I went to a very good lecture the other day – all about how the media and news consumption has changed.
The speaker – an eminent journalist in his 50s – reminded us all of the core journalistic values. Seek out the truth. Don’t go in with an agenda. Don’t ignore inconvenient facts that don’t fit your first ideas of the narrative. Don’t be afraid. And so on.
The speaker also covered the issue of ‘alt-facts’. Not just to pour scorn, but to point out that these are indicators in their own right, and that there is a reason why folk seek out alternative narratives to those being played out through traditional channels. “We were wrong to ignore these voices, however nutty,” she said. Words of humility and wisdom indeed.
Then, inevitably, the issue of AI came up. Including that fact that AI bots misreport real news. The BBC’s own analysis tells us that half all AI chatbot answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some sort. And around a fifth (!) of answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates. Here’s the link – https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2025/bbc-research-shows-issues-with-answers-from-artificial-intelligence-assistants
So – there are problems with AI.
Does that mean it is the bogeyman?
Will it undermine our lives and our society?
Will we lose control to the cyborgs?
Is Terminator coming true?
After this lecture I’ve been describing, there was a reception. You’re expected to mingle and talk to whomsoever you find yourself next to. So I did. And ended up with a charming couple, in their thirties (a generation younger than me). They had enjoyed and been stimulated by the speaker’s thoughts. But they were a bit fed up with the underlying ‘doom-and-gloom’ message.
“How many technological revolutions has our society already been through – especially since the 1980s?” one of them said. “First the PC, then the mobile, then the internet, then Google, then the smartphone, and so on… And haven’t we adapted every time? And weren’t there lots of people in those phases saying that life as we know it would collapse?”
You know – they have a point.
I know that our businesses could not have happened and grown without the internet.
The sky did not fall in.
Armageddon did not come.
So, we’ll probably cope with the proliferation of AI-based tech support. And it will get better.
But finally, I think there remains one really important point.
If AI can effectively automate formerly human jobs in the call centre, in document processing, in enquiry management, in insurance applications, in financial advice, in local government, in retail, and so on…. what happens to all the ‘ordinary’ jobs? By ordinary, I mean jobs not requiring tertiary education.
This is a very serious question.
Not everyone can become a retrained worker in the ‘knowledge economy’. The clue is in the name…. ‘knowledge’. There’s an educative baseline.
So what does everyone else do? What happens to those who don’t have a degree (and a good degree, at that).
Because if we automate and AI the hell out of everything, we’re going to have a huge swathe of the population with nothing to do. That’s not going to be very palatable for the knowledge workers, is it? Slaving away to support folk who may want to work, but cannot find a job.
Perhaps this is where the policymakers and political scientists need to put their minds.
Having a whole load of people without a professional role in society IS a recipe for disaster.
I hope you find these bulletins entertaining. I’m happy to discuss all relevant engagements – from customer community creation, to directorial mentoring, to strategy development, to thought-leadership content development, to full campaign structuring and management, and more.
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