Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics.

And I'm delighted to say we're joined by Tim O'Reilly. We're sitting outside in Cambridge

at the computer labs. You might hear a hum in the background. Tim is here to give a talk

on the WTF economy. Tim is a tech publisher but also an entrepreneur and I hope he's

like A with me saying this is a guru as well. WTF stands for what you think it stands

for and it also stands for what's the future. And Tim has been warning people for a while

that the world is changing much faster than we appreciate and the way we organise our

societies, how we work, how we play, how we live is going to change very very dramatically

very soon. So if we could start by talking about jobs and how you think that's going

to change. You wrote a well back that we tend to think of how we work as fixed and you

drew the analogy with Victorian England where people look at an economy and think it needs

child labour, it needs these working conditions because that's the way that work works. But

it's not true and lots of the things that we think of fixed are actually very fluid.

So what are our equivalents of that? What are the things that we think we need in order

to have a functioning economy and society that actually we don't need and we need to

start thinking about different ways of doing it? That's sort of an interesting framing.

Let me try to come at it a little bit differently. The first thing I would say is that we have

to get rid of the idea of the job as something you acquire from someone else. We have to

stop thinking about jobs and we have to start thinking about work because ultimately technology

as my friend Nikhan Hauer says, technology is the solution to human problems. We won't

run out of work until we run out of problems. But what's happened in our economy is that

we have come to think that basically work is designed to improve the financial outcomes

...