YouSaid · the spoken record

James Manyika

lines on the record: 60
first: 2025-01-13
most recent: 2025-01-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Think it's going to dramatically improve the world, but that's not going to happen automatically. We have to make it so. So the choices that we make, Alister, about safety approach, you know, responsibility, I think are going to matter a lot. The applications to which we put this technology to will matter a lot. So I think it's up to us.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assigned was that we need to think deeply about, because that was generally phrased statement, what I signed on to was the idea that we need to think deeply about the societal implications of this technology. Long before we get to what's called artificial general intelligence to think about the risks and the complexities.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Who's tied to convene some of us at the Vatican to talk about? I remember an extraordinary meeting that a few of us read was there, you know, Sam Altman and Demis Sabis and others went to the Vatican to spend time in 2015 with Pope Francis, who deeply wanted to understand AI and where this was going. And his deep concern was around issues of equity, what it means for people in society and how we make sure that everybody benefits from this. So he's been deeply interested in this for quite some time.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you at least two of the first. I remember back in 2014, I was at least in regular conversation with two leaders who deeply were interested in AI before any of it happened. One of them was Barack Obama. I used to have these meetings at the White House where he actually deeply wanted to understand this. And I was part of those discussions. The other one was Pope Francis.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Land of five minutes. That's what that quantum computer did. But the really big step, though, towards building a fully erocated quantum computer was the fact that we're able to make a big step in what's called error correction to show that as you add more quantum qubits, qubits as in quantum bits as opposed to normal digital bits, you can actually reduce exponentially the errors or the noise associated with them. So this is an important step towards building quantum computers.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not quite perfect quantum computers can already do extraordinary things. One is we did a computation in under five minutes that would take the world's fastest supercomputer get this ten to the power twenty five years. That's ten septillion years. That's 10 with 25 zeros next to it. That's far, far older than the age of the universe several times over.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classic computing systems basically operate on ones and zeros, either in the one state or the zero state. That's what's called Boolean logic, and that's how those work. Quantum computing, on the other hand, allows for the possibility that one and zero can both be true at the same time. And what that opens up is the possibility of understanding many, many more states, many, many more configurations of things. In fact, you're able to explore computations in a very short amount of time that you couldn't with a classic computer. And this may blow your mind. So first of all, quantum computers, they're not fully functional yet, just to be perfectly clear. There's still a lot of work going on to build what are called fully fault-tolerant error corrected quantum computers. That's still a long way away. But we're already in this intermediate stage where our”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, quantum computing is extraordinarily exciting in the sense that, I mean, it goes back, the person who first came up with the idea of quantum computing was actually Richard Feynman in 1981, who basically said, look, reality is inherently quantum. And so if we want to understand it, at some point we're going to have to build a quantum computer because if we're going to, in any computer that's going to try to understand the nature of reality, is going to have to be a quantum computer.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't have access to those resources now. Some of those kids are starting to use these systems to learn and to write code. I think that's great. So I think when I worry about how do we make sure everybody benefits, it's everybody everywhere, not just in the developing world, but also even in the advanced economies.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few concerns. One is they're not participating both in the development of this technology and the governance of it. And then the other is that they don't have the capacity to be able to fully benefit from this. And that capacity ranges from everything from digital infrastructure to even in some cases electricity. So because if you don't have digital infrastructure and electricity, forget AI, benefit from AI. There's some basic things you need that need to be in place. So I do worry about that quite a bit to this question of how do we make sure everybody and by everybody I don't think it's just in the developing world. It even includes in communities inside developed economies. I mean, I've spent time, for example, in California, in some communities and districts where kids were promised that somebody was going to show up someday and teach them how to code never did.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I certainly worry about the potential that not everybody will benefit from this technology. I would like everybody to benefit, both, you know, I'd like to see many more companies participate in this. I'd like to see many more countries participate in this. I'd like to see the thing I worry about Alistair is I think about what happened with COVID where the world invented vaccines and then not everybody got them, at least not initially. And some countries, some people got them and others didn't. I worry that even as we advance the bounty from this in science and knowledge and all of these things, it may end up just benefiting a few. So I think that's one of the things we have to address. In fact, the work that we did at the UN highlighted this quite a bit. It highlighted that on the one hand, while much of the rest of the world, the so-called global south, tends to be generally optimistic about this technology. They do have a”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On AI governance. One of the things that many of the people from the Global South highlighted quite a bit is that when we talk about the risks of AI, we should talk about certainly misapplication and misuse, but we should also talk about missed use. And the missed use speaks to this idea that there are places where there aren't other alternatives. And this technology could provide alternatives.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About education, how we think about work. So I see all of that, and it's both the positive and the complexities. And I think where we end up is a function of what we choose to do. So I always think when it comes to how to think about regulation, we should certainly think about how do we address the risks and concerns that we have in all those complexities. But in addition to that, we should also think about how we enable all the extraordinary beneficial uses. You know, this is part of what takes me back, Alistair, to where we began this conversation. You know, I grew up in a township where often people did have access to resources, didn't have access to schools, didn't have access to libraries, didn't have access to doctors and so forth. And so I think this technology has the potential to give access to those things. I remember when we did the work at the UN, as Roy mentioned, I was co-chairing this.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, because what I like about the SDGs, by the way, is the fact that it's probably the best expression that humanity has about what we want to improve about the world and the fact that 193 countries have agreed to them, at least agreed that's the right list. So I see all those potential benefits. At the same time, Alistair, I also see the complexities and the risks. And there too, you know, we could go into them, right? I see the potential for harm that could happen in these systems don't perform as expected. So safety risks, accuracy risks, and those kinds of things. I also see the potential risks from misuse. Think about deep fakes. Think about manipulation and all kinds of those kinds of risks. But I also see the risks that could come or the challenges that could come from the changes to our societal structure as a result of this. So think about the impact on, are we thinking?”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I start with the view that anytime you have a very powerful technology, if it's powerful enough, it's going to hopefully bring extraordinary benefits, but also at the same time create some amount of complexity and risk. And I think this is such a technology. So my starting point, Alistair, is I think where we end up is a function of what we choose to do, which is what I was trying to frame in that essay. Because on the one hand, I see extraordinary benefits to, as I said, to people, to the economy, to advancing science, even tackling things like the SDGs, these big societal things. And we're seeing examples of that already today. So I see all of that.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or structurobiology, but in other fields as well from fusion to material science, so the potential to benefit in advanced science is really quite exciting”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does that mean for our cities and agencies? So if you're solving for safety, you might say that's an extraordinarily wonderful thing. In fact, right now, you know, you know, a week now, Waymos in San Francisco and a few other cities are doing something like over 175,000 rides a week. So people are getting quite comfortable with these cars for their safety. And in fact, a lot of the users of them tend to be often at night. Women use them a lot at night. They're considered kind of safe and trustworthy. But we're going to have to think about how do we think about agency? How do we think about safety? How do we think about other modes of transportation? I think it's quite an exciting prospect. But the thing I also wanted to mention, by the way, in addition to some of these economic things, is the potential impact for AI to advance science. And so what we're seeing with AI advancing science is happening not just in”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so I live in San Francisco. We've had travelers cars, Waymos running around San Francisco for the last year and a half, and they're extraordinary. In fact, I personally have always had a strong interest in this because I remember when I first moved to California, one of the ideas that I toyed with with some of my friends was to use some of the AI and robotics work we'd been doing to build autonomous vehicles. There used to be this competition called the DAPA Driverless Car Contest, which used to happen where people used to compete to build cars to drive across the desert in America autonomously. So this is something I was always very interested in. But now, fast forward to where we are now, we now have fully autonomous cars driving around San Francisco, and they're far safer than your average driver. They're not distracted. They're paying attention to all the rules. So I think from a safety standpoint, these are quite remarkable. But we are going to have to think about”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand that. So the economic benefits all the way from small businesses to large businesses ultimately to economies, especially including workers enabled by the power of this technology, is what drives labor productivity and least economic prosperity.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The economic potential, so it's been known for a long time that productivity is a driver of economic growth and prosperity. It's the reason why economists worry about productivity. When productivity is low, we don't have GDP growth. And in fact, if you look at much of what's driven productivity growth throughout human history, a lot of it's been technological innovation. And in fact, in the case of, you know, where do we think we're going to get technological innovation? It's mostly coming from AI. So we're going to think about transforming sectors like healthcare, industries and manufacturing. And then even small businesses, the fact that a small business can now use these systems to be able to understand and do better marketing, to be able to understand regulations, to be able to say, you know, I operate in this space. What are the regulations that are applicable to me? As opposed to going to read all hundreds and hundreds of pages of regulatory documents, I can use an AI system to help me.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extraordinary benefits for individuals, then think also about the potential benefits for the economy, small businesses, large businesses, even transforming economy sectors, even productivity. And then think about the impacts on examples.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because I think what happens when we've seen so far, Alistair, is that in fact when doctors are assisted by these tools, they actually do better than doctors not assisted by these tools. In fact, one of the things that I'm very excited and I think is what motivates many of us who work in this field are these extraordinary beneficial impacts. I mean, so the way I think about why do we do all of this? Why does any of this matter? At least I think about it in a few different areas. One are things like how this benefits individuals. Think about language translation. Think about any kind of assistive individual things. I mean, I don't know if any of you use Google Translate. It works based on AI. That's how it works. And in fact, now we've just gone from, you know, even just four years ago, we could translate about 30-something languages. Now we can do 246. In fact, we're aiming to get to 1,000. So think about these experiences.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of our models, MedGemini, which is our Gemini model fine-tuned on a medical corpus. That's why we call it Matt Gemini, is actually able to perform better than most doctors on predicting and doing diagnostics and diagnosis of things. In fact, unless you're in the top two or three percent of doctors, it'll do better than you.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't help you very much, but the algorithm is learning to be able to predict what typically comes after somebody's writing a bike hits a pothole. There's a finite range of possibilities of what happens next. It's learning to predict those things.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a huge amount of words, all of a sudden it's now good at predicting that a word like close is similar to near is similar to proximity. He starts to be able to predict those things, so much so that if I then give it a sentence, Alistair, that says Alistair was writing a bicycle very fast down the hill and he ran over a pothole. It can then starts to be able to predict 12 people. When somebody's riding a bicycle down the hill and they hit a pothole, chances are they fell or they hit something or they might have broken a hand. It starts to be able to predict what comes next.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're giving it lots of examples. So let me, you know the expression peanut butter and jelly, which is a very American peanut butter and jam, I guess we would say in England. But it's that expression. So imagine training an algorithm to predict that phrase, peanut butter and jelly. I show the algorithm those words. Peanut butter and jelly. It studies them. The next time I cover up the word jelly and I say predict what comes after peanut butter and so initially it gases, it might say peanut butter and I don't know milk or something or cheese. And then it looks up the original phrase and said, oh, I got it wrong. Let me try again. So it keeps trying. And then after a while, after trying and failing, trying and failing, it eventually starts to get it right. So that's the training process. Now you could imagine that training process going on for a very long time.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's building from associations in what it's been trained on. So there's clearly something in what's on the internet about Alistair. There's clearly on the internet things about me. There's clearly on the internet things about ideas and concepts, maybe even things that we've written and things that we've said. So it's building associations based on those things. In that process when scaled up dramatically is able to then give these responses. It's the reason why you'll often hear people talk about the so-called scaling laws in AI and that the scaling laws simply speak to this idea that these processes, when you make the architectures very large and very complex and you train them on lots of things and you train them for a very long time, you start to have performance and behavior that looks intelligent and is amazing.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that basic prediction mechanism is a way to try to fix and address some of the factuality issues. We've now added things where you can ground it on search. Go validate what you're about to produce with what's out there first before producing it out. It's the reason”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be fascinating. Keep in mind that the performance and behavior we see from this system is a result of scaling up a very simple process. And that simple process goes something like this. It's when you type in a word, it's trying to predict what comes next. So these are next word predictors. In fact, it's the reason why some people have said, well, these are very sophisticated version of Autocomplete. They're simply predicting the next word. What then happens is that when you scale this process up, meaning you train on a lot of words, it starts to build very complex concepts. So when you type in a prompt, it's trying to figure out what's the best response to that prompt. So it's not going out to search anything. It's simply trying to predict what comes next. Now, what has happened over time is that in addition”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning the structure of language, they're learning the patterns of words. They're learning things like a word like close lives in the same area as proximity, as near. Creating these associations about words that seem similar, that seem to speak about the same kinds of things. So the building associations about language and its structure. So they don't have any value judgment, good, bad, ugly. They're simply learning the structure of language.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think, you know, one of the things with these machine learning algorithms is that they're largely learning from stuff on the internet. And on the internet, we have everything. We have incredible poetry, literature, science. We also have some of the very ugly traits of humanity. So you've got all of it, all of what humanity has created good, bad, and ugly, and they're learning from all of that.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2017, there's a famous paper written by Google researchers called Attentions All You Need, which introduced these large language models with the so called transformer architecture, because up until then the AI machine learning algorithms that you had were very specific. There were either things you could do used to do image classification, that's a cat, that's a dog, learn from lots of examples, or to do natural language processing, or to do other kinds of pattern recognition that are very narrow and very specific. The transformer architecture in this famous paper in 2017 introduced what felt like a general machine learning algorithm. That's why what we now have with these chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT, they seem able to do a wide range of things. That's why they can go from writing poetry to writing essays to translating language.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Examples of those, but even before you get to those recent developments, you started to have this idea that, in fact, I remember working on this when I was doing my PhD, that maybe if you gave machine learning algorithms lots of examples and say build from those examples patterns and recognize other examples that look like that, how do you do that? So that started to make progress in the 90s. And then what then happened in the early 2000s is that the combination of lots of data becoming available from the internet and also the computing resources being available becoming more available. Those three things, the deep learning algorithms, the availability of data thanks to the internet, and computing architectures all suddenly came together for what we now see as this extraordinary acceleration. But the real thing, maybe to get back to your original question, Alistair, that happened around”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happened was in the late 80s, early 90s, after the so-called AI winter when progress hadn't happened very much, researchers rediscovered the second approach, the connectionist approach, the machine learning approach, as we now call it now. And this is when people like Jeff Hinton and John Hopfields, we just won the Nobel Prize, started to write about this and said, well, no, let's try to do this quite differently. So when I tried to do my PhD at Oxford, that was coming back into Vogue. And so a lot of the progress we're seeing now, Alistair, stems from a lot of that original work that Jeff Hinton and others did. And so what has happened in the last, call it 20-ish, 25 years is really that three things have happened. First of all, the machine learning approach has kind of won the day. We now have these neural network deep learning algorithms that basically”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it wasn't because didn't quite have some of these what feeled like intuitive moves that the grandmasters had, and so there seemed to be limitations. In fact, there's a famous report which is put together by Sir James Lighthill, the Lighthill Report in 1973, which basically argued, I think I'll paraphrase it probably not quite right, we basically said, why we're wasting our time, which is stop funding this work in AI. It hasn't amounted to anything. So this is the famous Lightel report in 1970. And what was interesting is that James Lightel was the location professor at Cambridge, which is a professorship with incredible history. I mean, Isaac Newton's location professor, Stephen Hawking and Charles Barbage. So it had all the weight of all of that, saying, let's stop wasting our time.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Approach actually had some initial success because remember, this is the time in the late 60s where even films like 2001 Space Odyssey came out of because it looked like that approach was actually making progress. It only started to hit the limitations in the early 70s when progress started to slow down what seemed like the initial success is of codifying things may have worked for things like chess playing algorithms and things, but not much else.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, pretty good. I mean, you're trying to understand the logic and rules that govern thought and choices and steps if this happens and that happens and so forth. And you're also trying to codify knowledge. How is it that we know what we know? What are the rules of knowing things? How is knowledge structured? And that first approach, by the way, actually initially won the day. So in fact, the period from roughly the late 50s even into the 60s, that was the dominant thread because it sounded right. It sounded logical. It sounded like it had the weight of science and history and everything from the Laplacian dream, from the Enlightenment. So it kind of had the weight of history to go with it.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Claude Shannon and others got together for what they called was going to be their summer project. The summer project was actually to build AI systems that could simulate what humans do. But there's a long history of this field during, in fact, it even goes further than that. And in the 50s, there were always kind of two strands to the thinking. One strand was, call it the mind approach, if I could call it that, which is let's try to build machines that can reason the way our minds reason. So think about the rules of logic, the rules of knowledge, how do we build systems that can replicate how we think our minds work. That was always one strand. There was another strand, which was at the time called the connectionist approach, which is called the brain strand, which said, no, no, no, no, let's try to build systems that mimic the way the brain is structured with connection.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before we go to the Oxford part, there's actually a personal connection from Zimbabwe to Oxford and AI and robotics. The very first thing I ever published in my whole life was actually a paper on, it was titled something like training and modeling neural networks. And I did this as an undergraduate in Zimbabwe, which people sometimes find surprising. This is because there was a postdoc who happened to be there from Canada who is familiar with some of the work that Jeff Hinton, who just won the Nobel Prize recently, had been doing on neural networks. So I sort of have that kind of one or two people removed connection to Jeff Hinton. In fact, I've actually told him this and he finds it quite interesting. But to your question about the history of AI, the term itself came into use in 1956 in full force. There's a famous Dartmouth conference where a handful of very notable figures, Jod McCarthy, Marvin Minsky.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are very few of us, and so we had to move into these boarding houses because these schools were set up almost like old English public schools. So I was in Slo House, which is interesting in itself. Those houses like Rhodes House and Jemison House. And I remember there was a lot of resistance to black kids showing up in these schools. So it was a very, very difficult time. But it's part of my most memorable times growing up in making, you know, initially getting involved in all kinds of fights and racist incidences and all kinds of things at that school. But I made some of the best friends that I still have from those days.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been a White Tony school. I mean, this is an extraordinary school that was over 100 years old, incredible resources. We were in Astronomy Lab. We had a telescope, an observatory.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember the first time I went to Prince Edward's after Zimbabwe in Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. I was one of the first, among the first black kids to go to an extraordinary school, Prince Edward School”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you've got it right. I mean, I think the sense was always that it wasn't that simple in the following sense. I think there was a sense that, in fact, there had been a terrible colonial legacy. There was a sense, in fact, even in the early 2000s that a lot of things had gone unaddressed, such as inequity in land ownership and so forth. Because even until the early 2000s, I think you had something like still over 80% of the land was still white-owned. And this is kind of 20 years on after independence. So there's a sense that there was a legitimate issue that needed to be addressed. But I think the sense that I had was that at the time, the way Hugh went about addressing those issues was absolutely the wrong way to do it. At a time when also there was now a growing opposition movement that was starting to challenge the domineering effect that his”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundred trillion dollar bill. I mean, I actually have a copy of a couple copies of $100 trillion bill. Yeah, that was probably the worst moment economically.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think suddenly when I was in university doing my undergraduate degree in the early nineties, there was a sense that the country was doing well. I remember actually one time coming on holiday to London and I remember the Zimbabwe dollars actually stronger than the British pound.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the view about him whilst he's tired to change in the 2000s when there's tired to be in opposition movement that was starting to challenge the status quo.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, in fact, when I was university as an undergraduate, this is when a lot of that was going on, the conversation was often in the local newspapers was that, oh, there was some insurgent dissident activity in this part of the country that the government was trying to quell down was the way it was talked about. And it only became, I think, apparent to most people much, much later as the extent of what had been going on. So to ask you a question, I think up until probably the early 2000s, I think Mugabe was seen very favorably as having led the country. And in fact, the country was quite seen as a success up until that point, because if you had looked in roughly about 2,000 of the late 90s, Zimbabwe had the highest literacy rates across the continent. It was exporting things even to the EU. It was incredibly self-sufficient. The education system was remarkable, and all of that. So I think he got a lot of that.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's changed a lot. I mean, I think if you had, you know, when I was growing up in the township, he and many others had this reputation of people were fighting for freedom as part of the liberation struggle. In fact, my uncle, my dad's brother was actually part of the liberation struggle. He fought alongside Mugabe's name as Robson Manika and fought alongside. So in the 70s, these were seen as kind of brave liberators fighting the war. And then in the period after independence in 1980, so roughly from call it 1980 to about 2000, he was largely seen very favorably as having led the country and transitioned the country from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and having done very well, keep in mind that at the time many of us even living in Zimbabwe didn't know very much about some of the atrocities that had happened in the southern part of the country, even though we were living.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when he came back by the time I was born, because he was there before he was in America before I was born, he had visited Cape Canaveral, which I think eventually became called the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And he'd seen all these rockets going up. So when I grew up seeing his slides and photographs of rockets going up in space, I remember thinking I want to be an astronaut. But at the same time, my circumstances gave me no reason to believe that I could ever become that. But I still wanted to be an astronaut anyway because my father had this one photograph of himself wearing a space suit when he visited Cape Canaveral. So that was kind of my secret dream, although of course I thought that would never happen.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of them, probably my oldest friend who I'm still in touch with, is actually a filmmaker, a named Olisoisitole. She's actually an extraordinary filmmaker. She's actually very, very bright. She always used to come top of the class. In fact, she's done very well. She's won a BAFTA, has won a Peabody Award for her documentary filmmaking. But most of the people I grew up with and went to school with, many of them are still in Zimbabwe, many of them struggling because the country hasn't, after incredible period of promise, hasn't always worked out very well for most people. It's heartbreaking, to be honest, for me, to think about these extraordinarily bright kids who I grew up with who didn't often get the chances and the opportunities that I got. But to answer your question, Alistair, but what did I think I was going to be? Again, I had this kind of dual view of myself. As I said, my father had come to marry.”
2025-01-13 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 116. Is AI the answer to human suffering? (James Manyika) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source