#193 - David Goodhart - AI Is Coming For The Graduate Elite

**David Goodhart** (0:00)
We have hugely overproduced people with generalist academic skills.

**Peter McCormack** (0:05)
Is AI doing for the graduate elites what globalism has done to factory workers?

**David Goodhart** (0:11)
I kind of hope so. A huge number of people even going to university feel like second class citizens. The British economy has not been a success.

**Peter McCormack** (0:19)
Over the last 15 years, can you name one thing that's got better in this country?

**David Goodhart** (0:23)
Football, the football team.

**Peter McCormack** (0:25)
Well, that's private enterprise. Anything that the government, the state has delivered, improved.

**David Goodhart** (0:32)
Oh, well that narrows it down a lot.
That's probably a tougher one. This could be the end of the line for people with generalist academic skills.

**Peter McCormack** (0:44)
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Hello, how are you?

**David Goodhart** (1:10)
I'm very well, thank you, Peter.

**Peter McCormack** (1:12)
Thank you for coming in.
Like a lot of people at the moment, I spend a lot of time thinking about AI, because I think it's an interesting and fascinating subject. I was with a girl in our local pub the other day, she's back from university. She said two really interesting things to me. The first thing she said was, I thought I was woke till I went to university. Secondly, I have no idea how I'm going to get a job when I leave. I'm aware because of my son's generation, a lot of people struggling to get jobs. So something I've been thinking about, I wanted to ask you about how much you've thought about this, but is AI doing for the graduate elites, what globalism has done to factory workers?

**David Goodhart** (1:52)
I hope so.
Yes, we have hugely overproduced people with generalist academic skills and this could be the end of the line for people with generalist academic skills unless they're absolutely at the top 5% to 1% in their particular field.
I think the AI effect will happen much more slowly than people imagine. I think obviously we tend to overreact to new technologies when they come along and we think it's going to be the end of the world. Generally speaking, like when the car replaced the horses, everybody feared that there will be mass unemployment of all the young lads who looked after horses. Of course, human needs are insatiable and we will find new work for people even though clearly a lot of the middling and lower level academic white collar type jobs are going to be for the chop, the kind of junior clerical, legal work and the accountancy work and so on and so forth. But a lot of that is kind of already automated or semi-automated. So, but yes, I think whereas much technology in the last 50 or 100 years has affected blue collar people, this is going to affect white collar and sort of upper white collar people. And maybe that will make them more politically sympathetic to the people who have really lost out in our society in the last couple of generations, which tends to be the less well-educated people, people who don't go away to university, people who have come from post-industrial parts of the country. And the political class has not been representing their interests, which is why reform and restore between them are on 30-35% in the opinion polls. So I think one of the least empathetic speeches of any modern politician, and one of the most shocking speeches in some ways, was Tony Blair's famous speech in 1999 saying that 50% of all school leavers should go to university. Clearly, nobody in that group of people who are helping him write that speech, and I knew a few of them, thought for one second that their child would be in the 50% of people who didn't go to university. Now, it's fine. Obviously, we need clever people. We need people to go to university. When 10, 15, even 20% of people in your town or your school, your class, go to university and you don't, that's fine. You go and work in a local factory or office and life goes on. When 50% of people go, and of course, many of them, we have an unusually high level of people going to residential universities in this country, which I think has been a great source of division in some ways. Then if you're not in that cohort who leave and join this sort of cast of people, the liberal graduate class, if you like, I call them the anywheres in my book about populism in 2017 If you're not part of that group, you might well think of yourself as a second-class citizen. Of course, now, as universities have expanded and expanded even since 1999, a huge number of people even going to university feel like second-class citizens because they expected that having worked hard and passed their exams and gone to university, done what their parents and teachers asked them to do, they were expecting reasonably high status, well-paid professional job and there aren't enough for them to go round, and there are going to be even fewer in the AI age.