Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you BT’s chief digital innovation officer wants the world to stop moaning about how cuddly AI is going to put pesky humans out of work because horses "didn't complain" when cars were invented. In an interview with Raconteur this month, Harmeen Mehta, who BT parachuted into the newly created role in 2021, was discussing how media …
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Perhaps YOUR kids. Mine are a lot smarter than a horse. Which is why they don't work for BT*. ;-)
I'm sitting here next to a horse field, and those buggers are pretty bloody dumb.
It's not like cats, where they basically run the house and have humans making everything nice for them. (Or dolphins, or mice. but mainly cats)
* I joke. Over the past 20+ years I've worked with some of the smartest propellerheads I've ever met at BT up the road in Martlesham.
I guess that's where Jansen has got it all wrong. Instead of thinking, "Great, with AI we can get rid of a bunch of employees and save money" he should be thinking "Perhaps with AI we can have people doing more interesting things, and take away a lot of the drudgery". If you think of your employees as assets who can add value, because you try to employ the smartest and pay them well to keep them. That's how you GROW the company and make more money, instead of SHRINK the company by shedding people. Although don't go mad with it like the big tech companies did and grow too fast.
Neil Barnes: "To be honest, I'm not entirely looking forward to being turned into catfood and glue."
But you're not entirely rejecting the concept, then. So what product would you like to be made into?
I think I'd want to be used in some nice quality bone china, maybe a few wallets, and a couple of iPad cases from buttock skin. Meat will be a bit stringy, but big chunks could be fed to Eurasian bears* at any decent British zoo** the bears. My skull would make a great lamp and conversation piece, after the brains and eyeballs have been pureed and secretly added to a vegan meal production line.
Or of course if you don't like those sorts of applications, there's Body Worlds***.
* "Look mummy! That one's run off with somebody's arm!"
** Not ZSL Whipsnade, who shoot their bears.
*** The most amazing exhibition ever. Not gruesome, but respectful and educational. If you get the chance, go. Sadly not in the UK at the moment.
> boil down to exactly the same thing.
They kind of do, but carry very different connotations: The latter implies that those people's basic needs will still be met on some way, shape or form. You could replace "doing more interesting things" with "gently decomposing in preparation for a future of pushing up daisies" and still be consistent with the former.
You are under the misguided idea that a company has any responsibility to its employees.
Henry Ford wanted to increase his worker's salaries over the shareholder's dividends to ensure that his employees could buy their own Model T, increasing sales, was taken to court and lost: A company has a responsability to its shareholders. Employees are just an annoying cost that impacts that profit...
"...didn't have enough intelligence to have a clue about what the consequences would be..."
That reminds me of the various BT "release" voluntary redundancy schemes BT have ran in the past.
Successfully "offloaded" high numbers of staff only to have to bring many of them back as highly paid "consultants" because they'd got rid of the ones with all the knowledge and experience.
Then let's start with Mehta herself.
WHAT the hell is with Indian nationals and their attitudes on workers anyway??! This has to be the, ugh, zillion'th time a boss just dismisses worker concerns, worker health, or even worker lives, as "Oh well, I'll just pick up another slave replacement ASAP!" I wonder (both aloud, and non-PC) if it has anything to do with sect stratification and built-in attitudes on how you treat anyone you don't perceive as looking you level in the eye.
Looking at contemporary UK (from a afar) one has to wonder whether the subcontinent is getting even for the couple centuries of the Raj. :)
Horses and automobiles? A rather obvious non sequitur. The introduction of mechanical looms and spinning machine with the violent opposition from those affected (Luddites) might be a more appropriate comparison.
Recent politcal deparures and this gem make one wonder in which queue they were standing when brains and common sense were being handed out.
"CEO Philip Jansen said in May: “For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient"
=
"CEO Philip Jansen said in May: “For a board of management like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI so as to be able to sack lots of costly minions and make more money for the board in share options and bonuses because we met our cost-reduction targets. Long term company future? Who cares. I'm richer than you'll ever be."
BT staff would be able to get more sensible answers more quickly if the upper management were replaced by chatbots. They wouldn't get their intelligence insulted regularly by [de]motivational training events. And there'd be less faffing about with disruptive reorganisations every few months.
Yes, there are lots of opportunities for AI at BT.
“I don’t know how horses felt when the car was invented, but they didn’t complain that they were put out of a job; they didn’t go on strike. It’s part of evolution."
THE HORSES DIDN'T PROTEST BECAUSE THEY WERE SLAUGHTERED. This guy must resign and apologize. Get rid of this inhuman monster before it's too late.
Personally, I strongly doubt that Elon Musk has anything more useful to say on AI than anybody else.
He's simply coming out with pleasing soundbites to ensure that people keeping taking him and his companies seriously, which protects against people questioning why Tesla has a market capitalisation of 733.39 billion. By comparison Ford (which produces EV's which are at least comparable if not better than Tesla's) is nominally worth less than 40 billion despite selling more cars per year than Tesla has ever built in total.
Just stop quoting the man; he hates people ignoring his irrelevance.
My view? AI cannot threaten the human race. In extremis, if an AI took over my rack of servers then the worst thing it could do would be take absolute control of everything that was connected to it, deleting all data and displaying "lolz, die meatbag" on my screen. At this point, i'd treat it as a ransomware outbreak and restore from offline backups with the added step of remaining disconnected from the internet and it couldn't do a thing to hurt me.
The threat to the human race is limited to boring things like starving to death because your supermarket of choice doesn't have adequate backups to revert to manual function for things like shipping food, and have their only backups "in the cloud" and this is quite easy to guard against with a combination of legislation, inspections and testing.
The other threat is the modern habit of connecting things that can actually interact with the outside world (like for instance Mr Musk's Tesla cars) to the internet and entrusting the on/off switch to software.
Software which is designed to be remotely modified via the internet and so could (in extremis) be programmed to go crashing into things, or people. It's also worth noting that I suspect that the fuse for the AI stuff is probably located under the bonnet, and i'd be surprised on a Tesla if you don't have to ask the software to open the bonnet for you. (and please hold still and don't run me over while i'm doing it)
This sort of thing is trivially simple to guard against; instead of having an on/off switch in software then insist on a hardware switch, or better a physical token that has to be present in the circuit for operation. You could call it a "key".
This has an additional benefit of needing something more than a laptop to steal the car.
"Tesla has a market capitalisation of 733.39 billion."
To be fair Tesla isn't just a car company. They are also in the energy business with solar roofs, Powerwalls, and Megapacks, plus charging infrastructure as well. Whether it should be worth that much is debatable, but comparing Tesla to Ford isn't quite apples to apples.
To be fair Tesla isn't just a car company. They are also in the energy business with solar roofs, Powerwalls, and Megapacks, plus charging infrastructure as well. Whether it should be worth that much is debatable, but comparing Tesla to Ford isn't quite apples to apples.
No, not quite.
Ford Revenue: $158 billion.
Tesla Revenue: $81 billion
Ok, let's value the car side of Tesla as being worth $40 billion (ie; more than Ford), despite producing a small fraction of the number of cars. Then let's value the energy business with the solar roof as being worth $40 billion which is just absurd, then the powerwall separately as being worth $40 billion which is equally absurd and then then the megapacks as being the same amount which again is absurd. That's $160 billion. Then let's add another $70 billion for the value of Musks hot air, and it's still overvalued by over $500 billion; that's over half a trillion.
Objectively, Tesla's valuation is in the same league as the South Sea Bubble, Tulipmania, the dot com bubble, and FTX.
Investment has gone from investment to betting.
yes and no.
Warren Buffet for instance amassed a huge fortune by seeing things that he thought were undervalued and then putting his money into them until he thought they were overvalued relative to something else, at which point he'd sell shares off and buy something else.
He's playing an entirely different game to the people who are gambling on whatever being "the next big thing" because everybody is talking about it, despite the underlying fundamentals not actually making any sense whatsoever.
Quote: "...Elon Musk delivered a chilling verdict earlier this month when he said “no job is needed” in the future..."
Really? No waiters in fancy restaurants? No "escorts" to "accompany" lonely people? No tennis players at Wimbledon? .....and so on......
In the England of 1600AD there were about five million people living near subsistence.
In England in 2023 there are more than 50 million people....ALL those 50 million are living better than their 1600AD ancestors!!
Technology may have caused significant chaos during times of change........but technology, in the long run, NEVER PUT ANYONE OUT OF WORK!
Elon Musk......pah!!!
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