With Gladwell’s 10,000 hours under their belt, this person would be as well-informed on the impact of AI on unemployment as anyone on the planet – a true expert, perhaps even a phenomenon. This is the single person or, if you like, Oracle (in the Ancient Greek sense of the word) solution to this decision problem. But is it the optimal one? There are reasons for doubt. Evidence clearly suggests that, in a complex decision environment, drawing on non-expert opinion can provide added insight. It offers diversity of perspective, whose benefits are amplified if those diverse perspectives are discussed and debated to arrive at collective conclusions. This is Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” at work. So let’s go to the other end of the spectrum and draw instead on the insights of a big crowd – say, 1 million people, roughly the adult population of Estonia. This would then, in effect, be an Estonian referendum on AI and unemployment. Clearly, we would now be drawing on a vast array of expert and non-expert opinion. But that would come at the expense of less time for deliberation. Given our time quota, each person would now have only around 30 seconds to give an answer. Facing a tight time constraint and a very complex question, most people would struggle. I certainly would. The best a non-expert could probably do is to provide an instinctive, “fast thinking” response. Or, perhaps more likely still, they might jump aboard a collective, but potentially poorly-informed, bandwagon by copying what others say.
Despite a communications revolution, public understanding of central banks remains low and public trust in central banks has fallen. Improving both calls for a second revolution, focussed on educating and learning from the general public. The Age of Innocence may be over, but the Era of Engagement has only just begun. st  This new era may mean 21 century central banks becoming more disbursed and personalised in their communications, creating new infrastructure to interact with the public and extract their folk wisdom. Thomas Jefferson said democracy is something you can only learn by doing. The same is true of central banking. For the Bank of Estonia entering its second century, and for the Bank of England in its fourth, there is much still to learn and even more to do. 24  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  24  References  Akerlof, G and Shiller, R (2009), Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, Princeton University Press. Bailey, M, Cao, R, Kuchler, T and Stroebel, J (2016), ‘Social Networks and Housing Markets’, NBER Working Paper, No. 22258. Baker, S, Bloom, N and Davis, S (2016), ‘Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 131, No. 4, pp. 1593-1636. Bank of England (2013), ‘Monetary policy trade-offs and forward guidance’, August 2013. Barnes, L, Feller, A, Haselswerdt, J and Porter, E (2018), ‘Information, Knowledge, and Attitudes: An Evaluation of the Taxpayer Receipt’, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 80, No. 2.