Sir Anton Muscatelli on Leading Public Institutions Through Complexity, Slow Growth, and the AI Age

Now, you spent your career creating knowledge, advising governments and leading institutions that exist to serve the public good.

Increasingly, however, knowledge itself doesn't seem to be enough.

So what does society need from experts today?

So that's a great question.

And I think it still requires expertise.

Although trusted expertise is being challenged politically and culturally, partly for good reasons, because I think occasionally institutions that generate expertise or hold expertise have sometimes over claimed certainty or, you know, have to be sufficiently, have to be, you know, my view, sufficiently cautious in how they deploy that knowledge.

And also because, inevitably, there's some disintermediation of access to knowledge that's happening because of technology.

You know, the internet began That journey began with the Internet and now is being accelerated with AI.

But I think what we need now is that ability of institutions to not only provide expertise, but I think we have to be careful in terms of how we deploy that expertise and using authority cautiously, not simply to claim that things are what they are.

People, I think, when accessing expertise, are much more demanding, and quite rightly demanding, of the nature of, they want to understand the nature of that expertise.

They need to understand the complexity behind some of our judgments when we deploy expertise.

So I think that's what's becoming, what's changing in terms of the institutions that we represent that deploy expertise, whether they're universities or national academies or whatever.

Yeah, so maybe doubling down a little bit on that point, how do you think institutions like universities and national academies can contribute to democratic debate while remaining independent, trusted, and intellectually honest?

I think we have to communicate better than perhaps we've done it in the past.

As I said, I think...

Knowledge is becoming more democratized.

Rightly, it's easier to access than it was before.

And I think to some extent, institutions were much more hierarchical in the past.

So there was a tendency to simply say, let me tell you how it is.

My expertise tells me to tell you that this is the way it should be.

Quite rightly, there is a situation where that expertise is available more uniformly.

even outside institutions, I think there's a tendency to question and ask, you know, why is it that way? So I think that's one of the key issues.

I think we need to adapt to that environment where, you know, knowledge is much more, you know, democratized, if you like, and that's what technology has done.

I think we also have to be careful in explaining the complexities of where knowledge takes us.

I think, again, perhaps in the past, and maybe this is again a tendency in more hierarchical societies, there's a sense to say, well, here is some expertise, some information about a particular issue, but I'm also going to tell you how drift from knowledge, from imparting knowledge and expertise to actually making judgments.