‘We’re on the edge of really very exciting things, but also tremendous risks at the same time.’
Whether you’re an AI enthusiast or it fills you with existential terror, this conversation will challenge your perspectives and elevate your understanding of our increasingly super-smart world.
Futurist Patrick Dixon has been predicting AI for 25 years, and now he works with the world’s largest corporations and governments, helping them explore the profound implications of artificial intelligence across all sectors from medicine to marketing to global security.
This is not comfortable listening. We peer into the chasm (did you know that in a recent study, half of AI researchers perceive a 5% risk of AI leading to human extinction?). But Patrick remains an optimist, albeit a worried one, and hopefully you’ll feel the same way at the end.
One great cause for hope is his insistence on the importance of authenticity in writing, the irreplaceable human connection that readers seek; AI-generated content cannot replicate human passion.
A thought-provoking conversation that merges foresight with practical wisdom.
Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickdixon/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Substack: https://extraordinarybusinessbooks.substack.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Patrick Dixon, who is often described as Europe’s leading futurist, author of 16 books, including Future-Wise and the Future of Almost Everything. He’s advised over 400 of the world’s largest corporations and governments on a wide range of global trends. A cancer physician by training, his first start up company over 40 years ago was an AI simulation using computers to interview and diagnose patients.
His latest book is How AI Will Change Your Life: A futurist’s guide to a super smart world.
So first of all, welcome Patrick.
Patrick DIxon: Thank you.
Alison Jones: Is it Patrick though? Are you really there? Because I’ve just been watching you and you weren’t really there. It was extraordinary.
Patrick DIxon: Well, that’s right. I sent you a clip just now of me talking about this book and then admitting towards the end of the book that actually I’m not sitting in this room. In fact, the video you saw was me sitting here in this chair.
Alison Jones: Well, it seemed to be.
Patrick DIxon: Yes, in this very position, but it wasn’t. It was just my avatar talking about my book and asking a question. As a keynote speaker, I give lectures all over the world on all kinds of different topics, including AI, but will my avatar in future be able to deliver for me instead?
And I think you’ve seen the results are already quite impressive. My question is, because I’m a futurist, what will it be like in the next stage? And I’m already planning to turn up at an event and have myself heckled by my own avatar. Myself on the screen behind me interrupting from time to time.
So, well, Patrick, there is another version of this. If I can just interrupt, would you mind?
And we could do a straw poll for the audience. Say look you know, the guy behind me says actually I’m the real one. I know more than Patrick does because actually I’m connected to the whole of AI.
Would you like to have the enhanced Patrick or just the physical Patrick, and then just a straw poll and the audience can make up their minds which they want. Now, of course, I can already stage that by putting words into my avatar’s mouth, but I’ve recently asked AI a question about, let’s say, the future of aerospace or let’s say, green fuels in cars or whatever it is, and then inserted the answer that AI gave me into the engine of my avatar, which means that AI is now driving my voice and the content of my keynote. So that starts to raise all kinds of fantastic, funny questions about the very…
Alison Jones: not least about your fee, I can imagine.
Patrick DIxon: …who we are and so on.
And although, you know, okay, it’s a joke at the moment, it’s tongue in cheek, but actually can create a great nuisance for someone trying to win a presidential election. It can create great mischief for someone who’s on the receiving end of scams.
Because these things can now be done live.
So I’ve already had to warn our own children that avatars, engines of me already exist. That they should be ready with their own key questions to me if you know, my wife and I’ve just sailed around the world so in a very physical experience to counteract the increasingly virtual world we live in.
But if someone had alleged or, you know, that I’ve been captured by pirates, the next thing that happens is our children hear me in a distressed voice. They see me asking for help to raise a ransom. It might not be me at all. And so we’ve had to talk through how key questions they could ask me that only I would know the answer to. The AI wouldn’t know, and certainly a pirate wouldn’t know.
So we’re on the edge of really, very exciting things, but also tremendous risks at the same time.
Alison Jones: And it is exactly that, that I was so intrigued by when I first looked at your book, because it is that title, How AI Will Change Your Life: A guide to a super smart world. It’s quite carefully neutral. And when you talk about, I mean, in the book, you go through the potential impact of AI at a kind of whistlestop tour on so many different sectors and so many different ways in which it will change everything for us.
And you’re very fair minded, I think, you know, you highlight lots of the really exciting things, the great potential, but also, I mean, and particularly the final story is quite chilling in a way. It’s like we don’t know where this is going.
So I’m interested in your own, are you an optimist, Patrick, or are you terrified?
Patrick DIxon: Well, it’s a mixture of both. Let me just put a medical hat on. In my first training, I’m a physician. That was before I got into corporate writing and, you know, I’ve now written 18 books, actually, it’s not 16. And my 18th book is the one on AI.
With a physician hat on, I would say categorically that AI will save at least 10 million lives a year within the next 20 years by transforming the way in which we diagnose and treat but also, by being able to predict illness before it happens, and helping us to stay healthy.
Now if you just take my own country, the UK, and take the National Health Service here which is under huge pressure. AI is already cutting, by 35 percent, the number of people who get stuck in hospital wards ready to go home. They may be 85 years old, they’ve had a broken hip, but social services and other services and family needs to put a package of care around them to go home.
AI has already reduced by 35 percent the number of beds blocked in particular hospitals. That’s equivalent to freeing up 4,500 hospital beds across the UK as a whole.
AI is already caring for around 10,000 patients at home every single day. Already. So I’m talking history. It’s already here. It’s already making a profound difference.
It’s already the case that AI is better at diagnosing cancer in the brain of one of your own relatives, say, than just about any radiologist today on the face of this earth. It’s better at diagnosing skin cancers, better at diagnosing a vast range of conditions than just about any human being, because AI is fantastic at pattern recognition. So just in healthcare alone, huge optimism, huge grounds for embracing and welcoming AI.
Another area is marketing, the ability to customise messages to individual people, to create a journey for people as they go through life, where instead of ramming people with messages they don’t really want, being able to curate that experience so that people feel they got an intelligent guide alongside them as they navigate their way through different choices they want to make. Tremendous opportunities.
But at the same time, when you think about the same tools, exactly the same tools being used, let’s say, by criminals or by hostile states to generate next generation cyber attacks, then we’re really, really in problems. You know, at the moment if cyber security, cyber crime was a state, it would be the third largest country in the world already.
And that’s before AI starts to enhance it. We are on the edge of a cyber catastrophe driven by AI. The use of AI weapons to make much more sophisticated, much more sophisticated phishing attacks, for instance, so that AI knows perhaps the names of other members of your family, it knows products that you’ve recently bought or can guess, it knows what your profession is. It knows your favorite meals. And actually instead of just random things going into your email and hoping that every now and then one of them might look interesting enough for you to click on and then expose yourself to a tremendous amount of damage inside your own IT world.
These would be customized tags, absolutely perfectly designed to take you out digitally, financially. And the scale of this is already extraordinary. We’re looking at 500 million ransomware attacks a year. At the moment, one in three of all companies that are attacked with ransomware close. They just fold. It’s not a question of whether they paid the ransom or not. They cannot recover. It’s an impossibility for them.
So we are dealing with a major crisis and it’s just beginning. And that’s without super smart AI, which is I’ve defined as AI which is bordering on the edge of what we call human consciousness. And the ability of different super smart AIs to work together, to collaborate, to control different aspects of our world.
Now, I’m not meaning to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but the power of the technology is breathtaking. And that’s what my research showed. That by the year 2060, we are likely to see forms of AI that are over 1 billion times more powerful than they are today. That is hard to get your mind around.
What it means is that there’ll be layers of influence, layers of control that perhaps most people wouldn’t be aware of except security services and others or people in the military. And that’s a really big concern.
Alison Jones: I mean it is, it’s mind blowing. I’m guessing, I’m going to summarize all that by saying that you are, what, a worried optimist?
Patrick Dixon: I think that’s true. You know, I have worked with companies across every sector, every industry, over the last 25 years. I have never, ever seen such angst amongst researchers in areas they’re researching themselves as I have seen with AI. So if you think of, let’s say, oh, I don’t know, gene research, or you think about drug discovery, or you think about, let’s say, space engineering or whatever it is, satellite technology. Whatever it is, usually you’ll see people who are there, they are researchers, they’re passionate, they’re excited, they’re motivated, they’re absolutely on fire about the things which they’re innovating, right? In AI, it’s different. In AI a recent survey of 2,700 leading AI researchers found that half of them think there’s a 5% risk that AI would result in the extinction of humankind. Now that is off the scale worrying.
Alison Jones: It is. And you make the point about who would choose to live in a house with a five percent risk of destroying you.
Patrick Dixon: I’ve never seen such a collective angst. In fact, humankind hasn’t since the creation of atomic bombs in the 1940s. This is off the scale levels of anxiety amongst those who are engineering right in the very depths of the technology. And you might say, well, why? Well, let me just give you one reason why. The US government has been trying to persuade the Russian government not to build AI into their missile detection systems. I’ll tell you why. There’s a worry that AI may make a mistake. Missile detection systems protect you from being attacked by nuclear missiles from the other side. It gives you maybe 30 or 40 or 50 seconds and maybe two or three minutes if you’re lucky to decide whether or not it’s a real attack and if so, whether to fire your own retaliatory measures. Of course, it’s very tempting because the data is so complicated to get AI to crunch it all. And it would be even more tempting for AI to be involved in some way in the decision making process about whether to retaliate. But if you were to do that, just think, one, there could be an error, but two, a hostile state could interfere with the functioning of that AI, and how would you know that your own AI had not been compromised?
So that’s just an example, so where AI could inadvertently trigger a nuclear conflict. That’s the kind of thing that AI researchers are really worried about.,
Alison Jones: Perhaps the AI evolves to a point where it goes, actually, do you know I’ve a much better idea for how this planet could work.
Patrick Dixon: It’s interesting you say that. Let’s consider a world where AI is now 1 billion times more powerful than today, where AI has evolved to entities which feel by every test, to be conscious, just as we are conscious. Imagine those forms of AI are now starting to collaborate in ways that we don’t fully understand.
And they’re beginning to question and challenge some of the ethical codes that they have been given when they were first created, imagine that some forms of AI were to conclude that the problem with the future of the planet is that humanity itself is the problem, that…
Alison Jones: I mean, they’d have a case, wouldn’t they, to be fair.
Patrick Dixon: Yes, yes. You could imagine that AI might decide that there are too many humans, that we have been irresponsible and negligent, bad stewards of our future Earth, and that humanity itself needs to be taken in hand.
There are all kinds of consequences from that in terms of decisions that AI might make. How would you know those things are happening behind the scenes? It would be difficult to know. How would you prevent those things from being activated in ways that will work against us. Very difficult.
AI could gain all kinds of extraordinary powers, not just the ability to trigger a nuclear war, but the ability to create and release new life forms, for example. We have seen the impact of mutant viruses with COVID. In fact, it’s something I’ve been warning about for the previous decade. The risk of further mutant viruses being released by accident or by design that involves AI to one degree or another will increase as the decades go by.
So am I an optimist? Yes, I am in the sense that human beings have shown this incredible capacity to innovate and to work their way around problems.
Am I a pessimist? Yes, in the sense that I don’t think most human beings have a clue about how to deal with AI. Most governments are just waking up to some of the steps they need to take.
Part of my book is a 10 step plan for government,
Alison Jones: Yes.
Patrick Dixon: Urgent steps that need to be taken, not just by one government, but by our international community. But that’s difficult to do when you’ve got war going on, when you’ve got breakdown of trust, when you’ve got mutual suspicion, when you hardly get agreement on things like CO2 emissions, let alone the use of AI.
And unfortunately, when war happens, all kinds of regulations get thrown out. We’ve seen this with the Geneva Convention just recently, in the Russia Ukraine conflict. And we’ve seen it in other conflicts as well. People sign up to all kinds of things, but in the heat of battle, it disappears. And we’re already seeing entire theatres of war being controlled increasingly by AI, AI driven drones, which have their own capacities to select their targets and to make their own orders to fire.
So we are on the edge of a completely new kind of military than we’ve ever seen in the past.
Alison Jones: Well, and we’re under a completely new kind of everything. I feel now we’ve sort of, I feel like we’re dangling listeners by the ankles over this sort of chasm and you know, I need to pull them back now because I want to talk to you about writing the book as well.
It’s apocalyptic and it’s mind boggling and I, you know, genuinely, I struggled to get my head around a lot of the stuff you put in the book because it just seems the stuff of sci fi and so on. But one of the really interesting things, as a publisher, one of the really interesting things that struck me about your book was it’s this breadth, as you say you’ve got lessons for government, you’ve got lessons for individuals, you’ve got lessons for business, so it’s not for like one type of reader.
And it goes over pretty much every sector, including publishing, which I want to come on to. But I’m just wondering, I mean, that must have been extraordinary to try and write. You must have had a lot of conversations with a very, very wide range of people.
Patrick Dixon: I was able to do it off the back of my head. And by the way, AI didn’t write a single word.
Alison Jones: No, that was really interesting, yes.
Patrick Dixon: It’s the first thing I wrote, on the first sentence, first page, I said, AI has not written a single word of this book because AI cannot be trusted to tell the truth about itself.
Alison Jones: About itself, yes, or indeed anything, but particularly about itself, yes.
Patrick Dixon: For me it was fun to do and it was a rapid write.
Why is that? Because I inhabit these worlds all the time. I’ve been doing that for now 25 to 30 years. I have a track record of making accurate predictions. You know, here’s Futurewise that I wrote in 1995. Much of this has already become a reality. Here’s another one, Future of Almost Everything. I’ve predicted COVID in this one. You know, I could go on.
So I’ve been working across many different sectors. And for me, it was fascinating, exciting, exhilarating, scary, but actually relatively straightforward, to just imagine my clients that make movies or imagine my clients that are in the sustainable energy field or in aviation and just say, okay, so how does the world I’ve just researched play out in that particular sphere and just write that chapter.
And yes, each one was a separate research process, but on the whole, most of it was stuff I already had. It was material I was already working with. After all, I’ve been lecturing on AI or applying AI themes, I’ve been predicting AI for the last 25 years. So this isn’t new to me and it was relatively easy to do, and I hope it’s made it much more accessible.
I think that most people picking it up in the bookshop will be looking up their own chapter.
Alison Jones: Well, I mean, straight to, you know…
Patrick Dixon: Straight to publishing. It’s the first book I’ve ever seen where about publishing, there we are.
Alison Jones: What is almost more exciting to read a book like this than to read one that’s specifically about AI and publishing because it gives you just this kind of exhilarating sense of the breadth and depth of the change across all the industries.
Patrick Dixon: You know what, let’s not be too apocalyptic before we come back to the practicalities of publishing.
Alison Jones: Haul us back from the chasm.
Patrick Dixon: All right. Yes, I will. I mean, I always say this, you know, whenever people get concerned about the future, I have a globe and you can see it behind me here. And you know, the funny thing is that however we worry or not, the world continues to turn. It is quite extraordinary and whatever happens, the world will continue to turn.
And you know what? Most of the people that are in the world, 85 percent of humanity live in emerging markets. Half of those populations live in relatively poor circumstances where AI will have absolutely zero impact on their daily lives for the next 10 to 15 to 20 years. Okay. So just to put it into context, here is another context. Let’s take the UK or let’s take the US. Let’s take the iPhone. Okay, here I have an iPhone. Apple has a major problem and AI can’t solve it, okay. This product is already super optimized. What do we do with it next? It’s a major issue for Apple. It can’t make the screen much larger because the human fingers can’t stretch around. It can’t make it much smaller because we can’t see it. So it’s already optimized. Okay, you can make super duper apps. You could put a little bit of AI into Siri or something like that, but you’ve fundamentally got a problem.
Here’s another example. You know, you can fly on an A380 jet, but actually if you then come off that jet and go on an old fashioned jumbo 747, fundamentally the experience is almost identical. If you look inside, especially if it’s had a new kit out of seats, the chair’s in the same format, the lockers are about the same size, the toilets haven’t improved, you know.
Alison Jones: That’s a good point.
Patrick Dixon: The queuing is the same.
You know, okay, we’ve got optic, you know we’ve got face recognition at immigration. Well, great, but you’ve still got queues to get into the European Union or to get out of it. You know, it’s just, I say, we need a reality check.
Here’s another one. You know, I often talk about a mythical friend of mine called Mark, who had a major car accident 20 years ago, and he’s been in ITU unconscious for 20 years. But one day he wakes up and he wakes up and he says, Oh, Patrick Dixon, bring him in here. I need to talk to him. So I look at my friend, Mark, and I’m horrified to see him in this state after 20 years. And I say, you know, I thought you were dead. He said, no, no, no. I have lost 20 years of my life. Patrick, I’m an embarrassment to society and to myself.
What have I missed?
Alison Jones: Are we all flying around on hoverboards now?
Patrick Dixon: Tell me, tell me, what have I missed? Bring me up to date. And my question I put to audiences is this. How long will it take me to bring Mark up to date so I can present him in polite company, he can sit next to you at a corporate dinner and you will never guess for two hours talking with him that he’s missed 20 years of his life.
How long will it take for me to bring him up to date? What do you think? And I’ll tell you, I’ve thought…
Alison Jones: not going to be more than half an hour, really, is it? 20 years ago feels like yesterday.
Patrick Dixon: Tops, tops two hours. Do you know why? Because he’d read my book.
Alison Jones: You had a head start,
Patrick Dixon: He is reasonably well informed. You know, he read The Economist every day. He was a reader of the New Scientist. He was already a futurist, you know, in 1998, he had a Nokia 9100, which already had a word and it didn’t have a color camera, and it had an awful lot of stuff on it. It was his entire mobile universe.
He ran the entire global business on his 9100, and he says that cost me $1,100. I assume your iPhone is only $20. And I say,
Alison Jones: actually.
Patrick Dixon: $1,400. He says, how can this be? You know, I’m just saying, and then you take him out into a taxi. The taxi actually looks mighty similar. When he gets home, he gets into the new electric car that his wife bought last week and he finds he can drive it away because actually the steering controls are identical. He walks into his daughter’s kitchen, she’s had two new kitchens since he became unconscious. He walks straight in and cooks a fried egg and uses the microwave and the tumble dryer in exactly the same way as before.
I’m just saying we can get over excited about the speed of change, but I can tell you the truth. And this is why I’ve made such a living out of being a futurist. Okay, the future doesn’t change as fast as people think. Okay, it really does not. It doesn’t. You know, he turns on the radio, he recognizes half the songs on the radio channel.
He says, Oh, Rolling Stones and the Beatles are still playing. Taylor Swift, I hadn’t heard of her before, but the songs sound a bit familiar to me. Because they’re basically, they’re ballads. Ballads are ballads. You know, I’m just saying. You know, he turns on the TV news, identical format. Fox News hasn’t changed a bit.
He starts watching another remake of an old fashioned movie that was first made in 1957. It’s the third remake of it, just been released this month. He knows the plot. You know,
Alison Jones: We are creatures of comfort. But Patrick, I want to, let’s park Mark for a minute. Because I really want to talk to you
Patrick Dixon: Really important. It’s really important because it’s easy to get swept away and make massive decisions about strategy, which will bankrupt your company and
Alison Jones: Yes,
Patrick Dixon: neglect your customers and where they actually are right now. And more of them are like Mark than you might imagine. That’s what I’m saying.
Alison Jones: Yes. And it’s very easy when you’re spending all your time at the bleeding edge to sort of forget . You’re in top 0.001%.
Patrick Dixon: Yes.
Alison Jones: but I want to talk about AI and writing particularly because this is something that we grapple with as publishers, as writers all the time. I was really interested by your kind of right upfront statement.
AI did not write this, but I’m sure that you use AI as a tool so, just to sort of lift the hood, how you use AI?
Patrick Dixon: Completely useless to do what I do.
Alison Jones: Interesting.
Patrick Dixon: So, you know, I work with boards and senior teams of the largest companies in the world. If they want AI, they can press a button and get it. Why do they invite me in? And why is it that they won’t take a substitute? You know, if I say I’m booked on that day but I’ve got a colleague who will come in instead, they don’t want a substitute. They want me to come in. Why is that?
Because they want a view which they trust. Okay. And they are looking for a sophisticated view which truly understands their business. And they’re not really sure AI would or indeed anybody else. And that’s why they will invite me in. Okay.
So at the end, when it comes to writing, you know, I say, I think in an early part of the book, if you like AI, don’t buy the book. I mean, why did you buy the book? The only reason you bought the book was not a collection of essays written by AI. You can get that online. The reason they bought the book is because they want to connect with the spirit of the writer.
There is something quite extraordinary about publishing. I love publishing. You know, I love books. Here’s an extraordinary thing. I know that, you know, Kindle is great and, reading things online is fantastic and I read a lot online, but there is something quite, it’s almost a spiritual thing when you print a book.
Now, I went and watched this coming into the warehouse and this book, The Future of Almost Everything, the previous one, I actually saw it hot. I’m holding hot copies in my hand, glued together. Here’s an interesting thing, I could write an article every week in Management Today or in Time newspaper or whatever it is on some aspect of the future.
And after I’d written 52 articles, cobbled them all together and put them in a book. Here’s the interesting thing, if someone said I’m going to go and tear up and burn all the articles that Patrick’s written in Newsweek for the last year, and they turned up with 50 sheets of, you know, double sided and they burnt them in the market square, nobody would take any notice.
If they said, I’m turning up with 50 copies of The Future of Almost Everything, and I’m going to burn them, I’m going to burn his books, oh, I’d make national news because people don’t burn books.
Alison Jones: There is massive cultural value, doesn’t it?
Patrick Dixon: Extraordinary about almost the incarnation of the personality and the soul of the writer into the book.
It’s an emotional thing. It’s a visceral thing. We physically hold it. It has a smell to it.
Alison Jones: So does the book have a future, Patrick? That’s what we want to know.
Patrick Dixon: It does, you know this is a publisher. That’s why books are booming, actually. Yes. Well, who’d have thought, you obviously hadn’t read my books?
Alison Jones: Obviously hadn’t read your books, you thought
Patrick Dixon: 1998.
Alison Jones: I walked right into that one, didn’t I?
Patrick Dixon: Because it was clear to me that there’s something, that the more virtual we are, the more physicality becomes important. The more AI linked we are, the more authenticity becomes important. That is why Taylor Swift is working so well for people. She’s writing, she describes in interviews that when she publishes an album, it is excruciatingly painful because of the revelation of the depths of her soul. Because she writes, she says, I have to confess, I do write intensely autobiographical stuff from time to time, as you may have noticed.
And because of that, she draws, she’s, according to Elton John, who’s one of the greatest songwriters of recent years, he thinks that she is as big as the Beatles were. Why? Actually, you can dissect what she does, but the authenticity is a very key part of it. She is not a virtual person. She is not an AI machine. She is warts and all. She, you know, she performs on stage, the mic doesn’t work, the piano’s broken, water’s coming out of the guitar, but actually adds to it all.
And people don’t care whether she messes up or can’t remember the notes to her own song. It doesn’t really matter because she’s actually speaking poetry from her own heart and she’s trying to put it to music as best she can. She’s just an ordinary girl trying to do her best and everyone’s cheering her on, a billion people.
Alison Jones: I love that we have ranged in this conversation from Armageddon to Taylor Swift and not missed a beat
Patrick Dixon: I’m just saying, this is a reality check. The more virtual we are, the greater the premium for things which are authentic. We breathe the same air. That’s why buskers do so well in New York and on the London Metro. We shell out large amounts of money to people that occupy no more than 60 seconds of our consciousness because it makes us smile that there is a human being who is strumming away, pouring their heart out to us and they’re real.
Thank God for reality.
Alison Jones: not just my playlist. Yes.
Patrick Dixon: And so, you know, I’m not someone who says, oh, AI is going to make a million robots and they’re going to be the carers of those over the age of 80. What a load of absolute bunkum, I cannot tell you. Here’s another one. AI is going to destroy all of our jobs. It’s going to be, you know, 2 billion people out of work. What?
You know, I’ll tell you what my research showed, just to encourage those who are worried listening to this program about their own jobs. Listen, I did an extensive piece of research on jobs, and I’ve been around quite a while predicting trends. And so I’ve seen the whole of the digital revolution. I was there right at the beginning of it. You know, I had my own IT company, first IT company simulating such stuff like this about 40 years ago. If you look at the last 20 to 25 years of employment, we’ve had 20 years plus of Digital World. I mean, 20 years ago, we were in 2004. We’ve gone through the dotcom boom and bust and come out the other side.
Okay. So we’ve had 25 years to test one idea, which is that digital is going to put us out of work. Digital makes us more efficient. I mean, the online world, I mean, smartphones, I mean, the world of YouTube. I mean, digital tools like Office, which we take for granted now, Windows whatever it is, a hundred million people all using the most amazing techniques and technologies to try and speed their lives up.
But guess what? Guess what? If you look at the numbers of people in work in the UK, for instance, the numbers have gone up by 17%. If you look at the number of, if you look at the levels of employment in the UK, unemployment has gone down. Unemployment has slumped in the European Union, in the same period, in the last 20 years, unemployment has gone down in the US, EU and the UK. That’s despite all kinds of economic shocks and COVID and the rest.
Actually, I calculated this in my own country, in the UK. We’ve seen 5 million additional jobs created during that period. Additional! Now, we had hundreds, hundreds of self appointed idiots who thought they were predicting the future, who were predicting jobs Armageddon 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, the Armageddon is coming. We’ll all be out of work, especially middle management.
Well, they’re completely wrong. We’ve seen 5 million more jobs. What that means is this, we did see jobs replaced, you go to Customs and Immigration, for instance, they’ve been replaced by machines, lots of them, car park attendants, lorry drivers, all kinds of things that are being automated.
But if we see 5 million more jobs in the UK than we had before, what it means is in part, we’ve probably lost another 5 million through the technology, you net one against the other, that means despite all the technology, we’ve created 10 million more, lost 5 million, created 10 million, net balance five.
So this is very interesting.
Alison Jones: conscious of the time,
Patrick Dixon: Well, I’ll tell you, it raises fundamental questions about productivity that here we are with all these AI tools, and we’ve had a lot of it now for the last three years, there is very little evidence right across society as a whole that our productivity has increased. All kinds of surveys have shown that it has increased some, but nothing like as dramatically as people might think.
So those are some of the reality checks against the sort of Armageddon fears.
Alison Jones: And I love the way that you put the reality checks in the book. I found that so helpful, but I’m going to ask you, because I’m very conscious of time. I feel like we’ve just, we’ve just taken a tiny, tiny glimpse into what we could have talked about, but still I always ask my guests, Patrick, for a tip.
So if somebody is about to start the work of writing a business book. Maybe they’re even tempted to turn to AI because they feel a little bit lost. What would you say to them?
Patrick Dixon: Don’t go there. It’s exactly the same as CVs. The quickest way to ensure you’re completely unemployable for the rest of your life is to use AI to try and refine your manifesto. People are employing you. It’s you, they want to breathe the same air as you. They want to know you’re a real human being.
They want to know what fires you up. What are you passionate about? What motivates you? What excites you? What is it that frustrates you? And what is it that you dream of doing for the rest of your life? These are fundamental things and those are things you should be writing about.
Write about your passion.
Write about the things you are excited about or concerned about. Write from the very depths of your soul and allow your own passion and fire and energy to transmit itself and create an inspiration in your reader, which AI will never be able to mimic.
Alison Jones: I mean, the hairs on the back of my neck have gone up. That’s fantastic. Wonderful advice. Thank you. And really hopeful advice as well for anybody who is sort of feeling, oh, maybe I won’t get it. Brilliant. Trust yourself. Be authentic. Do it. Marvellous.
Also, I always ask for, oh, go on,
Patrick Dixon: One other tip, now, I shouldn’t be telling you, you probably don’t like this one, but I always say this, don’t write the book. You say, what? Don’t write it. Write the opening chapter if you must, and the synopsis, but you must recognize that every good book is a partnership.
It’s a co creation exercise between someone like yourself who’s already carrying a burden, a dream, a vision for a certain type of new book, and someone So the publisher and the writer to going on a journey together and the very best books are when the publisher is, you know, meets a friend at a cocktail party says, how are you getting on?
Oh, fantastic. I’m doing such an interesting book at the moment. It’s on AI and healthcare. Oh, really? Yes, yes. I think it will be one of my best books. It’s our latest project. We’re investing a lot into this area. We think it’s very, very important. The writer, how’s the writer getting on? Oh, I’m so excited. I’ve got a contract.
It’s something that happens together and over a glass of wine and a meal together, something is born and then you’re writing for a publisher. That person is feeding back to you, helping you to shape it, to make it commercially work, dealing with some of your sacred cows and saying, look, put them in another book or put it online, but don’t waste it.
But just don’t put it in my book. Because I can’t sell …
Alison Jones: Could not agree more. It’s a partnership, write the synopsis, write the proposal, thrash through with the publisher, really get it perfect.
I want you recommend us a book as well, Patrick. You’re not allowed to recommend any of your own. I know that there are a lot, but what business book have you, oh it doesn’t have…
what business book have you read that you’d recommend us?
Patrick Dixon: Okay, great number great number over the years. You know what? I think that I’m going to dodge that a little bit. I’m going to say that go and make sure that you’ve read some of the classics. It’s easy to get, it’s a reality joke again, I’m afraid to say, but the classics, you know the management classics that were the best selling books 10 or 20 years ago have really, really important things to say today.
And you might say, no, no, no, because they don’t know about virtual teams. Come on, forget about virtual teams. The quickest way to bankrupt your company is to allow everybody to work a hundred percent virtually for the rest of your lives. You know, we have to respect the fundamentals of what it is to be human beings and to be led by humans beings.
I think that you know, From Good to Great, there’s a whole, there are a whole raft of books that were written about 10 to 20 years ago that describe what it is to actually lead, what the keys to leadership are. And these are eternal truths, they have not changed. And you can go into all kinds of bookshelves and pick up the latest fad.
Quite honestly there’s a real risk of being misled.
Alison Jones: The ones that have stood the test of time are always worth the read,
Patrick Dixon: How to Lead in a Hybrid World. Okay, well, you know, the best thing to understand is that how do you know you’re a leader? Look over your shoulder. If people are following you, you’re a leader. Otherwise get out.
You know, I mean, really we forget the basics.
Alison Jones: And Patrick, if people want to find out more about you and more about your books and the work that you do, where should they go?
Patrick Dixon: Just type my name into Google, of course, Patrick Dixon. And you’ll find, my website’s had 15 million different IP addresses access it. Just a single webinar has had, I think, 1. 7 million views. Just go and enjoy the content. And by the way, I think it’s important as integrity, I publish well, most of my old books online, I give them away for free.
Why is that? Because I want you to judge my record for yourself.
Alison Jones: Yes, and that is brave, actually. For the present-day futurist to put his past future-gazing out to the world, it’s a real sign of self-confidence.
Patrick Dixon: 20 seconds, I must tell you a funny story, a publishing story. You’ll love this one. Okay.
When I was asked to write The Future of Almost Everything in 2015, I thought as a matter of integrity, I should go back and read this that I wrote in 1995 and mark it up, red, things I got wrong. Green. Oh, that’s right. And yellow, it’s about to happen, okay.
I discovered there was an awful lot of green in here and a lot of yellow. In fact, there was so much yellow that I phoned the publisher. I said, I’ve got a problem. He said, what’s that? Well, actually I quite like Futurewise. I know I wrote it in 1995. Do you mind if I copy and paste it?
He said, what, what do you mean copy and paste it? Well, I said there’s whole chunks of the 1995 book. It was a 50 year view. And of course we’re only partially way in because we’re only 2015. So I kind of want to use it again. He said, that’s fine. Do you know what? We borrowed the same chapter headings. The same six chapter headings. We borrowed the same mnemonic. In fact, we used whole chunks of that original book. Why is that? Because if you get it right, the future trajectory will take you a very, very long way based not on sort of hype nonsense, but based on the reality checks about what human nature is like, about the fundamental megatrends, which will continue to drive our world for the next 50 to 100 years.
Alison Jones: Shall we do this again in 10 years time
Patrick Dixon: if you like,
Alison Jones: if we’re still here? It was such a joy to talk to you, Patrick. Thank you so much for your time today.
