The UK economy grew by 0.4% in the second quarter of this year, suggesting that businesses are weathering the threat of surging energy prices resulting from the Iran war. GDP rose 0.3% in June alone, with signs that the World Cup boosted activity for the likes of restaurants, alcohol firms and TV makers. Top A-level results across England, Wales and Northern Ireland have risen for a third year running, with 28.5% of all grades marked A* or A. Some 228,990 students have been accepted into their first choice university, with numbers of those opting to study engineering and technology courses up 14% on last year. Millions of people across the UK and Europe enjoyed the most dramatic solar eclipse for nearly 30 years last night. Viewers in Britain experienced a hazy darkness at around 7pm with more than 90% of the sun covered by the moon, while parts of Iceland and Spain experienced the complete black-out of a total eclipse, known as “totality”.

It’s fashionable to claim that all those “smiling, mop-haired” teenagers opening their A-level results today are buggered, says Juliet Samuel in The Times. Off they’ll go to university, only for the entire job market to be decimated by artificial intelligence. “I don’t believe a word of it.” In the US, where adoption of the technology is furthest along, there is no evidence of the dreaded “jobs apocalypse”. Nearly every sector employs more people than in 2022, when ChatGPT launched. What is happening is a reallocation: the companies hiring for “AI-related” roles have increased their headcount by almost a fifth. In other words, contrary to the doom-mongers, “the firms hiring the most are those adopting AI the fastest”.

I used to get down in the dumps about AI. But then I started using it and realised I wasn’t replacing myself, I was “cutting out drudgery”. The googling, the scrolling, the cross-referencing; rearranging a badly formatted report to make it easier to read; rooting out that half-remembered, years-old article about smuggling routes through the Sahara. Ditching all this “administrative dross” makes me likely to produce more, and to hire someone to help me – especially if they know how to set up AI agents that can improve my workflow even more. As Jensen Huang, head of chipmaker Nvidia, puts it: “You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.” To be clear, I’ve never been a tech enthusiast. I don’t care about the latest iPhone and I “quietly still wish I could travel by horse”. And yes, I suppose AI might yet kill us all. “But it won’t be because it has done away with the job market.”