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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt's avatar

A different thing that embracing AI could mean is "purchase large contracts from AI companies". This might take the form of replacing customer service with AI chat bots, or enabling all your employees to write their emails using LLMs, or predicting diagnoses with AI, or many other things.

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Matt McGrattan's avatar

Ironically, I have just taken on a contract to do exactly that—data cleaning and dataset curation/release—for a public institution (in the US). I think they see it both as being about getting people in the AI/ML space to work on/with their data, and as a way of establishing the right kind of rules and good practice for their data around rights, bias, personal privacy, etc.

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Jay's avatar

Luddites: labour vs capital

Listen and reframe, this is fundamental stuff

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/id1484511465?i=1000624680121

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bjkeefe's avatar

I propose that we update the nickname for your Mr. Blair to Big AI's poodle.

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Philip Koop's avatar

The way I'm reading you is that if I take advice from Mr. Blair, I should expect to change a lot of diapers.

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Jul 17, 2024
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Steve Hemingway's avatar

Tony Blair has a history of being totally wrong about IT policy. Remember his hysteria over the so-called "Millenium Bug" (https://www.ukpol.co.uk/tony-blair-1999-speech-on-the-millennium-bug/). It turned into a feeding frenzy of software vendors who refused to certify their existing products as 'Y2K compliant', and held big users of packaged systems to ransom as they sold essentially the same software, but re-badged, at a huge markup.

I'd been writing software that processed dates (many of them decades in the future!) for years at that point, and it was clear that virtually all modern system would cope with 'Y2K' effortlessly.

I always wondered who was advising Blair about this: presumably the same IT suppliers that stood to profit from the panic.

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Jul 17, 2024
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Dan Davies's avatar

Mr Tony is famously vague about the technology he's so enthusiastic for - he didn't have a mobile phone until he left government. I think he might actually believe that the tech is magic and just needs everyone to believe really hard

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Combaticus Wombaticus III's avatar

Yeah, I think you are being overly generous when you claim they want data to be effectively cleaned for use in data processing - I think what’s really happening here is “Golly, this AI stuff sure is cool isn’t it - we should be doing some of that.” Strong ‘greetings fellow kids’ vibes here

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Ducky McDuckface's avatar

Oh God, get right on the Bleedin' Edge 'cos it's a Magic Bullet. Sounds disturbingly true about Blair.

(BTW, that's Sir Tony to the likes of me and thee).

I came to know and love the MS strategy as "embrace, extend, exterminate", which has the distinct advantage of creating the mental image of Bill Gates running around with a toilet plunger sticking out of his forehead.

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