Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm here today with two guests. We have Tom Davenport, who is a professor at Babson University and a research fellow at MIT, and Julia Kirby, who is an editor at Harvard University Press and a contributing editor to Harvard Business Review. But the reason we have them today on the podcast is because they have a book that's just coming out called Only Humans Need Apply. And the subtitle is Winners and Losers in

the Age of Smart Machines, which is a topic we talk a lot about as software eats the world. Welcome,

Tom and Julia. Thanks, son-all. I'm glad to be here. Nice to be here. The best place to just kick

off is you guys have this section in your book where you talk about this ode to the AI spring.

And I think that's a really important place to start because both listeners on this podcast and people who have been following the world of artificial intelligence for a long time, often talk about their scars from the contrasting AI winter before that.

Do you want to talk briefly about that?

As you suggest, we've

gone through various cycles in this space. And this is probably the most spring-like spring we've

ever had in the sense of interest in the technology, the number of firms that are adopting it.

One of the things that always fascinates me is that

even during winter, there were a lot of things kind of quietly happening. I mean, 10 years ago,

I wrote an article saying that automated decision making was really percolating its way

through lots of insurance companies and banks and so on for underwriting and credit issuance and so on. But now,

I think probably with big data and analytics, gave a lot of impetus to the topic and everything

is in full flower all over the place. Yeah. In one of my former colleagues, Brian Arthur,

I wrote this really compelling view called The Second Economy. And his idea is that there's, I'm actually only now putting it in the context

of the AI winter, but this entire time that we've been waiting for AI to have its moment,

it's this collection of things that have already become automated in our lives that are invisible

to us every day, like down to checking in at the bank teller to checking at the airport. I mean, there's so many

ways that automation has, to your point, percolated and permeated into our lives. I think the

question that's top of mind, though, for people is that no matter how we approach it as investors

or researchers or observers of the phenomena,

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