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- [00:00]
Mark Warner
That's mad.
- [00:01]
Robert Peston
Clinically insane, Completely mad.
- [00:03]
Mark Warner
If AI makes it harder for, let's say, us to test people cannot take away the absolute best tools for learning that maybe humanity has ever invented. On the one hand, there will be people displaced. On the other hand, if we artificially limit our companies from making people redundant, then they'll become uncompetitive and those people will lose their jobs anyway. Threading this needle of what's the right level of displacement and how do we make the best of that is actually a really hard problem as well. There are political risks. There are. There's the concentration of power to our mind. The best mitigation that we can think of for those risks is.
- [00:54]
Robert Peston
Hello, and welcome to the Risk is Money with me, Robert Peston.
- [00:57]
Steph McGovern
And with me, Steph McGovern. And today we've got a fantastic guest for you, Mark Warner. He is a founder of, of a fantastic London based AI company that he's in the middle of selling to Accenture for $1 billion, making it the UK's newest tech unicorn.
- [01:12]
Robert Peston
Robert, I want to talk to him about why he's concerned about the safety of AI, is AI going to take our jobs, why he has sold out to the world's biggest consultancy, Accenture, and how he persuaded the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, to lock down during COVID Mark, it's an absolute treat
- [01:31]
Steph McGovern
to have you here on the show. Robert and I are both fascinate by your business. Well done and all the success with it. But can you just tell us a bit about what Faculty is? You know, because this is a business that started with you and two friends, two colleagues, and has become, well, the UK's latest unicorn, tech Unicorn, which is an incredible achievement.
- [01:53]
Mark Warner
Yeah, well, thank you. Lovely to be here. So Faculty is an applied AI company. So sort of 2014, when we set up the business, we could see already that AI was going to become the most important technology of our time. Like, I was actually a physicist by background and sort of decided physics was the science of the 20th century, led to these kind of incredible technological revolutions that we saw over the course of the 20th century. But AI was going to be the equivalent of that for the 21st century. But we wanted, at the time, there were lots, there were OpenAI and DeepMind and these were research labs. So they were primarily concerned with how do you push forward the state of the art of the technology, how do you push forward the scientific frontiers? And we thought there was a place for bridging the frontier technology and getting it into the real world. So we thought it was like it be a great thing to be to make it valuable in people's lives. And so that involved, you know, doing things in health, in education, helping companies make their products better and cheaper. And so we've been doing essentially that for the last 10 years, watching as the world has recognized more and more that this is going to be like a huge deal across the, across the economy.
- [03:16]
Robert Peston
And can I just ask in terms of that initial judgment that you made about AI, your academic background, your research was in quantum. So and quantum is obviously at the moment something we're all pretty excited by. Why did you make the leak from quantum to AI?
- [03:39]
Mark Warner
A couple of reasons. One, AI is like fundamentally easier, like as just as a, as a kind of mathematical topic, it's simpler. And I could see that it was just seemed more important. So you know, quantum Mechanics is a 100-year-old field. It's very mature. If you want to make important breakthroughs, you know, you have to be unbelievably talented these days. Whereas AI was a much less mature field or at least let's say the AI techniques that were working deep learning was a much less mature field. And so there just felt like there was way more opportunity. There's a kind of funny quote from one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics. He said in those early days it was a time when second rate minds could do first rate work. And in my life I read that in my quantum days and always thought well was ever the opportunity to do that, that's where I should be. And so I've kind like when I saw the AI like taking off that just felt like so much more energetic and young as a field.
- [04:49]
Robert Peston
And just, and this is not to denigrate you in any way because you're obviously a lot brainier than I am, particularly in this space, but you broadly took the view that your, you were much more likely to make a breakthrough in terms of commercial application of AI rather than sort of fundamental research that was going to push forward the frontiers of knowledge.
- [05:12]
Mark Warner
Actually it was less about where I would like to make a breakthrough and what I thought was good for the world. So you know, I'm always. Part of the reason I got interested in this was because I cared a lot about safety. And so I've always taken the view that pushing forward the bounds of what these models are capable of is at least very complicated from an ethical perspective. I think there's very good arguments to do it, but I think there are arguments against doing it. Whereas if you take technology that already exists. And you just apply that. That seems to me like almost obviously good. And so it was more that choice that pushed me in that direction rather than where I actually thought I could make most impact.
- [06:04]
Steph McGovern
We're proud to say that the Rest Is Money is powered by Octopus Energy this year. Greg Jackson is back to answer another question. Now, this is something that we see a lot that I wanted to ask you about. When you start in something new, how do you think about risk and momentum?
- [06:21]
Mark Warner
I think people think entrepreneurs love risk, but I'm not sure they do. I hate it. I never buy individual stocks and shares on the stock market. I don't gamble. I think the thing about an entrepreneur for me is I've got more control. When you're working for a company every
- [06:35]
Robert Peston
day, you're at risk of what that company chooses to do with you.
- [06:38]
Mark Warner
If you're an entrepreneur, actually, you've got far more say in what happens tomorrow and next year than when you're at the mercy of your bosses.
- [06:47]
Steph McGovern
Nice one, Greg. Well, thanks to Octopus Energy for powering this episode of the Rest is Money. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Car shopping shouldn't feel like preparing for a marathon of paperwork. That's why Carvana makes buying and financing your car easy from start to finish. Search thousands of vehicles with great prices, all online, all on your time, and when you're ready, your new car shows up right at your door. It doesn't get better than that. Buy your car the easy way on delivery fees may apply. This episode is brought to you by indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate. C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. So how did you work then? Where to start in all of this?
- [07:57]
Mark Warner
Well, we started with the place that we knew. So we were PhD students or. Well, actually we'd got our PhDs at this point, but we knew the academic world really well and could see that transitioning from a very mathematical subject, something like physics, maths, or engineering, into the world of data science, as it was called at that time. And now AI was quite tricky because you needed experience to get a job and you needed a job to get experience, and it was just sort of hard to break that kind of loop from inside the academic system. So we started as a program to help PhDs become AI engineers, AI researchers, data scientists. Then pretty quickly we got applications from about 10% of the UK's maths, physics and engineering PhDs. And so we realized that we just had these incredibly talented people flowing through the program and we could just hire them ourselves and start building AI systems. Then we realized that, or we had actually the resources, more it's fairer to say, to start doing work on the safety side and trying to figure out how to make these algorithms do what we wanted them to do. And so we started working in that dimension. And then finally the last piece of the puzzle was there's still a big disconnect between AI and decision makers and the different departments inside businesses. And so there's sort of these silos where marketing only really talks to marketing and procurement only talks to procurement. But if you really want to make intelligent decisions, you want to connect all that up and you want to get that into the hands of decision makers. And so then we built a software product to solve that problem.
- [09:42]
Robert Peston
Just explain to us how your work is about applying AI as opposed to creating these large language models. And I suppose one question is, why did you decide not to go down the route of building your own equivalent of whether it's OpenAI or Gemini or Deep Seat, why didn't you go down that route?
- [10:10]
Mark Warner
Well, I mean, the first thing to say is it's really hard, right? Those companies that are building those models are essentially probably the best organizations in the world. They have some of the absolute smartest people being paid the most amount of money with the greatest resources. And so even if we'd tried, I'm not sure we would have succeeded. And we kind of see that in the world today where like the Big three are taking off and seem to be slightly accelerating away from some of the smaller players in the market. But ultimately we've always had this hang up about really trying to push forward the bounds of the technology where it's just not unambiguously good to us. And so our kind of the, the choice, we, we've never really had the energy to throw behind it that it would take to succeed in doing that, because we just can't quite bring ourselves to think that it's really, really the best thing to be doing.
- [11:14]
Robert Peston
So tell us what you do do in the AI space.
- [11:17]
Mark Warner
So the way we think about it these days is we have this incredible wave of technology washing over us and all organizations are going to have to change some of their core business processes. So think about something like a pharmaceutical company, they have to discover drugs, put them through clinical trials and then market them to the world. And each of those elements is going to change very substantially over the next five to 10 years. Let's talk about clinical trials, for instance. So there's an amount of time that you have to test something for, like test a drug for, to ensure it's safe. So, you know, if you want to know whether it's safe over a few years, you have to test it for a few years. No one should ever touch that bound of, like, safety. But actually, in a real trial, there's lots of extra time, administrative burden before, after, and all of that is very costly, but also stops us getting drugs that really do work to patients as fast as possible. And so AI is already letting us plan trials more effectively, make them, like, happen, you know, much closer to this truly safe amount of time. And then that ultimately results in cheaper drugs getting to market faster and better, like healthier patients out in the world.
- [12:54]
Steph McGovern
Why is it a case that it can't also do the trial faster? Why is it that you have to still keep that in the same time, but it's just the abdomen that can be better?
- [13:03]
Mark Warner
Ultimately, it's likely that we'll be able to build sufficiently clever models of the human body to start testing things, like they call it in silico.
- [13:14]
Robert Peston
Isn't that what Dennis Azarbis thinks will happen?
- [13:17]
Mark Warner
I mean, on some timeframe? That will certainly happen. It's just a question of is the technology right now sufficiently good that it should be trusted to fulfill that kind of role, and it's just not there yet. Like, no one would tell you that there's any chance we are able to model, like, anything, like, the complexity of a human body with sufficient, like, quality that you'd want to trust it to say, this is safe or this is not safe.
- [13:47]
Steph McGovern
So for the example you've given, there is the productivity and efficiency gains around the admin side. But you guys have also done some really fascinating stuff with the nhs, NHS in terms of, like, the early warning system in Covid. And can you explain that? Because it's quite fascinating what you did there.
- [14:03]
Mark Warner
We started working with the NHS many, many years ago, helping them in all kinds of small projects, and eventually started helping them with their AI strategy, or at least a small bit of the NHS called NHS X at the time. And, you know, we started that project in sort of late January20, where we were all planning to sort of multiple years, build up this AI lab quite slowly and focus on rolling out capabilities across the system. Obviously, history didn't pan out like that, and sort of by late February, we went to them and said, look, we can all clearly see that this Covid is going to become an enormous deal. Would you like us to help with that? And so actually, the sort of senior technical leadership of the faculty kind of moved. So me, the cto, the chief AI scientist, all moved out of faculty for, I forget how long, let's say three months, and went to work full time for the NHS to help them figure out how to predict how many patients were going to turn up in hospitals across the country. Because, of course, you'll remember, at the start of the pandemic, particularly, they had to make all kinds of difficult decisions about where to send things like oxygen and ventilators and how to move patients around and where to send ppe. And if you don't know where the disease is going to peak, you're sort of doing that blind and you can move stuff and then it can turn out it's needed in other places. And so we built a system for them called the Early Warning System, that sucked in a bunch of data, anonymous data, as in there was no personally identifiable information. And we built models to predict how many patients were going to turn up across the entire nhs. And, of course, that gave us very deep insight into what was going on across the system. And we were able to help some of the senior people, including the Prime Minister, to understand what was likely to happen. And off the back of that, he was able to make a bunch of decisions about things like lockdown.
- [16:21]
Robert Peston
I mean, what Dominic Cummings said to me pretty much immediately after lockdown is, if it hadn't been for the work that you and your brother did, the Prime Minister might not have locked down. Is that how it felt at the time?
- [16:34]
Mark Warner
I think he would have locked down and, like, the later lockdowns show that he would have done it anyway, but I think it would have been a couple of weeks later, and that couple of weeks could easily have overwhelmed the nhs.
- [16:49]
Robert Peston
And, you know, as a result of doing it two weeks earlier, of course, significant numbers of lives were saved.
- [16:54]
Mark Warner
Yes.
- [16:55]
Robert Peston
So that was that. Did that feel, you know, like the most meaningful moment of your life in a way?
- [17:02]
Mark Warner
Not really. I mean, it felt panicked, uncertain. You know, it was not the. It was not the suave movie version that I would like, if anyone ever dramatizes it. It was not very cool. But, yeah, we kind of. We kind of had a sense that it was important, but, you know, it was all much more Real than that, like we were just trying to do sort of our uncertain best rather than thinking.
- [17:36]
Robert Peston
I just remember on the other side of the fence as it were, just ringing every minister, every official, and it just the chaos that one experienced, we're talking to people, so being on the inside must have been, must have done your head in a bit.
- [17:49]
Mark Warner
Yeah, that chaos was, was very noticeable from the inside as well.
- [17:53]
Steph McGovern
It feels like a real sliding doors moment as well, given you just happened to have started this project with them and then, I mean, how easy was it to like kind of suddenly scale up and move so quickly to do it all? Because as you say, three of you went to then work for the nhs, was it. How easy was it to suddenly do that?
- [18:10]
Mark Warner
We put a team of. I don't know, I think it was probably like started off at about 15 and went up to about 40. Yeah, I mean it was, I don't know, you guys probably recognize it as well. It just felt different at that time. Like it didn't feel hard. We phoned our investors and they were like, obviously that's the thing you should do. And like, you know, we knew there were going to be repercussions downstream, but it just felt like one of those moments where it was just kind of, in some sense the emergency was so clarifying that it didn't, you know, it didn't feel hard or difficult. It was just like, obviously we just have to do this. I mean, I wish, actually, I wish we could recapture that level of clarity, particularly in sort of government work more regularly, because we, we know that the people in government can operate on those kind of timescales and achieve those, you know, those kind of like that system was absolutely the best in the world when it was built over the course of about six months. And so, I mean, obviously incrementally with useful things almost immediately.
- [19:20]
Robert Peston
And this was the system that forecasts essentially bed demand, NHS resource demand.
- [19:27]
Mark Warner
Exactly, exactly.
- [19:28]
Robert Peston
And what's happened? Is that system still in operation?
- [19:33]
Mark Warner
No, that's one of the slight tragedies of COVID was obviously we'd spent, not we, but the government had spent an enormous, we as the country had spent an enormous amount of money on Covid. And when we needed to rein that spending into under control, it was done fairly indiscriminately. And so, you know, I would very, very much like it if we had kept something like the early warning system going because it is clearly the future of public health.
- [20:03]
Robert Peston
Totally. I mean, it seems absolutely astonishing that it's been, I mean, you, I Mean, it's two things. One is essentially there will be another pandemic and it would be absolutely essential to have that kind of predictive model within the nhs. But why wasn't this system simply useful for assessing NHS demand on a normal day to day basis? I mean, it seems to me if it can do a crisis, it can also do normal times. So why is it gone?
- [20:38]
Mark Warner
Well, I mean, the future of public health, like we should have on the TV every day, you should get a weather forecast, a pollen forecast and an infectious disease forecast. That should actually let you make good decisions about what you want to do with respect to your health. And that should be constantly being done with this wastewater surveillance. So you monitor sewage for the genetics of all the infectious diseases, you predict how much is going to be in every region, across the country, in every city, and then you provide that information to the nhs, to companies, to citizens.
- [21:15]
Robert Peston
I mean, relative to outcomes, that's not, you know, the cost is insignificant. So why isn't it happening?
- [21:22]
Mark Warner
We have tried very, very hard in lots of different directions to try and get that to happen again. We are now, as I understand it, somebody told me we are now behind Malawi in our ability to this wastewater surveillance and early warning. It's such, to me, it is such a no brainer win. It is ultimately a piece of generational infrastructure like the motorways or the Met Office that we should be building now for our kids, for our grandkids, and at the moment, we're not.
- [21:58]
Robert Peston
That's really depressing.
- [21:59]
Steph McGovern
Yeah, it is.
- [22:00]
Robert Peston
Can I just ask, therefore, on faculty, AI, more broadly, widely seen as an important British success story. But you did take a decision a few months ago, and the deal's going through now, to sell the company to, I don't know if it's the world's biggest consultancy. It's certainly an enormous consultancy.
- [22:22]
Mark Warner
I think it's the world's biggest.
- [22:23]
Robert Peston
I mean, it employs, you know, almost 800,000 people across the world. Accenture, who? I mean, it's been reported you sold for, I don't know, a billion dollars plus, which is why Steph used the unicorn tag about you. But why did this feel the moment for you to sell? Did you feel constrained in your ability to grow by your existing independence?
- [22:52]
Mark Warner
I think there's a few different elements that sort of figured into the decision. So the first and probably the most important is that we do think of AI in terms of this tremendous upside. It's going to change lots and lots of things. There's going to be a personal tutor for every Kid, a doctor for everybody in their pocket, these kind of amazing, wondrous technologies. But there are also risks associated with it. So there'll be unintended consequences of what good actors do and there'll be malicious use by bad actors. We think of those as like the technical risks and then there are political risks. There's the concentration of power that will come if we don't manage things correctly. And there's the risks of conflict as countries get increasingly concerned about others having access to this powerful technology. And so we kind of bucket those as the sort of the technical risks and the political risks. And to our mind, the best mitigation that we can think of for those risks is the safe, widespread adoption of AI. So the safety building the kind of technical safeguards into the technology itself and then having it widely adopted means you don't get the same concentration of power and the same risk of conflict. Right now ultimately we think this is happening right now. Like if you have not used the latest coding tools, you should just sit down and try them. They are extraordinary. Anyone can now basically program in English. And so, you know, autonomous cars are here, they work, they're going to come to London this year, things like this. And so with the best will in the world and let's, you know, I have hold faculty in extremely high regard. But nevertheless, if we did brilliantly for another five, 10 years, we'd be a multi billion dollar company and we wouldn't be able to touch the sides of safe widespread adoption at a global scale.
- [25:00]
Robert Peston
And so why does Accenture as a partner help you do that?
- [25:04]
Mark Warner
Because they are the biggest consultancy in the world. So immediately we have access to essentially every organization in the world, whether it's the labs themselves, whether it's, you know, country like, you know, however many countries they're in across the world, essentially every important decision maker in essentially every large company in government, we can now help think through this problem and help build this technology out in a safe and widely.
- [25:34]
Robert Peston
And you're going to be Chief Technology officer. What does that mean in practice?
- [25:39]
Mark Warner
It means that I help set the strategy, the technology vision and the technology strategy for the organization which sort of leans everything in an AI first direction. I mean, the Chief Technology Officer role has evolved a lot over the last few decades. It used to be about sort of building computers in basements, then it became about building software products. But I think with the latest iteration of these coding tools, it's going to become primarily an AI role and primarily about how does AI actually drive the fundamental elements of your business.
- [26:16]
Steph McGovern
And on your point about the ethics around this, which clearly means so much to you, you advocate, don't you, human led AI over full automation. So why do you think preserving, I guess, human judgment is non negotiable?
- [26:31]
Robert Peston
I was also interested in, I saw that Accenture is basically, as I understand it, training pretty much all its people to use AI agents. What does that mean in practice?
- [26:46]
Mark Warner
So the first thing to say is the deal hasn't actually closed yet. So we haven't started with them, but I think that is like a broadly a very sensible step for every organization they like, if you're not, if you haven't experienced these kind of latest coding agents, they're like superpowers, anything you've ever dreamt of in. So I've always wanted to build this particular type of planning software for myself so that I can just quickly build out what's called a Pert diagram, basically a Gantt chart. And just last night and this morning I just started building that and I just built it in English. And like, that power to put software in every, like the ability to build software in everybody's hands is remarkable. And so I think everybody should be just getting their people started in this. And for some roles it'll make more sense than others. But there's like an activation barrier where if you don't, if you don't play with these tools, you never quite get started. You don't know what they're capable of and so you never get the benefits. So I think it's very sensible to just lean everybody into it to start with and then kind of let the dust settle and let the people who really like get value out of it continue.
- [27:57]
Steph McGovern
You see, the businesses doing well are the ones that no matter what their business, whether they think they're digital or not, is they're encouraging their, their staff to just find ways of using AI. And even on a personal level. My mom and dad were staying with me last night because they were looking after my little girl. And they were certain to me, what's all this about AI? We won't need it, will we? And I said, right, ma', am, what's your, what's going on with you in your world? What's the big issue? Said, well, we'd love to get more people at Stockton Rambling Club. And I said, right, ask AI to tell you how you can do that. And she went, what? So then we did it. And honestly, now she's downloaded the app, she's like, right, I'm gonna go. At the committee meeting I'm gonna tell them all what AI has told us to do to get more people in Stockton Rambling Club.
- [28:40]
Mark Warner
I think that's perfect example.
- [28:42]
Steph McGovern
Yeah, just using it, finding ways to use it in your life then just makes you feel more comfor about it.
- [28:48]
Mark Warner
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
- [28:50]
Steph McGovern
So just to my question before, why is it you think that human judgment is still needed even though the models are advancing?
- [28:58]
Mark Warner
So I guess right now it's still true that the models can't, aren't powerful enough to do things without human judgment. So we're sort of in this intermediate period where I had to spend a lot of time saying, no, no, don't put the diagram like that, do it like this. This is better than that. Add this feature, these kinds of things. And even though it can do the coding, it can't pull together the sort of bigger picture for me. So I think right now it's just necessary from a technical perspective. In the long run, we have to find ways to stay in control of the models.
- [29:39]
Robert Peston
But that's what I wanted to ask you because there are plenty of people, experts, people actually at the cutting edge of creating models who are either warning that we're quite close to seeing very significant numbers of human jobs replaced by AI, or actually trying to do that. They're actually in the business of trying to do that. I mean, that is going to happen, isn't it? I mean, you know, we are going to see jobs eliminated by AI, aren't we?
- [30:15]
Mark Warner
There's no question. But I think it depends on exactly how you see that or sort of what context you set that in as to how serious you consider that to be. So, so what do you think? I think of, I mean, AI is ultimately better software. And so I see this as part of a trajectory that we've been on sort of since the invention of the computer, where software has consistently replaced jobs. And so, you know, the number of secretaries over time has, has diminished and all kinds of things like this.
- [30:51]
Robert Peston
But you don't think this is the biggest leap, the biggest step change.
- [30:54]
Mark Warner
So I, it, I don't think it's going to feel like a single moment in time. Actually. My. And this is now, I wouldn't say this was like general wisdom as in other people, very serious people have a different perspective on.
- [31:10]
Robert Peston
Well, Dario Amade definitely has a different perspective.
- [31:13]
Mark Warner
It's slightly hard to decode exactly what, exactly the details of what he's saying. He certainly thinks he'll say things like, we're going to get a country of geniuses in a data center in two to three years. But what exactly he means by geniuses is like slightly hard to unpick. And so I don't think I can make strong statements about what he means. What I can say is I think this process is going to be much more continuous. So these algorithms are going to get better and better and better, and every so often they're going to get to capability levels that pop through into the mainstream and suddenly become like the ChatGPT moment. As the kind of most obvious example of this, those models were improving for quite a long time beforehand, and if you were paying attention, you could see that they were just getting better and better and better at natural language processing. The ChatGPT moment was primarily when it became like a mainstream phenomenon. And so that feels very like a step shape, but actually there's a more continuous background going on. It's not just something you made, it's the privilege that you get to work with your hands. It's building something that serves a purpose, proof that you have the grit to keep going. At Timberland, we understand you take your craft seriously, and we do too, which is why our products are built to the highest quality. We put in the work so you can perfect yours with purpose, in every detail, and crafted with intention. Timberland Built on Craft Visit timberland.com to shop.
- [33:00]
Steph McGovern
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- [34:24]
Robert Peston
should governments, our government, other governments be doing more to prevent. Even if you think the most likely scenario is not a mega labor market shock, nonetheless, you're saying there is a trend of certain jobs over time being replaced by AI. Economies will need to adapt. New jobs will have to be created. Education will have to change. Do you think that governments are conscious enough of the role they should be playing in helping particularly younger people acquire the relevant skills for this new economy?
- [35:05]
Mark Warner
The slightly easy answer is no. I mean governments face enormous amounts of incredibly urgent day to day stuff. And we know two things. Exponentials are really hard for humans and we know that long term planning is really hard inside the like institutions of government as we've got them currently set up today. And so it would be sort of inconceivable to me that we could be planning effectively for AI. But it is worth pointing out just how hard a problem this is in the sense that on the one hand there will be people displaced. On the other hand, if we artificially limit our companies from doing, from sort of making people redundant, then they'll become uncompetitive and those people will lose their jobs anyway. And so finding the exact, like threading this needle of what's the right level of displacement and how do we make the best of that and cycle people round is actually a really hard problem as well.
- [36:14]
Robert Peston
But so, but just look at schools for a second. At the moment schools are often saying to their pupils, you can't use AI. Now that seems to me to be.
- [36:24]
Mark Warner
That's mad.
- [36:24]
Robert Peston
Clinically insane.
- [36:26]
Mark Warner
Completely mad. Yeah. I think it's absolutely insane to do that. I, I think that's completely the wrong approach. If AI makes it harder for, let's say us to test people or whatever, we have to have to reconfigure the tests. We cannot take away the absolute best tools for learning that maybe humanity has ever invented.
- [36:50]
Steph McGovern
It's so out of date. You know, I've got a six year old who, you know, her, her IT lessons at school are just absolutely out of date with what she can do already in, in the house. Can I ask you then just, you know, Robert and I have talked a lot about the problem of youth unemployment, the problem of young people who are just disengaged with the jobs market, with education. What should they be doing to get a job? Like what if you were going to sit with a young person now this is what I'd learn to do. Is it coding? What is it that all of our young people should be doing to stay relevant.
- [37:24]
Mark Warner
So I think there are slightly different answers at different ages now the technology is moving that fast. So I think for my 3 year old there are different answers to sort of like an 18 year old today. So, so we're about to go through this incredible transition of the kind of industrialization of software development. So if you think about like the production of cotton before and after the industrial revolution, before it was this incredibly artisan thing that meant there are very small volumes of it and you know, it was very, very highly prized. And then after we can do it industrial scale, it becomes like just the default material for clothing. I think software development is about to undergo a similar transformation. We have seen absolutely no lack of demand for software. So I think there's just going to be this unbelievable elasticity and ultimately we're just going to build more and more and more. But instead of it being this artisan craft, it's going to be available to everyone all the time, no matter what your software development skill is. And there will be people who are better at understanding other people's problems and better at seeing the opportunities and better at specifying what it should be.
- [38:48]
Robert Peston
There's obviously an enormous amount of debate about what they call recursion, which is when the AI itself is better than humans at improving itself. How close do we, how close are we to that?
- [39:01]
Mark Warner
So I, this is another one of those massive open scientific questions. Depends on your perspective. So my personal perspective, we are going to make like programming really easy, but that is not going to have the like recursive effects on other parts of the economy that some other people think. So I would say, you know, in principle if you, you know, you could take the world's smartest mathematician and say, well why aren't they brilliant at gardening? They know, they know maths so they can just figure out gardening and they should have the best garden. Of course real knowledge doesn't work like that and I think there are good, good reasons why it doesn't.
- [39:50]
Robert Peston
A recursion you think will work within a very narrow area. So you set an AI a task and it will be able to self improve within a very narrow area. But the idea of general intelligence constantly improving on its own in an exponential way. You don't think that will happen?
- [40:14]
Mark Warner
Well, I would say if you, that I don't think if you put that intelligence in a box it can just recursively self improve its way to brilliance at everything. What I think it has to do is, I think it has to interact with the universe and it has to be able to test theory.
- [40:31]
Robert Peston
So this is world. This is the so called world AI.
- [40:33]
Mark Warner
Yeah, Sort of embodied AI some people will call it. And so, but I, I should say that this really, like there are lots and lots of very smart people that would totally disagree with me and that would say we are plausibly going to get this recursively self improving AI within the next few years.
- [40:50]
Steph McGovern
So what are you telling your three year old, just out of interest? And what should I be saying to my 6 year old about skills?
- [40:55]
Mark Warner
I think we already know huge classes of jobs that we do because we care about the experience rather than the outcome. So to take a slightly silly example to illustrate this, we can already move 100 kilos of mass over 100 meters much faster than Usain Bolt can run. Right. It's never about the economically efficient way of getting usain bolt over 100 meters. It's about the experience, it's about the competition, it's about what it means to us. And so, you know, Magnus Carlsen, the chess player, already knows what it's like to have a job in a world where super intelligent systems can already completely dominate him at chess. He will never, ever be at our best chess, computers, no matter how hard he tries. But actually, when you start to think about it, there's actually like quite a lot of these types of jobs. So anything sort of artistic or artisan that involves like human taste or live music or live comedy or professional sport or you know, podcasting or these kind of things. There are like a million and one ways that we do things because we care about the process and that process is actually somehow importantly interwoven into the outcomes. So the thing I'm thinking for my three year old, which is, is kind of annoying for me because he's very good at maths and I know how to teach him math. Is that sort of that job where you're pushing the frontiers of knowledge for economic value. I don't think will, I don't think that will be open to him in 20 years time, but I can easily imagine a world where we still do maths, but we do it more as an artistic pursuit than as a kind of economic pursuit.
- [42:49]
Robert Peston
I really like that as a vision. I mean, obviously, obviously it's conditional on us not becoming the slaves of the super intelligence. Can I actually.
- [42:58]
Mark Warner
Yeah, just to make that point a bit more like, I do actually think that, you know, if you look back at sort of humanity and where it evolved, we are kind of egalitarian hunter gatherer tribes. And our instincts are very much geared towards that. And in some ways to sort of force us to be part of this large industrial machine, we have to like train those instincts out of ourselves. So a lot of education, some people would say, is like you have to force people to think about themselves as part of a hierarchy so that they can then fit into a kind of more industrial workplace.
- [43:38]
Robert Peston
But that's dead, is that should be dead.
- [43:40]
Mark Warner
And I think that's the wonderful thing about all of this. Out the other side, I actually think we'll see will be more human. Like people will look back on this period being like what you had to go to work and be told what to do by somebody you didn't like and like that was how you had to do it to survive. It'll feel much more like coal miners do to us. Of course they were the sort of Silicon Valley of their time, but we look back on them as having to take these terrible risks and get sick to survive and these kinds of things. I think out in the long run, looking back, we will feel similarly to those people as coal miners do to us. But I do think this bumper.
- [44:26]
Robert Peston
So you believe in the world of plenty, you do believe that this will generate significant amounts of income, better lives, better health and all the rest of it. But again, it gets back to my government point that can only happen if, you know, 99.99% of the profits don't all go to Elon Musk. You know, the fruits of all this stuff are properly shared.
- [44:49]
Mark Warner
I think that's exactly right. Like what I'm saying is if you zoo. If you get the path right and you go out a thousand years, I think there's brilliant futures available. But it's a, it can be quite bumpy and quite path dependent on getting there and there's no guarantees that it gets you there.
- [45:04]
Steph McGovern
Yeah. I also think it plays to the point that Robert and I often talk about, which is with education is we, we often refer to important skills in life as soft skills when they're very much essential skills, which is what you're saying about communication and creativity and everything else is stuff we often sideline in pursuit of these, you know, pure academic roots and actually computers, AI, everything's going to do that for us and we should focus more on all the things that make us human.
- [45:33]
Mark Warner
And one like one weird sort of perspective on all of this is Silicon Valley is actually commoditizing the very skills that it is particularly good at and all the artistic skills that they don't prize so much are actually then going to become the much more like competitively valuable skill set. And I think there's definitely some truth in that.
- [45:55]
Robert Peston
Yeah. God, I hope you're right. Can I just ask a slightly narrow, semi patriotic question that I have to say is in the context of the really big ideas we've been talking about, is probably a bit trivial, but we do talk on this program quite a lot about both the sadness and potentially the economic cost of the UK of great pioneering companies like you selling out to overseas interests. I mean, you know, Accenture, Dublin based, I sort of think of it as American, but it's Dublin based. Was there a route where you could have stayed British and achieve everything you wanted to achieve?
- [46:33]
Mark Warner
Yeah. So we wrestled with all kinds of possible futures. I ultimately, I think it's true, you know, it's always a bit hard to say, so I don't want to overclaim anything here, but I think it's true that if a couple of years ago we'd had really ambitious British capital that would have come in and supported us to compete at the top levels of the world, we would have taken that and this wouldn't have happened, or at least wouldn't have happened in quite the same way. But even then, let's say that did happen, even then we still would have been faced by this dilemma of the moment where we decided that the mission was actually better served by having much more global scope. And so maybe, maybe if you wound back 10 years and we could have gone on a very, very dramatically accelerated path, which I'm not sure we would have been capable of as entrepreneurs, but nevertheless, let's say we could have pulled that off and we could have been 50x100x the size by now, then maybe something could have looked different. So we wrestle with this and I think there are arguments that this could easily end up being better for the UK because faculty, as a multi billion dollar company was never going to prop up the economy in any meaningful way. But this way we can do a bunch of, we have this now global rate, global reach, global scale and are still going to be London based. All the people are going to be here, all the skills are going to be here, all the, all the money that flows through the ecosystem when you get an exit like this that tends to have lots of good consequences downstream is going to be here. So it's really hard to know. And kind of the thing we hung our hat on in making the decision was that ultimately the mission was best served by this and the mission of safe, widespread adoption actually massively benefits the UK as well. And so that was our sort of justification, but we were definitely torn about it.
- [48:48]
Steph McGovern
Did you feel any pressure to go to Silicon Valley as well?
- [48:51]
Mark Warner
It would obviously be better to be in Silicon Valley, as that when we were independent, it would obviously have been better to be there. We stayed for family reasons primarily and like patriotic reasons, not because we thought it was absolutely the most effective place for faculty. There's actually some slight subtlety in that, in that to get the quality of talent. Faculty would never have had the same quality of talent in Silicon Valley as it did in London, because Silicon Valley is so competitive and we had this weird access to talent, but.
- [49:29]
Robert Peston
And we probably are almost out of time. There was one other question I wanted to ask you, which is we do have unbelievable talent in this country and a lot of it's connected to our university system. If there were one thing that any government could do to essentially convert more of that talent into wealth generating projects that benefit the uk, what, what would that be for you?
- [50:04]
Mark Warner
That is a very, a very big question. I mean, ultimately, I think the uk there's really two things that you need to do to make the UK the home of the next generation of tech companies. I guess let me just unpack some assumptions first. I assume that most economic growth is going to come through technology companies that grow really fast. I mean, that's what we see in America. Doesn't have to be true, but that's a kind of built in assumption here. And I assume that the best technology companies need the most talented, most ambitious founders paired with lots of very ambitious capital. And so if I was in charge, I'd be trying to make those two things happen. I'd make it very, very easy for ambitious founders to move here with visas and I'd reduce the cost of them coming. And at the moment they have to pay into the healthcare system in a way that makes it quite a big burden for a small startup and things like this. So I'd try and make sure we were really, really accessible to talented founders. And then I'd try and make sure we are very attractive to ambitious capital. And unfortunately the only real way I can see to do that is to give essentially tax breaks to fast growing startups that end up becoming very big. Now I don't love that because I recognize that in some ways these people are going to become very rich and like taxing them less doesn't feel necessarily fair. But I also think that in the long run the country as a whole will look back on that and say, actually, you know, we desperately needed some growth in our economy. We cannot flatline. And that was the necessary consequence of. Or that was the necessary trade off to make.
- [52:09]
Steph McGovern
Yeah, that's really interesting because it would be such a hard sell to people here, wouldn't it? But like you say, it's about thinking about the longer term.
- [52:16]
Mark Warner
The only thing that I would say that makes it slightly easier is you would be giving tax breaks to extremely tiny companies when they were founded. So the actual break you'd be giving them would be minuscule. Ultimately, if they did become successful, then it would look like a lot more money, but that would be 10, 20 years down the line.
- [52:38]
Steph McGovern
Yeah, fascinating. Mark, thank you so much. That's. We could carry on for another hour, I think, but we should probably let you get back to your job.
- [52:45]
Robert Peston
That was absolutely brilliant. Honestly, so much gripping stuff that we covered. Thanks again and well, good luck with your new life.
- [52:51]
Mark Warner
Thank you very much. Lovely to be here.
- [52:53]
Steph McGovern
Yeah. Yeah, thank you very much. And that's it from us on the rest is money.
- [52:57]
Mark Warner
Bye.
- [52:57]
Steph McGovern
Bye.
- [52:57]
Robert Peston
Goodbye.
- [53:03]
Steph McGovern
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [53:09]
Mark Warner
To others, he's a brutal death. Accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler, Mao Zedong
- [53:17]
Steph McGovern
has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
- [53:23]
Mark Warner
A rebel son who hated his father survived a 6,000mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic
- [53:31]
Steph McGovern
proportions from Empire, the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
- [53:36]
Mark Warner
And I'm William Duranpole.
- [53:38]
Steph McGovern
In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
- [53:47]
Mark Warner
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution. A time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
- [54:09]
Steph McGovern
Subscribe to Empire. Wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.