AI and the Future of Work
Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professorship Panel Discussion
Highlights

Professor Daron Acemoglu

The irony of today is that we have more abundant information than any time in history - just think of the internet - but the amount of useful information is extremely
scarce; if you try to get reliable information about any particular topic especially to help  you in a series of problem solving tasks whether you're a creative artist, you're an academic, you're a journalist or an electrician or a plumber I think that useful information is extremely scarce. So the true promise of generative Ai and AI more generally is to provide that type of information to human decision makers. However I will argue that that's not where we're heading.

Professor Helen Margetts

Nodality is a key tool of government. It's the capacity to exchange information, to disseminate information and to receive information from the outside world.
Nodality used to be something that governments had by virtue of being government; it was assumed they had a monopoly on these things, if you needed to find something out you went to a public organisation like a local council or a library and government knew all about you; they were like a watchtower or a watermill at the centre of society and the economy, but as Chris has pointed out - well both of you have pointed out - that is absolutely no longer the case. Governments hold far less about citizens than Google or a small number of other big technology firms, massively smaller amounts of information and kind of increasingly smaller and there's all sorts of data that is needed to use AI in a pro-human way that they can't get hold of.

Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides

If you ask anyone who's had a big influence of Science and a great idea 'how did you get to this?' they're bound to say just curiosity. Curiosity and luck are the two things that that drive big discoveries, could it be that when we all use the same information sources expressed in the same way we would lose this pool of new facts that we come across every day that could stimulate our curiosity. Isaac Newton famously said that he could see further ahead because he stood on broad shoulders. AI narrows the shoulders on which we stand to see ahead.

Professor Helen Margetts

There is a lot to be worried about but there's also lots of things to be positive about. The possibilities for an improved public sector, better decision making, better public services, increasing well-being; there is a lot to be positive about. But it's also the case that things like large language models have been released by companies, almost without warning they've been released into society, they've been developed with very distinct incentives, some of which relate to the  pursuit to be the first in the artificial general intelligence race and we as societies and governments have got to learn to live with them and that is going to be a really important task.