It’s been quiet around here, mostly because my energies have almost exclusively been focused delivering a conference and 180 page report for the closing of the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing.
This is a major, 3-year research project completed with multi-million funding from the Nuffield Foundation exploring how AI and automation are impacting the labour market – and people’s health and wellbeing.
I’m pretty proud of the final report, which I’ve done a huge amount producing:
Yesterday we had the launch and closing conference of the Review at The Shard in London, joined by satellite venues in Manchester, Cornwall, Cardiff and Edinburgh. It was a slightly mad and ambitious idea to have all these two-way satellites across the UK, but I felt it was important to widen access to the conversation… and it turned out to be absolutely brilliant. Very impressive tech deployment by First Sight Media (who – it turns out – also did the tech for both TEDx conferences I spoke at) and we had superb interactive sessions with each venue.
Also managed to secure Lord Patrick Vallance – Minister of State for Science, Innovation and Technology to deliver a keynote address, which you can catch here:
The core of the Review has been this: unless we centre human experience in AI adoption, all the promised benefits will actually turn out to impact our health and wellbeing – and social cohesion too. This has been part of the message of God-Like – but it’s fantastic to have this backed up by such solid research. Do have a read of the full report.
We had a slot booked in with the BBC’s flagship news programme to talk about it… but Trump did something dumb, and we got bumped. Happens v often! Then… just as the afternoon was looking a bit quieter… Deep Seek popped out of China and the world seemed to go into meltdown…
The AI circus never sleeps… but… the need for people to be put front and centre only gets more urgent.
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