Scene opens, the anchor dressed neatly in a black sports coat, classic cut black t-shirt underneath, thick dark-rimmed glasses, black hair in a messy pixie cut. Contrasted by a red silhouette cityscape on a painted blue sky. She picks up a tight ream of papers, holds them, tapping the bottom edge on the bench top — click, click — and lays them flat. Leaning in.
'Really happy to be here tonight, and we have got a show for you, but before we bring our guests on, I want to start with some facts. In 1846, the British government passed what is known as the Gauge Act of 1846. This act declared that the country's railway tracks would be exactly four feet eight and a half inches apart.
Why, you may ask? Well, let me tell you that, my friends, the axle width of a horse-drawn carriage, and let me be precise, a two-horse-drawn carriage. It was, in reality, the width of two horses' arses. Isn't that amazing?
Well, what's more amazing is that measurement, four feet eight and a half inches, dates right back to Roman times. A long, long time. Until, until, the arrival of the motor car. And that was it. The horses' arses were put out to pasture. These beasts of burden, a primary form of transport and heavy lifting for centuries, retired near overnight in 1908 when Henry Ford introduced the motor vehicle as the everyman's car.
That, my friends, was a phenomenal technological advance.
Now let me tell you of another, more recent one. In offices across the industrial world, men in shirtsleeves were doing ledgers by hand, and boy, they were impressive. Horizontal lines, double vertical lines, numbers, words, tallies and totals, all done by hand. Through wars and factories and more, these skilled men worked laboriously.
Then, in 1979, the first computer spreadsheet came into existence, VisiCalc. Quickly followed by Lotus 1-2-3 in '83, Excel in '85, and by the mid-to-late 1990s, yes, that recently, the spreadsheet became ubiquitous with today's office space.
This one, though, it snuck up on us. And not only did it sneak up on us, but it also didn't put all those white-shirted, short-sleeved fellows out to pasture. No, not at all. I would say many of you know exactly what I am talking about, even if you've never used Excel yourself; you've definitely been the beneficiary of its existence in some manner.
Anyway, two different inventions, two different times, two different outcomes. Not so good for the horses.
Arthur C. Clarke, yes, that Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author, had made some rules about technology, even before spreadsheets were a thing. They were interesting rules, in particular his third. Arthur said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The steam train, the car, and the spreadsheet are all magic. Now, though, we have the magic of all technology magics, AI, artificial intelligence.
The question, though, is whether AI is an automobile or a spreadsheet?
Before we get to that, we need to talk a bit about the magic of technology, because that, to me, is where we've been getting ourselves into trouble ever since we started inventing. And now it's just coming at us faster and faster.
I remember the black-and-white TV coming into the house as a kid, yes, I am that old. My first home computer was a TRS-80 in the '80s. Then the World Wide Web, in the '90s, '91 to be exact. Social media. Then the iPhone and its clones landed in our pockets in 2007, amplifying the benefits and effects of the internet and social media.
We did all of that in a little over two decades. From the steam train to the demise of the horse: 83 years, eight decades. It's impressive.
The upside of all this? All sorts of things, connection, access to information, democratisation of information, the Arab Spring, Wikipedia, the spread of education and literacy, advances in health and home care. As the pendulum swings, though, the downside: our algorithmic bubbles, the polarisation of politics, doom scrolling, and the addictive nature of social media. And bafflingly, the upside of connection is also the downside of loneliness and isolation. Bullying, doxing, harassing, it goes on and on.
Are we now moving so fast down the technology path that this new technology, this magic, or so the media and the big companies pushing and investing in it would have us believe, is going to cause a job apocalypse? Are we going to be so enamoured by the magic, fed through those same algorithmic bubbles, that we will fall into this blindly, fall into it like a sheep at the wheel of a magical machine?
Well, to explore this, to answer some of these questions, we are joined tonight by…'
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