Horses and Spreadsheets

 'Hey, you know when we were playing BG3 the other day, and the topic came up about AI?'

'Yeah.'

'It was interesting, that view from the guys, a bunch of 50-somethings.'

Post-game was a precious moment. After the hours of gameplay, concentrating, die rolling, it was a time to reflect on the game, peer DM chat, and all sorts of things. Sometimes, family stresses, raising daughters was daunting. Or work, and the drift into philosophy that only sits between good friends in those quiet moments.

'Wait a tic, let me top up my wine,' said Mick, puncturing Iain's thoughts.

Moments later, he came back on screen. 'What about it?'

'The idea that they think it's all a hullabaloo, you know, it'll come to nothing.'

'You don't?'

'Oh, it'll come to something, it's just a matter of how you reconcile it.' Pausing momentarily to sip his wine, thinking, waiting — waiting to see if he'd got his friend's attention, to see if he'd run this line of thought with him.

'Go on.'

'OK, you get what I do for a living?'

'Yup, talk shit, talk for a living, rabbit on about Chief Tech blah di blah.' Grinning back through the screen — it was part of the sport. Mates can't ever let them get ahead of themselves; that would be unnatural.

Staring back, Iain waited a moment.

'Well, I've been thinking. To be honest, not a bloody day goes by that there's not another vendor in my inbox asking me to a day out, a round table, god knows what else, to go talk about AI. Shit, the other day I was a guest speaker at a lunch, meant to be rabbiting on about cloud computing, told I had to talk about AI. Told 'em I'm a pragmatist, not an enthusiast.'

'Good lunch?'

'Yeah. Hang a tic, my turn to top up the wine, back in a tick.'

'Cool, I'll run for a leak.'

Silence. The two rooms, their respective man caves, sat looking at each other — Mick's 80" screen on the wall to the right, his bookshelf, and D&D ornaments to the back. Iain's bookshelves either side, red couch to the back of the room, evidence of D&D on both shelves and the couch.

'You were sayin'?' Mick spoke first as the two of them returned to their seats, reclining in unison and taking a sip from their respective glasses. It was wine tonight, not scotch — meant the chance of a pseudo-sensible conversation was possible.

'Horses and spreadsheets!'

'What the f--- are you rabbiting on about?'

'Horses and spreadsheets. What they're saying — and I quite like this analogy — AI is going to be more like spreadsheets than horses. Think about it. When the internal combustion engine, tractors, turned up, horses were pretty much out to pasture overnight. Spreadsheets, not so much. You look at the history of the things — have you ever seen the project plans and ledgers from the early 1900s? Hand ruled, nice tidy print.'

'Maaate! You're talking to an old engineer, of course I have.'

'OK, so think about it. When the digital spreadsheet came — Lotus 1-2-3, if you ever remember that, the precursor to Excel — people were saying that's the end of it. In fact, there were even pitches made to the British government to bring in laws. What happened? Well, now I don't think there's a computer that exists that doesn't have Excel open on it at least once a week. Heck, go back to the Luddites and the introduction of the mechanical looms. That's what AI's going to be about.'

'I'll be honest, mate, down at the wharves it's more something I hear about than see. Shit, from the media you'd think there was a jobpocalypse coming.'

Laughing. 'Exactly! It's insane — all these bloody vendors talking about how big it is, how much change is occurring. Looking at the actual data, and I do, it's got like an 11% success rate out in the wild. Insane. And there are so many challenges. Don't get me wrong, we'll work it out over the next couple of years, but I don't think any of us are really going to be out of a job anytime soon.'

A pause, the two of them sipping from their glasses at the same time.

'So what'd you think of the game tonight?'

Following his friend's lead, leaning into the change, embracing it even — this is how they worked. 'The way you played that call around the drow mage. Magic, mate. Could've devolved into a bloody mess, but you kept the flow, kept the story going. It was great.'