Wall of People?
Maybe they’ll move fast and make things.
News just in that the AI/tech industry is shedding human jobs at an absurd rate. Upwards of 95,000 people were laid off last year, apparently, and more are going this year.
The machines are building the machines. The AI/tech world is separating from the human world. [So long, and thanks for all the chips.]
On another page of the print newspaper where I read that report was a short item about the UK retailer M&S. After a massive “cyber meltdown” a month ago — a disaster on a scale only achievable with technology — M&S has succeeded in retaining its customers’ loyalty.
It has done this, apparently, by increasing the number of staff around its stores. Now, there are people at the entrances to say hello, people around the stores to ask for help, and people at all the checkouts, not just one or two of them.
Conclusion: people are an asset after all. Who knew?
Years ago, over an expensive lunch (he was paying), a banker lectured me about the “wall of money” theory. If there’s a market crash, for example, a lot of people sell out of the market. Therefore, they have a lot of cash in their bank accounts.
Well, yeah, the earliest sellers have cash — but a free lunch means not interrupting. That cash is the “wall of money”, the man said. It’s outside the market, wanting to get back in. “The pressure is all on the buy side.” [Look, I sat through three courses of this, and coffee. Let me do just two paragraphs on it, okay?] The wall of money is what brings markets back up again after they’ve crashed.
My banker, er, friend’s big show-stopping quote-me one-liner was “dot-com boom, dot-com bust, dot-come back up again”. I remember that, ha ha (didn’t use it). The survivors of the dot-com bust (including Amazon) did indeed come back up again (and the PR at the lunch did remember to give me the media pack for whatever the banker was supposed to be plugging, so that was good too). [Okay, three paragraphs. Thanks.]
I suspect that the real world is more complex and more complicated than the wall-of-money theory allows. But I think of the AI/tech industry shedding all its innovators — yes, its innovators; it’s the people who have all the ideas, right? — and I wonder.
What are all those people going to do with their time? Those innovators?
I think of M&S using its people to get through its tech problems — and yes, I wonder.
How is M&S going to build back better?
Call me an optimist, but if there really is a “wall of people” out there, all of them tech-savvy but no longer tech-dependent, all of them free-thinking and just a bit disillusioned about the promises of their former industry, all of them with time on their hands, and heads full of ideas, then maybe, just maybe…
…the future will be more fun, more creative, more humanly innovative than any mere wall of machines could possibly imagine.
[And by way of a PS, the person who wrote the M&S story called the M&S helpline to find out if that was still working — and got straight through to a human being. Wow! Her call must have been important to them.]
