When I was growing up, men landed on the moon and within years we would supposedly be colonising space. Concord arrived, you could get to New York in 3 hours and the next step would be a zoom into orbit to arrive in NZ a couple, rather an interminable 28 hours later. And here we are fifty years later and not a lot has happened. Even Teflon has been discredited. Why? Money, of course, which is what really makes the world go round. Big, slow planes make much more than skinny, fast ones and going to space turned out to be little more than a vanity project (now for a few billionaires). My prediction: most of the sinister AI stuff won’t generate any $s and will wither on the vine. And if it does replace 300m jobs, as we hear it might, who will buy the stuff it makes? So, don’t worry. Be happy. Actual, not artificial intelligence, will win in the end.
“The working-from-home illusion fades”
Are workers working from home more or less productive than those catching the 7.02am to London Bridge every day? ‘Probably sitting at home in their bleedin’ jim-jams’, said someone recently of a less-than-helpful call centre employee, the assumption being that, were they surrounded by colleagues and with a manager cracking the whip, he or she would have sorted his energy bill more efficiently.
