Breaking the Jeff Bezos model of new technology
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the LSE for this evening's exciting event, which forms part of LSE Festival's Visions for the Future. Started on Monday and will be running through to Saturday, the 21st of June.

LSE Festival is a series of events exploring the threats and opportunities of the near and distant future and what a better world could look like. My name is Aaron Reeves. I'm a professor of sociology here at the LSE and it's my great pleasure on behalf of both our online audience and those here in the in the room with us this evening to chair this event.

Technological innovation always disrupts work in some fashion, but we're living through a period when the scale of that disruption seems especially broad and the effects of that disruption are particularly acute. Is this disruption inevitable and what might we do about it? To help us think through these questions and some of the policy solutions, we have three eminent speakers.

Faisal Shaheen is a distinguished policy fellow at LSE's International Inequalities Institute and an economist, writer, political commentator and activist. Faisal has over 15 years of experience researching the trends and consequences of inequality as well as designing policies and campaigns to address the causes of inequality and exclusion. Do check out her book Know Your Place, How Society Sets Us Up to Fail and What We Can Do About It.

Jack Stilgo is a professor in science and technology studies at University College London, where he researches the governance of emerging technologies. He's part of the UKRI's Responsible AI Leadership Team. He worked with EPSRC and ESRC to develop a framework for responsible innovation that is now being used by these research councils.

His book, Who's Driving Innovation, New Technologies and the Collaborative State, would be an excellent follow-up to this evening's event. And finally, Hilary Cottom.

is an internationally acclaimed author, innovator, and changemaker. She combines new thinking with radical, concrete practice. She holds a PhD in social sciences and an honorary professor at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL. Her latest book, which is on sale just at the back here, and Hilary is both lovely to talk to, and she'll be signing copies if you go over there to talk to her, is The Work We Need, A 21st Century Reimagining.

For those on social media, the hashtag for today's event is hashtag LSE Festival. I would ask you to please put your phones on silent so as not to disrupt the event. It is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast subject to us not ruining it in some fashion with the way we talk or something. As usual, there'll be a chance for you to put your questions to our panel.

And for our online audience, you can submit your questions by the Q&A function. But please include your name and affiliation. And for those of you here in the theatre, I'll let you know when we open the floor for questions. And when that happens, just raise your hands. We'll try and find someone to get a roving mic to you. And if you could, again, also let us know your name and affiliation, that would be great. And we'll try to get a range of questions and to keep the conversation going. So without further ado, let's hand over to Pfizer.

Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. I wanted to talk through a little bit

but the thinking behind why this event. So LSE does this call out for the festival and says, do you want to put an event on? And I was talking to the events team within the International Inequalities Institute. And I was like, I really think we should do something on, obviously on inequality and let's focus it, you know, think about it in this kind of broad title of Jeff Bezos, because everyone knows who he is. But really it was two things in my agenda. One is,

to remind everyone that we've been talking about this a long time because in my own career, sort of 12, 10, 12 years ago, I remember there was a time when there was a whole flurry of books that came out, Outrage is Over, When It Takes All, all just warning that actually the way that technology was going, and this is before really talking about AI in the sense that we do now, inequality was going to get a lot worse. And so we're

But my starting point is to say we knew these things are going to get worse and we've let them get worse. So I want to point here to a kind of political problem as well as a kind of an economic problem or an inequality problem. So, you know, this conversation has been ongoing. We've known it's a problem and yet we've failed to do anything about it. In fact, things have in a lot of ways got worse.

um and then the second point which i always find myself doing now which is to call a bit for call for a little bit of a revolution um if that goes together so why um why has there been no movement and and i know from um what others are speaking about this is a kind of challenge also to think about kind of big enough as to what could really get this actual change to happen we know that um

You know, technology, if you look at why inequality has grown, technological change is often touted as one of the number one reasons. And alongside that is...

what we call a falling labor share and an increase in the profit share. So that's happened for lots of reasons. One of the things is that technological change as it's been so far has benefited people with higher education the most. And it's basically the job loss has been amongst sort of typical working class jobs. And now there's a discussion about a lot of middle class, some middle class jobs going as well. Yeah.

Obviously, it's a much bigger problem now because it happened at the same time that workers lost power and the ability. I think one of the things that happens in this debate about why inequality has risen is that, oh, it's one of those things, you know, it's technological change. But there's been a very concerted effort to, at the same time, lessen the power of workers so that in this bargaining conversation about who gains from technology, workers have less and less power. And I think...

it's really important to remember that because we are starting with inequality, we've got inequality, and then we've got more drivers of inequality on top of that. And we don't have the sorts of factors that we had, the sorts of things that would have pushed back on that in say the 1970s when inequality wasn't as high. I think when we talk about the Bezos model, and I

just I think everyone knows about all of the different ways in which workers have complained about the very difficult situations that they're faced with. I mean, we had this whole period here where we would hear these horror stories of people peeing in bottles because they couldn't take a break. People having babies in the toilets. I mean, it's going into labour in the toilets, didn't want to leave. I mean, it's

quite outrageous. And then we've also heard about when the places have tried to unionize what's happened and how the execs have fought back to block that unionization. But I think the thing about the Bezos model is not just the treatment of workers, not just the things that we see in terms of how he or how his company mines customer data or

not just about how Amazon dominates the market and ends up really pushing out smaller retailers. It's also that

the way in which these big tech giants and the people at the top of them have ended up in photos with Donald Trump, it's the way in which that money that they have is converted into power. And I think, you know, with this, I'm just going to read this quote about, you know, Jeff Bezos. I mean, it's inconceivable levels of wealth that he's generated, that he's got. I mean, just one day during the pandemic, his personal wealth got increased by $13 billion. Just

one day during the pandemic. I mean, it's inconceivable to ask like how much money that is. And even though like a third of the world doesn't have safe drinking water, when he was asked by the business insider what he would do with all this money, he was like, the only way I can see to deploy this wealth that I've got from Amazon is to

is to go to space, is to look at space travel. I mean, it's inconceivable the amount of money and then what they decide to put that money into. And so we have this business model that is built on inequality, that's making inequality worse in the treatment of workers, in how it operates, but also in how these people have power, how they use that power politically and what they, in the projects they invest in. So breaking that model is core to the change we need to see.

The second thing, and this runs alongside

this in terms of why this is so stuck and getting worse is of course the role of financialization. I was just doing a bit of digging as to which companies are benefiting most from AI. And of course there's all different types of companies and different parts of that process. There's those that there's obviously the tech giants as those that more directly involved in the large language models and, and, and,

looking at who owns a share in those. And these are not, you know, obviously they're not publicly owned. They are owned by, and again and again, I looked up the specific owners, BlackRock came up pretty much every time across these organizations, whether these big businesses. So whether it's like Google, whether it's NVIDIA, you know, these companies are very much in the hands of institutional investors that aren't thinking about

the social good, right? They're just thinking about the bottom line. Um, and I think, again, this is, this is the problem that we face. Um, and the, you know, the third reason why this hasn't moved on and why we, things have got worse is that given that, given that entrenchment of power, given that this tech giants, um, uh,

able to do what they want to do and accumulate this wealth and influence the system the way they do is that when you read the policy papers, so I was just, this is always my frustration, but you'll read all these incredible papers from academics and think tanks. Sorry, I didn't mean to point to you. Yeah.

But like, you know, you read these papers, sorry. You read these papers and they lay out the problem. They'll do the regression analysis and they say, yes, look at how, you know, this can make it wage. This is affecting wages this way. And this is affecting the middle class this way. And this is affecting manual work this way. And this is going to be terrible. And you turn to the policy pages and it's often like one or two pages. And it's like, and I was just looking at some OECD reports that did exactly this. And they say, well, we should,

do something about skills and education, that's often where these reports end off and sign off. And so you see the scale of this problem, which, you know, in itself, I think AI can do all kinds of beneficial things. Like the problem isn't necessarily these technologies, it's how they are owned and how they are contributing to inequality. And yet, at

whilst everyone admits that's a problem and that's a trend, when it comes to the policies, the policies are at best timid, right? And it really is frustrating to see that gap. And so, you know, the challenge for us then is what would actually bring us to that scale? And I was really lucky to do work with governments around the world that had broadly progressive governments. So I was looking at a number of the policies that they were

We lost a lot of those governments because governments change and unfortunately the far right is doing well in all kinds of places. But, you know, it was places like Sweden, which we did lose the government, but all kinds of governments around the world, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, an interesting group of countries. And

And actually, very few of them didn't have very, well, none of them had a clear plan on what to do about this specifically. The scale of redistribution needed in terms of this wealth that is accumulating. There were some bits here and there. Spain was doing some good bits on wealth taxes and simultaneously on increasing the welfare state. Imagine that. It's such a hard thing to say in this country. Increasing the welfare state, that's what they were doing. They wanted to give more people benefits. Yeah.

But the only country we could find that had a really clear strategy on this was Taiwan, which I think is,

you know, has all kinds of reasons for why it would want to get involved politically. But they also have this hand in TSMC, which is their semiconductor company, which of course is like world leading and makes loads of money. The government doesn't own that outright. And I think probably lots of us would be nervous about outright government ownership of various different things connected to AI. But they do have a clear stake in this company through their National Development Fund. And I think it's

sort of present and they have a strategy on misinformation on on making sure that everyone can gain from digital technology I mean they just have a very very clear idea of what they're doing and I think you know part of this is politically because they had a problem with obviously they have an ongoing political issue with China and they didn't want misinformation to spread and it just kind of like made them take this on in a very serious way but

we worked so hard. I remember we had these consultants writing this report, looking at what countries were doing more on this particular issue across the board in terms of technology, ownership, you know, digital inclusion. And we kept going back to these consultants who were very good and saying there isn't enough hair. And they were like, we cannot find anything. There's very few countries that have comprehensive strategies on this. And so that

you know, that is a call to governments to really take this seriously top to bottom and not just say we're going to build loads of data centres, which, you know, have all kinds of environmental issues attached to them. So I think, you know, I think in terms of what we should be doing, I'm running out of time, I've run out of time. I think the big thing here is the scale of redistribution needed. I think I never really thought about universal bailout

basic income as like the answer, but I see it more and more now and universal basic services, you know, a lot. And the other thing I did when I was looking at these tech companies is how many of them got government subsidies at some point, all of them pretty much had some kind of government subsidy to help them build something along the way that has meant now that they've accumulated all this money. And so, you know, this is time to call that

back and say, we are going to do a digital tax and we are going to hypothecate that tax. And this is what we're going to do with it in terms of universal basic services or income. So I think we need to be thinking differently.

on a much bigger scale here. And we need to be putting inequality and addressing inequality, both in terms of the wealth, but also in power at the heart of that. So there is also, you know, all the things that we need to do in terms of how democracy is or isn't working that needs to happen here. People like Jeff Bezos and the rest of them shouldn't, Elon Musk shouldn't be allowed to buy elections and be, well, not so close anymore, but, you know, be there in pictures with presidents. I mean, it's just...

It just demonstrates the bigger political issue we're dealing with here. Thank you. Thanks, Faiza. I'm going to build on what Faiza started with there as a really nice diagnosis of the sort of the big political challenge and just dig into...

sort of how much of that problem is tech related? Because I'm somebody that is interested in the role that science and technology play in society. I hold out a sort of optimistic hope that science and technology at their best can be emancipatory forces, that they can, if well governed, improve people's lot.

But I also have a diagnosis that I think Pfizer was getting at that technology left to its own devices exacerbates inequality. And the thing I'm interested in is how that is different from the story that we are told about technology's emancipatory promises and maybe different from the histories that we tell ourselves about the role that technology has played in human progress. I mean, it's interesting that we're starting with

a problem embodied in a man. And I think, you know, part of that is mischievous, but part of it is real, right? Which is that one of the reasons why it's important to focus on the actions of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and it's not just that they do, you know, daft things that are worthy of our attention or spend their money in peculiar ways, but

They operate in a world where governance regimes are pretty threadbare. So what individuals do matters a lot. And it shows you a sort of lack of accountability. And I think that lack of accountability is particularly acute when it comes to new technologies, not because of anything that's particularly technological about the politics of innovation. I don't think we need to understand how...

how a large language model functions in order to get into this. But states' dependence upon technologies and upon the economics of innovation are getting...

Those states are getting more and more entangled, more and more desperate, if you like, for the imagined riches that innovation will provide. And actually, the part of my diagnosis of government's frustrations around the world is that

the benefits, be they productivity benefits, be they benefits to people's lives or to public services or whatever, are not coming in the way that was promised, which leads governments to double down on some of those things. So what I will just say really is not so much about Jeff Bezos and his ilk, but more just to sort of, you know, what are they a symptom of? And

Why does it seem so hard for governments in particular to imagine alternatives to our current situation? I think it's the Amazon story. I would say it's a mistake to focus on the particular technological novelties of what Amazon has brought into the world, right? Because actually, Amazon, like a lot of big companies, has tried a lot of

technological things, seen some of them succeed, some of them fail. But what it does do and what it has enacted maybe as well as anybody is a Silicon Valley mode that some Silicon Valley gurus have talked about as blitzscaling. This idea that you scale for scale's sake and as Pfizer says, you know, you

ride roughshod over your competitors and it doesn't you know the how of that blitz scaling is less important than the scaling and what you do is create a form of sort of social whiplash where by the time policy makers have been able to respond you're already entrenched right you're sort of too big to fail and

And so Uber, for anybody living in a city where Uber has arrived, Uber, extremely successful proponents of this model. By the time that we're able to cash out the public benefits and public costs, they are already part of the furniture. These people that began as upstarts have become the establishment. And one of the ways that technology companies do this is by...

deliberately obfuscating their purposes. So if you remember, Facebook was, if you asked Mark Zuckerberg what his company was for, he would say it's to connect the world.

And if you asked Google in its early days what it was for, it would say we are here to organize the world's information. One of the documents I actually show to my students is the founding document of Google that says, oh, and by the way, we should never have an advertising model because that would lead to a gigantic conflict of interest between our customers and our users. Right.

The slipperiness of purposes, the Silicon Valley companies call it pivoting. But what it shows you is the impossibility of holding to account these companies for what they actually intend to do in the world. And we're now seeing that repeated with AI. And it's a form of irresponsibility that becomes really hard to hold to account. So what

How might we imagine alternatives? I think the first thing is to recognise, to diagnose why it is hard, right? I think government's dependence upon big tech, it isn't necessarily inevitable, but governments feel constrained by it. It was notable that Peter Kyle said that talking to big tech companies, Peter Kyle, the Science and Innovation Secretary, said that talking to big tech companies

is like in political terms talking to other countries, right? That that's the sort of, that's the mode and the sense of the power relationship here. These are powerful actors on which we are now dependent. And that creates and contributes to a pervasive sense of inevitability that technology is destiny and that

There's nothing that governments can do about it other than press the accelerator or where risks are identified, dab the brakes. I would like to see a sense of a steering wheel there so that we're able to direct innovation better towards the public good rather than pretending that what's good for innovators is good for society. One of the ways I think we might think about that is to actually emphasize that

Science and innovation depend on the agency and ingenuity of individuals. And those individuals operate in systems that make collective decisions that mean that the large language models that we currently have in society today were not inevitable. They were the result of human choices.

And indeed, you know, in Britain, my own university has been one of the organizations taking credit for two recent Nobel Prizes awarded to individuals who've been associated with the development of those large language models. Right. Things didn't have to be that way. And the creators of those of those systems would would surely agree. One final point.

which is not specific to Amazon, but just because I think it's particular to the politics of our moment is about monopoly. So we had a really interesting situation in the States under the Biden administration, where Joe Biden hired to the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, who had written a really, really interesting paper, right?

Academics occasionally write interesting papers. This one is worth looking up, Amazon's antitrust paradox. And Lina Khan's diagnosis is absolutely right, which is basically people on the left and the right have taken issue with monopolies for good reason. The normal way in which that was problematized was a sense that, well, in a world of monopolies, consumers have to pay too high a price for things.

Lina Khan's diagnosis is that is not how Amazon operated at all. And one of the experiences we all have of Amazon is that it is pretty cheap, right? But that we still have reason, or maybe particularly we have reasons to worry about the concentration of economic power that has then played out in all the ways that we've seen. Now, as it was, the Biden administration have been largely unable

to enact modes of antitrust that break up these monopolies. But I think the lack of that as a lever looked promising for a bit, and I think could look promising again, because it's not just a left-wing agenda. There's also historically been... And people like J.D. Vance promise, they pretend to be proponents of what they call small tech,

They think that big tech is a problem as well, which suggests that there is the potential for some sort of political coalition. I'll finish there. I was not expecting to end with an endorsement of J.D. Vance, but that is what I have accidentally done. Thank you. So I think I will pick up...

on some of the themes of revolution that Pfizer raised and also maybe circle back to this idea about what does technology determine and what is for us to determine. And in my book, The Work We Need, which is really a book about how we might design a work revolution, I do quote Jeff Bezos and what he said, the speech he gave at the first space flight that he launched with all these billions that he made. And he said, completely without irony...

I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this.

And, you know, I think the thing is, it's kind of it's nice that you laugh, but I think we do laugh. But also we just have this kind of sense of bitter disappointment now that, oh, like this is the model, these kind of tech titans. This is who they are. They all behave like this. They're going to line up with Trump, that these are the mindsets. These are the patterns. This basically is the template of this digital revolution that we're living in.

But I want to suggest and the book suggests that a different path is possible. And I think Pfizer and Jack are also kind of arguing the same. And I'm originally a historian and history shows that with every previous technology revolution, we have had a work revolution and significant sectors of the population have been able to change their conditions, their share of the bargain.

And so what interests me really is what's happening now, where is our revolution?

Because I think we can see two things happening. First of all, technology is actually just deepening the grooves at the moment of the existing business model in just the way that Pfizer describes. So it's just entrenching inequality and finding new ways of exploitation of new ways to increase that inequality. And the second thing that is happening is, of course, a response to that, which is this kind of growth of nostalgia, this idea of the 20th century. If only we could just somehow get back to those kind of stable jobs of the 20th century.

And whilst obviously there were good things about the 20th century, I think that this is equally mistaken because actually what worked in the 20th century was work for a very small group of people. If you were a white man, preferably in a unionised job with a wife at home doing the care, 20th century work was brilliant. But for everybody else, and particularly people in the global south, but for women, for people of colour, 20th century work was pretty bad.

So my book is an attempt to get underneath this and step aside from Jeff Bezos and ask workers, actually, what's really going on. So in 20, I can't remember, but sort of just before the pandemic, I set off on this journey and

And I went to work in five post-industrial locations in the UK. And then I was invited to go to the US and I travelled east to west. So I started in Baltimore. I went to Detroit. I finished off working actually with workers in Silicon Valley. And everywhere I went, I held these three-hour imagination sessions with workers from all walks of life. So I worked with gravediggers, carers, teachers, architects, consultants, lawyers, basically you name it. I probably worked with them.

And I asked him two questions. First of all, what would good work look like in this century? And secondly, what would we have to do to get there?

And what I discovered, actually, when I went out to do this research, I had no intention of writing a book. But when I came home from this journey, I felt I had to because what I discovered was that there are these really big shared dreams of what 21st century work could look like. And what's really important is that they are shared. These dreams are shared by people who work in very different walks of life, the gravedigger and the consultant in some London boardroom. And also, these ideas are quite doable.

And so in the book, I kind of distill this kind of, you know, all of this sort of hubbub and laughing and talking and creating and imagining with hundreds and hundreds of workers down to the kind of six melodies, if you like, that sang out really strongly, which I think are the six principles of what good work looks like, which is, you know, you can buy the book if you want to kind of find out, but is basically, you know, about achieving the basics.

You know, enough money that you and your family can kind of stand up and do the things you need to do about good work with meaning and purpose. Everybody I meet wants to work, but they also want to shift the axis of work so that there is time to play, time to care and so on.

And I think that in this light, what we see in the Jeff Bezos model is that he is sort of the last gasp of a sort of 19th century caricature, actually. He's, you know, the man that economists call homo economicus. He's ruthless. He's a plunderer. He's a colonizer. He's selfish. And he is just purely about economic extraction.

But in contrast, the hundreds and hundreds of workers that I've been spending time with over the last five years are not this person. They're a person that I came to call Sapiens Integra in, you know, a kind of mirror image, if you like, of the kind of Bezos model. And this other person, these people that I have met, you know, they're probably everybody in this room.

is somebody that, you know, does sometimes like to compete, certainly wants kind of economic certainty and a decent standard of living. But we also want to grow ourselves in all kinds of different ways across a whole range of capability in terms of our connection to each other, love, play, nature, and so on.

And actually, what's really interesting, of course, is that huge amounts of academic research in this century show that this is actually the human, that this idea of the selfish gene, for example, has now been completely discredited by biologists, that social psychologists have shown how we continually remake ourselves and ideas, anthropologists and so on. It's increasingly clear that we are, you know, collective social beings who very often act against our self-interest, in fact, in the wider interest.

So I think that breaking the Bezos model, which is probably why we're all here and what we're committed to, is in no small part about shining a kind of very bright light on these stories. I think the six principles and the stories that I heard again and again and again are not in the public domain. They're not the stories that are shaping policy. They're not the stories that policymakers are even grappling with. And actually also something that we might come back to talk about is that

There are business leaders, of course, that share these principles. I mean, technology revolution should throw up competing ideas of what it is to lead and what businesses should look like. And Bezos is one model, but there are others. So today's narrative in terms of technology and how technology fits with all of this is that it's a narrative about tools first. So, you know, whether it's kind of Daniel Susskind, for example, arguing that, you know, this is horrific and everybody's going to lose their work and increasingly it's going to encroach on middle class jobs or...

or whether it's, you know, Autor, David Autor, is he of this parish, David Autor? I think he might be. But, you know, arguing that, are you pointing to him in the audience? But arguing that, you know, that technology is fantastic and actually new jobs are created and they're always higher value jobs. The thing is, is that these stories, the dominant stories are about tools and they're about technology determining what's going to happen.

But again, a wider historical lens of the pattern of technology revolutions shows that we probably should expect something else. Because ultimately, in the past, technology revolutions have never been determined by the technology or the dreams. They've been culturally determined and they've been determined by the dreams, the dreams that we articulate and share. So a kind of very practical example of that is that obviously in the last revolution, oil-based mass production,

people did not work in oil. The dream was, you know, the American dream of, you know, your house with a picket fence, your TV, your barbecue, maybe a kind of pass to the tennis club and a refrigerator, the bigger the better. That was the dream. And of course, all the work was in

producing consumption goods, marketing consumption goods, branding and so on. So the work that that technology produced was cultural imaginative work and the work of that production. It wasn't work in the technology and it was shaped by the dream. And so the question comes back again, what is our dream and where are we having the space to develop that dream? And who is imagining, like who has the power to imagine? Which is why I wanted to start my work with workers and then work back to front, back into kind of labour economy and so on.

And then the question really is kind of, are we ready? So Carlotta Perez, who is probably the most eminent historian of technology revolutions, plots the path of what she calls five previous technology revolutions. We're in the fifth. And she shows how every single one has a pattern. There is a moment of huge excitement, an investment bubble. Then comes a crash.

Then, I mean, you're familiar, we've all lived this. Then comes a period of the doldrums of kind of, you know, really deepening inequality, the rise of populism. And then comes a turning point. And of course, last time the turning point was...

the Second World War. This time, I think it could be ecology. And I think actually this argument all should be about ecology, not technology. But that might be coming for the questions later. But the question then is, are we ready? What ideas are lying around? And work revolutions, when they happen, look sudden, but they are always, whether it's the abolition of slavery, getting a paid weekend, equal pay for equal work, the result of

decades of work on organising and they are about work organisation. So that was the second part of my conversation with workers was what should work organising look like? Because the other thing we know is that work organising in a technology revolution, if it has to be successful, has to change shape. And again, in the book, I look, I basically gave workers in groups of four a blank tablecloth and said, please design me a work organisation that

And, you know, let's say I started with gravediggers in Kilmarnock and they giggle because they're like, you know, hey, this isn't kind of our work. We're not the people that design the work organisations. But in every place, an organisation emerged with really, really interesting analysis of power and what I would call a code for how we organise.

And just, I think, as you know, when workers moved into the factories in industrial production and realised it was no longer any good to belong to a guild, that trying to kind of argue that you had certain skills and so you should be paid was out because it didn't matter who you were, you were just the cog on...

on the production line. But what you did have was you had this incredible mass power because suddenly you weren't working, you know, one person on a building here, one person there. You were in these huge factories, huge shipyards. You could organise in a different way. What we can see now is that industrial trade unionism, which got us everything we got in the last technology revolution, you know, fair wages, you know, good labour share of value.

a welfare state which we wouldn't have had needs again to shift because these vertically organized hierarchical organizations cannot confront the power of modern technology and i think it's so interesting that again and again workers had this kind of adapt you know how would you build a very high percentage actually higher than national in both the uk and the us of the workers who participated were unionized workers but had these very strong ideas about how you would shift uh

into new forms of work organisation. So I think that in conclusion, what I want to say is, you know, in the words of the kind of brilliant US organiser at the end of the 20th century, we have to be ready. Are we ready? And to be ready means that we have to have these conversations. We have to have a story of a common fate of how we could organise. What are the things that, as my co-panellists have suggested, that we should be organising for?

And I think also what we have to do is we have to re-embrace the idea, actually, that we are all workers here together. Because perhaps the last anecdote I can tell about my book, which is called The Work We Need, is I wanted to call it The Workers' Revolution. And my publishers, it's a kind of book for the mass public, turned down this title because they said...

The thing is, readers don't consider themselves to be workers. In other words, the idea of a worker has been relegated to somebody who does work and is not perceived to read a book. I mean, there's a whole lot of stuff in there we could unpack. But the thing is, is that we do, what's really important is that we share dreams and we have to collaborate. This is a kind of collective struggle. It's not about life-work balance or whether in one firm you can achieve something better. It is about rethinking the social contract in a profound way and embracing that label together, I think. Thank you now, speakers. APPLAUSE

Now, back to the event.

So we now have time for questions just to kind of reiterate. We'll gather some in the room. Well, if you could say your name, where you're from, same for questions online. If you put those, we'll try and get both some in the room and then go to people online if there are some. So let's get started. Thank you. So also, if you could wait for roving mics to get to you, that would be fantastic. So how about...

Yeah, maybe on the front row here. Thank you so much. My name is Ronald Kahn and no affiliation. So my question is as follows. As we know, in a large part of the world, the birth rates have basically collapsed from South Korea to Italy to the Baltics. And now even in the UK, schools in primary just

the enrollments are dropping. So my question is, do we think that this fact, which is not changing anytime soon, is going to speed up the workers' revolution or is it going to speed up

the current model that we talked about. And what I mean by that is where the workers have less rights, less power, or will be replaced by even more automation. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Yes, thank you. So that was terrific. My name is Martin Percy from the Inclusive AI Project. I'd like to, if I could just try and give a sort of common language call to action from this kind of fascinating discussion.

Could you comment on this? And specifically with regard to AI. We've talked a lot about Jeff Bezos, but specifically AI. So the thesis is we need to tax the expletive out of AI companies. If that slows them down, right, because they need to be slowed down, and we need to develop an AI dream,

like the American dream of a previous century, because at the moment we're all very familiar with dystopian ideas, but it's very difficult to find any clear articulation of a utopian dream for what this, in some ways, incredible new technology might do. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah, I did sociology at LSE. I graduated in 1978. I wanted to ask about how you would perceive of a different kind of model for delivering the kind of social service I think that Amazon does for everybody. It's a company that is unbelievably efficient and gets goods to people who order it very fast and has a wide range of products. So I'd like to know how you can invest

in visage restructuring a company so that it doesn't have so much of the profits going into a small number of people, but continue to deliver the same kind of service that people appreciate from Amazon. Thank you. So should we take a crack at some of these briefs we can do, hopefully get through another round or two? That'd be great. Yeah. I'm going to let you decide who goes first. I don't want to go on fire. All right, there you go. I mean, I do. I think this point that you raised, Jack, that, you know,

that these companies get in there so fast and policymakers can't keep up. And so this is the problem if we say Amazon, which you're right, like I'm sure most of us here have used them, you know, because they'll get it to us even sometimes on the same day and we don't have to leave the house. And actually, I think...

I think we're kidding ourselves a bit if we think we could set something up that could challenge that in the way that it needs to be challenged. Actually, what needs to happen is far more regulation, far more taxing of these companies and those very rich individuals. And I'm not talking about income. I'm talking about their hordes of wealth that they have. And so you refashion those companies so that they're not producing all of the bad outcomes. You know, but the other thing...

The other thing that needs to happen alongside that, and I get this a lot, so I was very involved in politics for a while, so I spent a lot of time talking to people, knocking on doors. And, you know, the thing is, people also long for their high street. So they'll use Amazon and they think it's helpful, but they also like really long for their high street in a really, not just a nostalgic way, but in a kind of community way, because they see these places of people coming together, popping to the shop sometimes. It's like helpful to have, you know,

it's a kind of universal feeling that people like to see those high streets alive. So I think also, you know, people talk about how hard it is to compete with Amazon because of the tax differentials, because of business rates and the rest of it. And so we need to take a serious look at that. And I think part of this dream, of course, the workers' revolution,

but is also thinking more broadly about communities and the communities that we want to live in. Can I just say something? Because I think that's so interesting because the work organisations are all place-based and they are all about that and how you, you know, actually have some kind of mutual resource and community to begin to build out in a completely different way. I think that, yeah, absolutely. Sorry, just to... Yeah, I mean, you can't build, you know, any form of revolution. You can't build any form of, like, collective fight back unless...

you actually connect with each other. It's actually quite hard to do all of this stuff online even. I mean, I thought one of the things a few years ago when Deliveroo took some action was because all the drivers were meeting in the same place and they were talking to each other about what they were going through. And then when they tried to call them in individually to deal with their problems, they said, no, we're going to go in collectively. So I do think, you know, in thinking this through, there's a way in which you sell this kind of...

there's a dream and communication that is already there and people want nice high streets. I'll let others speak about perversities, et cetera. Can I just say just some things about labor? So I'm not an economist, not a sociologist, but there's an interesting sort of angle on labor when it comes to tech companies. So there's been some really interesting studies of the hidden labor that actually props up tech. So this isn't what will AI mean for my job, right?

There's a brilliant book by Mary Gray called Ghost Work that actually focuses on an Amazon invention, which is called Mechanical Turd, which in a sort of slight moment of saying the quiet bit out loud, Jeff Bezos referred to as artificial, artificial intelligence, right? Humans doing work.

in order to pretend that this was the output of AI. Tech companies would claim that this is, you know, that it was a sort of fake it till you make it temporary expedient rather than the permanent infrastructure of their systems. But I don't think we should believe them there. I think the relationship between technology, automation and labor is a really complicated and interesting one. And the one thing I'm...

So this is why I really resist UBI talk, right? I don't want to fall into the argument that the tech companies want to have about what this will mean for your work.

I don't think they really understand the world of work. I don't think they have much. They see this as about rebalancing power away from Labour. So I think a confident government, rather than acquiescing on the point of Labour,

should be doing, should be asking those questions, investing in training and skills. And yes, probably, you know, working with various forms of automation will happen, but it won't happen in the way that the current generation of tech leaders tell us it will, because technology predictions never come true.

And it's the same with, you know, stuff about demography. It doesn't play out in straightforward ways. But, you know, if I was the government, I'd be thinking about relationships between automation, immigration, skills, all of that sort of complicated stuff because it's going to be important. We just, you know, don't necessarily know exactly how. Did you have any other questions?

Yeah, I just want to say a couple of things. So first of all, birth rates, I think is so interesting. For me, birth rates is a bit like the robots are coming. You know, it's like a kind of a big thing. We don't know how it will play out. We don't know what would happen ecologically. Like there's just so many factors. But I think it's a really interesting question. Of course, you know, actually, the demographic shift, the real one, not the predicted one is ageing societies. And they that's very central to work.

And one of the things I explore in the book is that technology revolutions are also a really important moment when certain forms of work can be revalued in very interesting ways. So, you know, obviously, you know, a lot of it is political. When production got offshore to kind of Asia, suddenly those exact same jobs did not carry the same salaries. There's no kind of actual equation between what we do and what we're paid. And in the book, I explore this through care. Like, could this actually be a moment where we profoundly rethink care? And I think it could be, which plays into the demography question.

But the other thing is just to the gentleman who kind of said, you know, everybody loves Amazon. And as far as I said, everybody uses Amazon. I think this is very complicated because first of all, it's like what gets accounted? I mean, the ecological impact

burden of Amazon is just completely not sustainable for any of our survival. So, of course, it's fine if we don't kind of have that in any accounting and we don't think that actually the work revolution is about ecology, then that's quite complicated. And the other thing I think is it's still back to what stories get told. You know, many people, you know, including the book you referenced, have written very powerfully about

gig workers, I also spend, you know, they're one of the groups I spend time with. And if you read the book, it's very, very painful. So I think we also have to ask, you know, that's fine, it's convenient, but is that the world we want to live in? And I think there are three factors that are propelling the current work revolution that will happen. One is technology, one is ecology, but the other is that actually, especially younger generations, but not only younger

profoundly don't want to live in a world where work is structured in such an unjust way and that that is a force in and of itself which is kind of propelling in a positive way for change.

Great. We've got some questions online, so I'd love to get some more in the room. We'll see how we do. The first question online is from Josefina Mas from Digital Catapult. She says, I think an impactful way of mitigating monopolies beyond antitrust-led regulation is to empower smaller companies and lower barriers of entry to tech markets. What do you think of this?

Second question is from Stuart McIver, who asks, how can we change the environment that has resulted in the Bezos's of the world? Mindful that our culture drives us all to aspire to become a Bezos. And the last question from David Wood, who's chair of London Futurists, are Elon Musk and Peter Thiel going to allow JD Vance to promote little tech in place of too big to control big tech?

Before we do that, was there a woman's hand here? Yeah. Can we get that question too? Just could we definitely have a slight gender imbalance? So it'd be good to try and address that a bit in terms of our questioners. Thank you so much. I'm an LSE alumni. And I remember three years ago when we were studying development management, we studied a lot about industrial policies and the role of state in promoting technology as a sector. And I know even the UCL Innovation Institute, that's a big topic. And since we've invoked JD Vance already, I

I guess the first part of my question is, you know, do we see a role of state? And obviously there's a disparity, I understand, between the industrialized economies and the global south, you know, where there is a power imbalance to what they're importing for their own growth. So I guess the first part of my question is, do we see a role of state and policy and form of industrial policy or whatever in breaking this model? And if I can quickly just...

quote a book from this recent book called Careless People. It was written by an ex-director of public policy from Meta, you know, where she...

gives examples of how a lot of governments depend on these big leaders for their survival. So, you know, how do we kind of break that political imbalance between what, as you said, you know, I work in big tech right now. I'm not proud of it. But for me, it's a way of surviving in London's living cost of economies or whatever. So how do we break that with living a better world for the future, but also surviving in today's world? Thank you.

Great. We just have a couple of minutes left, so we'll maybe do a round of responses again. You don't have to go first. I'll start at this end. Can I take two? So the first one is, I think it's a really interesting question from the online world about how do we not grow the Bezos's?

And so again, I look at this. So generally in technology revolutions, there is a group of business leaders at the forefront of technology who understand that the business model needs to change. They're not philanthropists, but they realise that things have shifted so much they need to offer a different social contract to their workers. So Ford is the classic person, you know, a really nasty person, anti-Semitic, shot his workers, but realised that he had no market for his cars unless he raised the wages of his workers and took his

board to court in order to kind of push through a different deal for workers. So on my journeys, I set out to meet these new industrialists. And of course, first of all, I thought that we would be, you know, in Silicon Valley, that I would find something. I went through kind of, you know, interviewing all those leaders. The stories are in the book. But I did find something

Really, really interesting people in technology with very different business models that are very strong for workers, very kind of strong on training workers from different places. I think one question that I can't answer, but is like, why are we so transfixed by Jeff Bezos? One thing we could all agree today is just...

practically ignore him, you know, because there are so many interesting things that, again, if we shine the light on, if we nurture, we see these alternative stories. Of course, because one, I mean, that's naive to ask in one way, because they're not making the billions, but they're very successful employing many people. And then I think the final question that you asked about the state is really interesting. I think that in order to have what I would call a work revolution, which I would see, by the way, like a velvet revolution, like what, you know, the same process that brought in the welfare state,

is we need four lots of actors we do need workers we need civil society in lots of forms we need what i call organic intellectuals in the gramscian sense so people producing ideas that connect to reality and then we need the state and i think what the one of the main reasons that we are so kind of in this still in the doldrums is that our state systems themselves are so industrial and vertically integrated that they find it very very hard to kind of do the actions that are necessary

And I think one thing that's really interesting for me is how in local government, this is not the same. That we have, for example, in this country, very good examples of radical local government investing in very different ways in public services, generating. I mean, Barnsley is one of the places I went to. In Barnsley, you've got, you know, the logistics centre of Britain, but you've also got this incredible digital hub growing a generative economy with horizontal links with an initial investment growing.

by the local authority. And I think this comes back to one of the points that Pfizer was making about community and place, which is that these government leaders are like actually the new industrious that I find. The common denominator is that people are of that place. They understand the place.

and therefore they're kind of part of the community and they work in a different way. And of course, in national politics, I mean, I am one of the people who knocked on the doors for Pfizer. Unfortunately, we don't have those politicians. They're very removed from their communities, by and large, of course, not all. And that generates a very difficult dynamic. Great. We'll have maybe a minute for each if you want some. One minute just to sort out the economy. Okay. I think a few of the questions we're sort of getting at

So barriers to entry, right? Little tech, alternative models of innovation.

including government-led innovation, right? I'm one of those people who would absolutely say that the government sort of writes itself out of the history of innovation when it has been a leading actor. And, you know, I thought that would change, for God's sake, with the COVID vaccines. But it's been extraordinary how that story has already been sort of rewritten.

I like to sort of, if nothing else, highlight the paradox, which is that current systems of big tech that we have are not as disruptive as they claim to be. They embrace a model of disruptive innovation, but actually the people that are getting disrupted are often the immediate competitors. They're not...

doing that sort of root and branch. They're not enabling the sorts of root and branch changes to society that have meant that industrial revolutions, as Hilary's pointed out, have also been social revolutions.

I think we see lots of ways in which big tech shuts down innovation. And a lot of the time it does that in order to create what tech companies call a moat around themselves, right? This active strategy of countering competition and countering innovation. So I do think we can build a coalition in which people on the right and the left can

rediscover genuine innovation rather than the model that we see at the moment. I'm going to stop before I get all JD Vance again. I mean, I just, on Vance, I think, you know, I think some of us heard him say some of those things like, oh, but, you know, Lina Khan got sacked. So how much we should take what he said seriously. I mean, she was the person to do it, really. Yeah. I mean, in a sense, our state does have a strategy. It's like,

business is open. I mean, in a sense, we're open for business even, you know, it's in a way, because they don't have an idea of how they deal with all of these negative impacts.

and instead think, oh, we need this investment, we need the growth, and we want to be seen as entrepreneurial, we want these people to come here, that actually the strategy is, for large part, let it be. I think there is, in a sense, a strategy there. So, you know, that is a decision that has been made.

And, you know, as you said as well, and I pointed to this huge lobbying power behind this. I mean, this is the main reason I worry about this, the wealth at the very top of society, because they are shaping our policy in every sense. The people versus the politicians on like

Every issue, the people want the rich to be taxed more. Is it happening? No. The people want action on Palestine. Is it happening? No. On so many things, we just see that massive gap. And it's because of what is, you know, who the government is listening to. And I think on tech, this, you know, we've really got to take this seriously. We've got to have much more transparency about taxing.

where money's coming from, what meetings are taking place, you know, what decisions are being made. And we need to call it out and make sure people understand. And alongside that,

create an alternative because what we can't do which is really what's happened I think for the left politically is to make people angry about a problem and then not point out that there's a solution because actually a lot of people reform voters in this country think the rich should be taxed more as well they think that these companies have too much power as well but that has been

push towards a far right agenda rather than an agenda that would actually deal with inequality in this country and give people the material security that they need. I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to our speakers. Thank you to you for your questions. There are a whole bunch of events going on at the LSE this week. So do check out the programme for that. It's LSE Festival Online. And a really important reminder, Hilary, it's

signing copies that are just on sale out the back there so please please go and check out the book um so please join me in thanking our speakers thank you for listening you can subscribe to the lse events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next we hope you join us at another lse event soon