Can I ask then, looking at your diffusion theory, what actually does a nation need to do to diffuse this, take AI as our GPT nominee, to diffuse it more effectively than others? What are the kinds of barriers and bottlenecks that currently you see stand in the way of diffusion? Is it a lack of skills? Is it a lack of education? Are there regulatory barriers? A lack of leadership from industry? What is it that you think we need to do to diffuse AI more effectively?

Yeah, I think I focus on skill formation, but I think it's not just about broadening the base of engineering skills.

So that's number one.

But it's also about standardizing and systematizing those skills so that it lowers the threshold of adoption for everybody and i think that's what's it so so yes uh countries should invest in broadening the base of AI engineering skills.

And even that, it's hard to define, right? Does that mean prompt engineering? Does that mean basic data science skills? We don't know because the field is changing so quickly year by year, and that's a feature of GPTs.

They have this scope for continual improvement because they're in this entire research field.

And so I think, That first plank, there has to be a lot of adaptability.

it's a tough exercise

Share with us what produced all those mechanical engineers across the country.

The U.S. was better equipped than Britain and Germany, its two main industrial rivals at the time, to cultivate this broader base of mechanical engineering skills that was connected to industrial requirements and needs.

And so in the first part, US institutions with a large proportion of them being these land-grant institutions that were set up by the Morrill Act were really instrumental in terms of training sufficient numbers of mechanical engineers.

So one of the US's rivals at that time, Britain, just simply did not produce enough mechanical Its universities were slow to adapt to these trends.

The key point of advantage for the U.S. over Germany was not in the number of mechanical engineers.

Germany did produce enough mechanical engineers, but its mechanical engineering training in its technology institutes and in its universities was divorced from practical applications.

And so I looked at evidence of what did the curricula at U.S. institutions of mechanical engineering education compare to German ones? What amount of time was devoted to practical exercises in the lab and shop versus purely theoretical instruction? And German institutions devoted very little time to those practical real-world exercises, whereas U.S.

So what is your prescription for the United States or any country that wants to put itself at the forefront of economic opportunity and growth using this technology?