what's actually being built and why it matters.

[Peter McCormack]

It's one of the most interesting parts of all of this. I said to you before we started, and I said it at the very start. It does feel like we are now living in the future. Everything we were promised is starting to kind of happen. We're being promised interplanetary travel. I think we're somewhere from that. But we do have access to these incredible technologies. And I also, I watched the, the funeral for the Trend Report as, as, as AI collapsed. All the timelines for you now. And is it, is it become more of a difficult job?

[Amy Webb]

You mean the work that I do? Yeah. Should I tell everybody what work I do? Is that because I know I've got a strange. So colloquially I am known as a futuristic. In real world terminology, what that actually means is the job is pretty boring. I'm like an accountant.

[Peter McCormack]

It's not boring. Well, can we be fair and have the quantitative part in it? Because there are people who call themselves futurists and they just make stuff up. I think this is gonna.

[Amy Webb]

Yes, there's a lot of that naked in data. There is. So my. I started off so my academic background is game theory and economics and a lot of what that. I mean, you know this. But like a lot of economics is you're taking in a bunch of different data and you're trying to figure out outcomes. I had a temporary professional side quest as a journalist, so I was a foreign correspondent. I used to write for Newsweek. This is like 25. This is a billion years ago. 25 years ago I was at Newsweek and I was at the Wall Street Journal. And a lot of what I was doing was I was covering technology, merging technology, but I was using early days computational systems and trying to find stuff. So I was doing something called computer assisted reporting, which is hilarious if I say that doesn't exist now because everybody's using a computer. But back then that was kind of a new thing. I wound up in this field, strategic foresight. But all of these jobs are related if you're a really good. Like when I was at the Journal, I couldn't Just talk to a few people and then, like, write the story. I had to write a pitch. That pitch oftentimes got edited and I got interrogated. This is for a daily story. Before I could sit down to do it, you know, everything that I wrote had to have a verified piece of data or just to be able to show your work. Right. I like to think that what I do now is what I learned how to do with economics and game theory and journalism. But rather than looking backwards, I'm looking ahead. So can I report the hell out of the present? Use modeling to figure out plausible outcomes in the future? That's it. That is very different from scanning a couple of headlines and saying, well, you know, my gut tells me, or getting super excited about a technology and then speculating about what the future might look like. There is such a thing as speculative foresight, which is sci fi. It's not just. I mean, there's, you know, and there is a role for that, but when it comes to making decisions. And most of what I do is advising, you know, we advise a chunk of the Fortune 100 and government agencies around the world. We have to be right. We have to be as right as we can. Knowing that you kind of have to update your priors all the time.

[Peter McCormack]

I expect you're busy at the moment.

[Amy Webb]

We're quite busy. So it is an important field. I honestly wish more people would go into it. If you're somebody who's like, yeah, I'm a futurist. Awesome, please go get trained and learn how to actually do the work. Which is most of the time sitting in front of a computer, just simulating and running models and talking to her colleagues to figure out how to sort of adjust things. It is that. It is not giving speeches or telling tall tales. It's actually really important work. Really important work. It's never been more important than right now.

[Peter McCormack]

And so what does excite you then, right now?

[Amy Webb]

What excites me?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, in the future?

[Amy Webb]

Well, I'm particularly interested in the intersection. Well, I'm kind of a. God, I'm going to regret saying this out loud. I'm like a longevity maxer. Not maxer, but I'm deeply interested in longevity.

[Peter McCormack]

The Brian Johnson World.

[Amy Webb]

No, Brian Arms. But I'm interested. Let me say I'm. I'm more interested in how people are approaching this, if that makes sense. I mean, I do a ton of research, so I'm also trying to extend my health span. But we're also living through this moment in time where it's possible to finally do that. I mean, there's a bunch that has changed over the past five years. So if we go back to GLPs for a moment, one of the things that GLPs do is they help people lose weight. There's also a giant body of research that's either out or going to be out soon. They also help reverse aging in some ways, or they improve the factors that lead to aging so that you get older without feeling or getting old. That's really interesting to me. Not just because I'm selfish and I want to live forever and have my face not melt. It's not that my dad's got Parkinson's, and that is a horrific, debilitating condition. Cognitively he's fine, but he's pretty much lost his ability to speak and to move. Synthetic biology is the. You know, there are ways now to sort of treat biological code similarly to how we treat computer code, meaning we kind of have Right access to life. So rather than a single Parkinson's medication that kind of sort of helps him, but he's got to constantly be monitored, and they have to adjust it every now and then. If there was something for him specifically or a better type of treatment, you know, then he wouldn't. He wouldn't be spending this part of his life sort of locked into his body, which just sucks. My mom died early of when she was very young of neuroendocrine cancer, which is a fancy way of saying cancer that affects the cells, but we can't quite figure out how or where. If there had been better diagnosis, something more targeted, a new type of therapy, leveraging proteins. What I'm optimistic about is artificial intelligence, when you link it with other things, starts to unlock totally other fields and give us optionality we just haven't had before.

[Peter McCormack]

I read a story, and I don't have the full details on memory, but about a guy who had a dog, and his dog had some form of cancer, and he used AI to decode his genome of some kind. And then they. It was the DNA spiral. Yeah. And they got a specialized drug for him for the dog. And I was like, that's fascinating.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. Now, look, I want to be very pragmatic here. We're not curing cancer tomorrow, so it's

[Peter McCormack]

not that, but we're in the timeline.

[Amy Webb]

I don't know. So this is the thing with everybody's got to stop asking. Not, yeah, it's your job to ask. But like, I'd like for us to unhook from the timeline piece of this, especially investors because they like, they want to know when the answer is faster than before. But exactly what month and what year? I don't know yet because there's too many variables in play.

[Peter McCormack]

But are there promising signals?

[Amy Webb]

Oh, my God, yes. All over the place.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

Japan is so far ahead of everybody else on genetics and artificial intelligence and doing all kinds of interesting things. There's. We finally have options for climate change. It is hot as hell right now in New York City. It's going to get worse over the next couple of days because we've got a heat dome. It's unlikely that we're going to be able to reverse the things that created more energy in the atmosphere, which is leading to these, you know, swings in temperature that we're seeing. So if that's true, maybe we figure out ways to mitigate the outcomes of that. So you can now combine AI and biology to create almond trees that don't require. Almond trees require a ton of water. You can re engineer them so they require a quarter of the amount of water, you know, and can grow in other types of conditions. These are the types of things that I get very excited about because agriculture hasn't really advanced in 14,000 years. And while we have miracles in health and medicine, we've also kind of been stuck for a little while in a lot of places.

[Peter McCormack]

And that's the AI accelerant on things.

[Amy Webb]

Well, right, because it gives us the ability to simulate and to learn faster than we would have before because we're somewhat limited by the squishy computers inside of our heads. There's a whole bunch of interesting things happening in the realm of physical AI. So this is artificial intelligence that makes use of the real world in some way. So there are wearable devices you are about to see over the next probably 24 months to 36 months. A literal explosion of wearable devices coming to market. There were a bunch of recently made announcements about glasses, but different wristbands, different rings, weird combinations of wearables that probably won't last very long. But basically this creates the conditions for people being able to do more better stuff than they would want.

[Peter McCormack]

Experimentation.

[Amy Webb]

Sure.

[Peter McCormack]

I mean, there's been two things recently that have just blown my mind. Did you see the midjourney announcement for the body scan? I was like, what is this?

[Amy Webb]

This is interesting.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, is it?

[Amy Webb]

Sorry, yes. You want to explain to people what that is?

[Peter McCormack]

Well, so my understanding it was a new way of doing an MRI scenario scans.

[Amy Webb]

Well, it is a way of doing scans and I think it's ultrasound.

[Peter McCormack]

Not.

[Amy Webb]

But yeah, so there was a thing in the 90s where you could get a CAT scan in the shopping mall and there was a promise to scan you for every single possible thing and all that did was lead to false positives. Allbirds is no longer making shoes, they're making AI stuff. Mid Journey has already been passed by by Nano Banana, so they're now getting into devices. But this is. So we talk about convergences a lot in our company. We also talk about divergences. So what we're going to see if you. So very quickly, if you go Back to like 1997, I was carrying a lot in my backpack. You probably were too. I had a very heavy laptop, Toshiba laptop. It's like 15 pounds, doubled as a self defense weapon if I needed it. I had a canary wire, I had a wireless sniffer because, you know, I had a minidisc player because it had wonderful sound quality. I had an early days GPS device at all this stuff by 2007. So that is just 10 years. I had the first iPhone and that first iPhone took all of these disparate things and put it into one device that had more compute and the ability to do all of these things today. So we're about 20 years afterwards that one device, the things that layer on top of it are now diverging again. So we've got ChatGPT and we've got Claude. We have Synapse spectacles if you're somebody wearing them or Meta's glasses. I'm an endurance cyclist so I've got bike computer and wrist.

[Peter McCormack]

I've got all this Garmin.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, all this stuff all over the place. What will happen the next Convergence is not, you know, a single device, it's ambient compute. So we will have all of these things sort of funneling into a singular system of some kind that takes all of those data and helps us make sense of it and then gives us access back to the insights and whatever on the other end.

[Peter McCormack]

My cocaine guy.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. That's a good example. So this is why in the moment with so much change happening all the time, it can be really hard to see the bigger picture of what's happening. But that's what I really want everybody to try to focus a little bit of attention on.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. So this morning I saw the announcement from Meta and I only briefly read it on Twitter about the brain to Quirk.

[Amy Webb]

Are you still on Twitter?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I still use it. It's good for me.

[Amy Webb]

What's going on over there. I haven't been To Twitter. I'm an og, one of the original Twitter users.

[Peter McCormack]

So we quickly changes your algorithm. You watch post of a fight, all your fights, post people fighting. Mine's just all AI now, and I love it because I see tools, I see prompts, I see skills, but I see things being built. So I have to be useful to you. Yeah, I get that. And then a small dose of British politics, which is a car crash. And so the AI stuff's great. But this morning, Meta announced brain to Qwerty. They've been using AI to decode brains.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, that sounds like a good thing to do.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. And I was like, wow, that's. I mean, again, that's the AI being the accelerant. And it's just like, these are the. It's.

[Amy Webb]

So is this doing what? How are they doing the brain to.

[Peter McCormack]

I just saw the tweet. So all I saw, I saw.

[Amy Webb]

Well, we know it's. You need to use your new I've got the receipt system on that tweet to make sure it's a real thing.

[Peter McCormack]

But it. But it's scanning brain. Brain scans to translate what people are thinking into words.

[Amy Webb]

Okay.

[Peter McCormack]

And so it's essentially what. It's like neuralink, but without an implant, which is kind of cool if they can do that. But it's more this accelerant that seems to be happening everywhere. I almost have AI exhaustion in that. There's so much you can do. I can't even keep up.

[Amy Webb]

Well, let me first say. And again, I'm happy you brought that up, because we keep getting stuck in the moment thinking that everything that we are seeing is new and novel.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

Which means that novelty has become the new normal everywhere. So what you're describing is actually not new technology. About 20 years ago at the University of Washington, one person. There were two researchers on opposite ends of the campus in Seattle, or I think it's Seattle. Anyhow, somebody sent thought type the letter F. And on the other side of campus, and there's a video you can see online of this. They. It moved that person's finger and they typed. The reason I bring this up is because sometimes it can feel like every new thing is the first time this thing has happened. And we forget that there's been a continuum this entire time. And that's important because when we start to ask questions about, is this okay, should we be doing this? What are we giving up? Who is going to accumulate more power? I think it's important, again, to just keep the broader context in mind, because what you just saw on Twitter is not the end use or the end product. We've got a ways behind us and a ways to go. And it's just we gotta keep the perspective, I think.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I mean, where should we be worried in terms of control of the power? I mean, is it gonna be the state? Is it gonna be these nine corporations?

[Amy Webb]

Well, that's a great question. And I think if you had asked me that question maybe 20 years ago, I would have, or even 10 years ago when I wrote the Big Nine, I would have said the tech companies, there's this three sided prisoner's dilemma sort of pitting the finance bros and the tech sector and the government. And everybody thinks they have the most power when in actuality they're balanced precipitously. And if they only collaborated, everything would be better. That's changed. The tech companies do have some power, but at least in this country, the Trump administration has amassed. I don't want to give the Trump administration credit for this because it's actually not the Trump administration. It was a group of people who worked on Project 2025. Right, that's what it was called. It was a small group of people who worked on a policy and before that had the vision to execute. What did they want the country to be like and how did they execute against it? This is just the administration that is the beneficiary, the current modality of that plan. And I think they're taking credit for a lot of what was done, but I don't think it was actually this administration. I think it was that group of people. At any rate, I think the power has shifted and I think the financial sector, look, look at how much money. You could argue that OpenAI has made many things, but the thing they've made the most of is debt. Right.

[Peter McCormack]

And they want more of it.

[Amy Webb]

And they want more of it. And Elon Musk is making a lot of debt. I mean they're trying to issue. So the finance sector no longer has the leverage that it used to because everybody's willing to throw capital. So that means in this three sided prisoner's dilemma, it's really the technology companies versus government, at least in this country. And I think there's a flavor of that in the EU because the EU actually has a fairly strong and heavy handed regulatory arm. And so it just depends on where you are in the world, how it all shakes out. I think that the. Again, it depends on where you are. The tech companies are working hard. So if you're a hyperscaler with products that require A supply chain, then that makes you a little vulnerable with this administration because they can use regulatory structures to cut off access to things. So that's with Apple. Right? So Apple products come from, you know, the components come from China. The Trump administration threatens to cut things off. That creates enormous problems for Apple, puts Apple in a terrible position. Our economy, like Apple, contributes an enormous amount to our economy. So the government taking them on I thought was kind of a stupid thing to do in the long run. But it does change the dynamics. You know, England, I mean, I think we all kind of understand Europe. What do you think about England? I haven't really thought about that before.

[Peter McCormack]

In terms of, well, in terms of

[Amy Webb]

the balance of power.

[Peter McCormack]

I mean, is it, I mean we. The power is in. Well, the power is entirely with the state, you think, and they're trying to get more power, but they are a little bit subservient to the, the asset managers of the world, the blackrocks and such. So when Keir Starmer got into power, first meeting he had was Larry Fink. And so there is a lot of regulatory lobbying.

[Amy Webb]

Okay.

[Peter McCormack]

There's a lot of cutting out of. The little guy.

[Amy Webb]

Does this. You're going to, there's, there's talk of Brenter, is that what you're calling it? Instead of Brexit? Re entering the.

[Peter McCormack]

I mean, I just don't, I think it's a Hail Mary for a leftist government who want to maintain power because they've. We, we took on a left wing government at a time when there wasn't much to give out. So traditionally in the UK what happens, you have a Conservative government, we build a bit of wealth, there's a, an imbalance in society. You then tend to get maybe a Labour government come in and there's a bit more redistribution and it's a, it's a fine pendulum. What we actually ended up having was quite a center, I would argue center left Conservative government, high tax, high surveillance and there wasn't much to distribute. And by the time people were fed up with them, they went. The Labour government arrived at a time when there was low productivity, low growth, wage stagnation, a lot of debt. And they tried to do what labor traditionally does and it's just squeezed everything out, the living standards. So we were in a really precarious position. Keir Starmer's obviously out now. He's been replaced by Andy Burnham who's probably going to become Prime Minister, but he's going to go even harder left.

[Amy Webb]

So what about AI and technology? Does that come into Play. Because I mean DeepMind is based in UK, but.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure if. Weren't they acquired by Google?

[Amy Webb]

They are, but they're based in.

[Peter McCormack]

For me, we just, I think broadly we don't have much innovation in the UK and if you're smart, ambitious, you come out here, this is the place of opportunity. We have so much regulation in every area. I read about an investment, I think it was a town called Barnsley into AI and the number was something like it might have been in the hundreds of thousands, if anything, at most it was like 5 million. I was like, huh, what are we doing here? The UK's not in a good position where if you're conversation, you're bright or smart, you should leave and go somewhere else. We are not pro innovation at the moment. It will change because there will be a reaction as there always is and we will swing to a right wing government and something more like the Trump administration is going to come at some point.

[Amy Webb]

But this is a wonderful point you're making. It's the swing that poses the challenge.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

And I think part of that, from my point of view, part of the swing keeps happening because our leaders in all of our various countries have not established a concrete long term vision that everybody can get behind.

[Peter McCormack]

They can't though. The problem is the news cycle and the demands from the public are so short term that you can't sell a long term plan.

[Amy Webb]

I don't know, I think you can, but it has to be something where everybody feels like they have a role to play. The long term plans that have been sold here leave out good chunks of the population. So look, the Project 2025 plan has a very clear vision of the future, but it alienates like half the country. The difference is there's a group of people organized behind it who have learned how to execute and this plan didn't get hatched overnight. It's the product of a long, long period of thinking and planning. But what we have here is just resistance against it. You know, I'll tell a story about my friend Taka, who's a Japanese. I spent a long time living in Japan and China and my friend Taka is a monk. He's in Japan, in Kyoto, Buddhist. He runs a temple. He is the 26th generation monk running this temple. I was hanging out with him one day, he's super fun. So we're hanging out and he's pointing to the roof. I was like, what's new? And he goes, that. And I said, you got a new roof, Come on. Taka like, and he was like, we were able to get a new roof and this wood is a particular wood that comes from a blah, blah, blah, particular region, all this other stuff. And the reason they were able to do that was because 200 years ago one of his family members planted the tree that took care of the tree that they knew at some point in the future somebody would need to use to repair the roof. Now this is a tiny little example of a small, beautiful temple in Kyoto. But I think it's analogous to what we lack. What we lack is what is the thing that we desire for the future. What his family desired for the future was that this temple continues to be a place for spiritual growth and community service and all the things that people need. We understand that things may change in the world, but we know we're gonna need a roof. That's what I'm talking about. That sort of we need to align on. And regardless of your opinions on the economy, like how we get there is different. Most of our plans and most of what people argue about is the how, not the what.

[Peter McCormack]

See, I would love us to have a long term plan. In the UK we've gone through, I think something like seven prime ministers in about 10 years.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah, you're cycling through on the soccer team.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, the soccer kind of kicked me afterwards. I mean football team. But, but it's, but there's this everything. So short term at the moment, everyone's very demanding and it's very difficult because it's very obvious that people don't want to deal with the debt issue and so they keep borrowing more money or they keep trying to tax more to solve the demand that the public has for public services which we can't afford. I would love a long term plan. It might have to get a little bit worse before we get there. I'm really.

[Amy Webb]

It seems pretty bad. Didn't your national NHS like run out of money or.

[Peter McCormack]

I mean, it always runs out. I mean we are. I mean if we were a company, we'd be trading insolvents. I mean our debt levels are crazy. And the problem is they keep increasing the taxes, then people are leaving. It's this vicious loop that Argentina went through where they had the brain drain in the country. We have a brain drain here. You know, people Connor's age, they can't get on the house. Another. There's lots of economic problems. I think they can all be fixed. I speak to October.

[Amy Webb]

What would be your like, what's a one? Easy. Maybe not easy, but what's Your sort of like, here's where we start to fix.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, gosh, I don't think it'd be one, but I can give you a couple. Firstly, we have to get rid of the mountains of regulation that exists in our country. I mean, one of our businesses is a coffee shop, and the amount of regulation we have for a coffee shop is crazy. And you throw in energy prices, the minimum wages, you cannot make money out of this business. We do it for the love of coffee. But there's a lot of people out there who have a coffee shop. They need to. But I would deregulate. I mean, I take a pretty libertarian approach. I would deregulate. I would make it a welcome environment for investors. So I'd have tax incentives for investors. I would reduce taxes, and I would reduce the size of the state itself. The state itself is a giant at the moment. But all libertarian ideas, it would be, you know, it'd be what I'm trying to think of a good example. It would be somebody like. Probably back to what Adam Smith would say.

[Amy Webb]

It's funny. So when I was in high school, I must have been 9th grade, so probably 15, I read the Communist Manifesto, okay. And I was like, I'm a communist now. This all makes sense to me. Like, I get it. And then my parents were like, literally, never tell that to anybody outside of our family. Two years later, somebody gave me a copy of Ayn Rand's like the Fountain.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Amy Webb]

Yes. My brain is starting to glitch. Anyhow, I read that and I was like, well, clearly every. I'm on the other side of things now. I worked really hard for a long time to find a group of people, it's like, to fit in. So for five seconds, I was a Democrat. Like, yeah, that makes sense. And then I started making some money and I'm like, I'm a Republican now. Right here's where I've landed.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

I'm 51 years old and nobody's singular system. I don't need any labels anymore, mainly because each one of those labels, including libertarianism, connects back to structures that I don't think work anymore going forward. So I would rather like we. We frame the conversations as regulation. No regulation in a binary. I think what we need is something not regulation, if that makes sense.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, so the way I explain it to people and I. I say, I'm a libertarian. I'm really a trajectory libertarian. I just, I look, everything at the moment is a bit too big.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

There's too much government, too much regulation, too much debt. Too much printing, the money. It's clearly working against what we're trying to achieve as a society. We need to reverse this a little bit. Have you ever read. I talk about this on the show all the time, but it's my favorite book. It's the Law by Frederic Bastiat.

[Amy Webb]

No, I have not.

[Peter McCormack]

It's a fantastic book. But he basically said, look, there's two periods that society goes through. There's one of productivity and wealth creation, and then there's a second period of plunder. And in the period of plunder, you have the plunderers who fight for control of the state to plunder from the productive class, and you essentially contract. That's where we are at the moment in the uk. So me, as a trajectory libertarian, I think we're in the plunder phase. I'd like us to get back to the productivity phase. So what would lead to more productivity? I think left and right is a trap. It's a trap of the mind. It's a trap.

[Amy Webb]

Look, I think spiritually we're aligned, but the point is, structurally, we are living in. It's America's 250th anniversary.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

This week as we are talking. And the way that we created laws and government and the initial structures for this country made sense mostly 250 years ago during a time in which there was no such thing as global trade. That not in the way that it exists today. We did not have drones that could, in an unmanned way, find and assassinate a person. Like, you know, the way they were thinking about warfare was malicious, like a guy with a musket on a farm in Virginia. Not unmanned drones entering Moscow to try to take down a political official, you know, or automated, like, automated systems into all of the things that make up modern society. Regulation. And at least in this country, the way that we create rules, our checks and balance system, all of these things made sense 250 years ago. Mostly, I think some of it doesn't make sense now. However, the answer to that is not, from my point of view, deregulate or more regulate. It is what could exist that is not regulation that has the desired impact. And that represents a fundamental reperception in my field. So one of the things we talk about a lot, my colleagues and I, that I work with, is something called reperception. It's taking all the same inputs that had already existed, but just seeing them in a different way. Exploring white space versus the stuff that's obvious. I think this moment demands reperception because we need to do something about AI So that the best possible decisions are made for the public interest, but it cannot be regulation. You want me to explain why really quickly?

[Peter McCormack]

Please do, please.

[Amy Webb]

So we were talking about football.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

And F1 earlier. Let me tell you a quick, hilarious, maybe not F1 story that illustrates this point. So, 1978, the year I was born. The year you were born, there was a race, and all the car companies show up at the race. These are fancy Formula one people, and one of the cars has a giant fan bolted on it. And everybody's looking at this car, and they're like, what's this fan? Why do you have a giant fan bolted to the car? And the team is like, the engine gets so hot. The driver gets hot, the engine gets hot. This is just to cool everything down. So they're like, okay, well, it looks kind of wacky, but so they start driving. And the person driving that car is Niki Lauda, who is one of the best drivers ever. So he would have been pretty fast anyways. But on this particular day, at this particular race, with a giant fan bolted to the back of his car, he is going really fast, especially around the corners. And as he's cornering, he's actually accelerating beyond the other drivers, which is a very unusual thing to do. So he handily wins this race. And afterwards, everybody's like, well, we want to use these giant fans now. Because in addition to cooling off the engine, that giant fan was also acting like a vacuum cleaner. And it was basically sucking the car to the tarmac so that as Nikki's driving around, he's losing. No speed, there's no drag, there's no problem. A week later, they banned the use of giant fans on the cars, but his win still stood. All right, what does this tell us about the current and future era of artificial intelligence? In Formula one, They're still doing shit like that all the time. So, like, people are constantly coming up with crazy new technologies. Cause there's no rule saying you can't. So they build it, and then maybe somebody finds out. And then there's a rule after the fact. That is what happens with emerging technology. It emerges. Right. And exactly how something is going to look, I don't know. And if you were to try to write a regulation or a set of rules, you would have to have answers to exactly how is it going to evolve and look over time. We can't do that. So this is a really good. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do something. But regulation, the way we've always thought of Regulation doesn't work. We need something else.

[Peter McCormack]

And we need to not stifle competition.

[Amy Webb]

That's right. So we need to enable competition, we need to enable investors. And I mean, we could spend many, many more hours talking about the. I have thought concretely through how to do this, but the point is, the current structures don't make sense for the world we're about to live in.

[Peter McCormack]

This is. We've. We've kind of hit a point where we've both got to leave and travel.

[Amy Webb]

Well, I'll be in London this fall. Maybe we'll have a part two.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I would love it. I mean, I've got so much more I wanted to talk about. I didn't. I didn't even use one of my questions. The opening question. This was everything I hoped and better. And I've got so much more I wanted. I could do this for hours with you. I really appreciate it. I know you're busy, and it was a real pleasure. And if you're in London, we'd love to have you in our studio. There's so much more I want to ask you about and I just. Yeah. I'm really grateful you did this for us. Thank you so much.

[Amy Webb]

Well, I'd love to be on here. Thank you.

[Peter McCormack]

I did have one other question, but it's something I hope. I'm hoping we head towards a world where technology does so much for us that we need it less and we just go back into the real world and let's save it for next time. But that's my hope.

[Amy Webb]

You know what? I can grant that hope today. Cause all you have to do is not use your technology.

[Peter McCormack]

I know I need it sometimes. Amy, thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate you.

[Amy Webb]

Thank you.

[Peter McCormack]

And thank you to everyone for listening. That's our final show on this trip back to London. See you soon.