Jun 19, 2026 · 36 min · 9 segments
For this episode I’m delighted to welcome Benedict Evans to discuss AI and jobs and much else besides. Benedict is an independent technology analyst who has spent…
Benedict EvansGuest
Ian LeslieHost
I've noticed that there's a big disjunction between the way that people in Silicon Valley and the tech community around the world feel about AI and everyone else really.
But if you look at surveys of the public, You know, people are interested in it, they're aware of it, but they're not hugely excited about it.
If your experience of this is sort of opening it every couple of months in the free version or opening it every couple of weeks, it's kind of interesting.
There's a sort of a portion of people who still think this is about making a paragraph of two or not very good text or making a not very good stock image.
And that's rather like somebody in 1996 saying, oh, I looked at the internet a few months ago.
In fact, you can find a video of Jeremy Paxman interviewing David Bowie at about that time.
It's a really profound failure to understand the difference between the first things that people are doing with the technology and what the technology actually is.
Now, I think a second answer to that would be the thing that's really, really working for this is software development.
That's the place where it's found what tech industry calls product market fit.
So with any new thing, you have this sort of iteration of we're not quite sure what the product is and we're not quite sure what the market is.
You change your product, you aim at a different market until you find the right combination that works.
You can go and ask an agent or a bunch of agents to make a thing and it will come back with you a couple of hours later with a working prototype that would have taken three or four people a week.
I've noticed that there's a big disjunction between the way that people in Silicon Valley and the tech community around the world feel about AI and everyone else really.
But if you look at surveys of the public, You know, people are interested in it, they're aware of it, but they're not hugely excited about it.
If your experience of this is sort of opening it every couple of months in the free version or opening it every couple of weeks, it's kind of interesting.
There's a sort of a portion of people who still think this is about making a paragraph of two or not very good text or making a not very good stock image.
And that's rather like somebody in 1996 saying, oh, I looked at the internet a few months ago.
In fact, you can find a video of Jeremy Paxman interviewing David Bowie at about that time.
It's a really profound failure to understand the difference between the first things that people are doing with the technology and what the technology actually is.
Now, I think a second answer to that would be the thing that's really, really working for this is software development.
That's the place where it's found what tech industry calls product market fit.
So with any new thing, you have this sort of iteration of we're not quite sure what the product is and we're not quite sure what the market is.
You change your product, you aim at a different market until you find the right combination that works.
You can go and ask an agent or a bunch of agents to make a thing and it will come back with you a couple of hours later with a working prototype that would have taken three or four people a week.
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