Antonym: The “Chatting Jenny” Edition
How to prepare your mind for a revolution.
Dear Reader
“Fortune favours the prepared mind”, Louis Pasteur said. I used his quote to kick off a talk I gave at the “The Robots Are Coming” event at The Royal Institution theatre this week, an event organised by Agencyhackers.
How do we prepare our minds for the unfolding revolution of AI?
Just use it
Herminia Ibarra, London Business School professor and one of my favourite business authors, runs a course for leaders called Sloan Masters in Leadership and Strategy.
Last week, one of their guest speakers was JP Courtois, who is now leading Microsoft’s digital transformation of states, and who as Ibarra says, “was head of Microsoft's global marketing, sales, and operations organisation at the time of the transformation brought on by Satya Nadella (a very successful one).”
We talked a lot about the soft skills of leadership, but I also asked about the technological skills, how to future-proof yourself as a mid-career executive, like our [students], going out into a job market that is definitely going to be disrupted by artificial intelligence.
What he had to say was really interesting and great advice. He didn't say take a course. He said use artificial intelligence daily in your work life, in your personal life, figure out what it can do, play with it, and do it every day. Great advice.
A thought experiment to prepare your mind
Courtois is right – we learn most from getting hands on with the technology as part of our lives. You can’t see all the many little things it can help with until you’re using it every day.
Once we are solving our smallest problems with AI we are developing a sense of how it works and can be applied to bigger challenges.
Preparing your mind for radical changes and innovations that haven’t arrived yet can be hard.
How many shirts are there in your house?
Before my talk at Agencyhackers, another speaker had mentioned the idea that artificial intelligence represented a new industrial revolution. So I shared the Spinning Jenny, the machine that fired the starting shot in for the first industrial revolution.
250 years ago in Lancashire everyone was spinning. The tedious process of taking wool or cotton fibres and twisting them onto a wheel or spindle to make a thread was how working people, especially women, filled the bits of the day they weren’t working on anything else. The pennies from spinning were a vital part of their income.
About 500 hours of spinning yielded enough thread or yarn to make seven to eight metres or so of material, enough for a shirt. The weaving was relatively quick -- just seventy hours and you’d have that cloth. And the sewing of the shirt? Seven hours or so.
If you wanted a shirt made with pre-industrial methods like these, it would cost you around £6,500 (579 hours at UK living wage). Shirts were incredibly valuable items -- they would be mended and handed down to relatives when their owners died.
The first Spinning Jenny machine made yarn four times faster than a person with a spinning wheel. In the next few years it improved to over a 100 times faster. Cloth became cheaper, demand for raw materials boomed, capital and soldiers poured into India, millions of people were sold into slavery to work the cotton plantations of the United States to feed the new machines with cotton.
Workers in Lancashire formed terrorist groups that tried to destroy the machines. The inventor of the Spinning Jenny moved shop to Northampton and made the machines in secret. Around the same time the Spinning Jenny was being developed, several people were refining the steam engine into a formidable new power source that would power the cotton mills and start the first industrial revolution.
TBy the way, today a modern spinning machine makes about 800 metres of yarn a minute. That seven to eight metres you need for a shirt is produced in just half a second.
The Chatting Jenny thought experiment
Over a year ago the Chatting Jenny (ChatGPT) was invented and one was given to everyone with an internet connection. Maybe 100 million people used it and started to have all sorts of ideas about the uses they could put it to. Just as the Spinning Jenny instantly made a worker four times as productive, ChatGPT has been shown to boost the output and quality of knowledge workers.
So the experiment: think about all the things that we do today that take up thinking or mean we have to buy the thinking of other people. What would happen if those suddenly became a quarter of the cost in time or money?Another way of looking at it: what are the things that very rich people can afford that are out of the reach of most because the expertise or knowledge is too expensive. Think like a billionaire for a moment.
Would we sue the insurance company for the cost of the five hours we spent on hold trying to get our claim sorted?
When we need to buy a new car or household appliance would our trusted expert come back with the recommendations on the best models and finance options?
Would our savings be managed daily by expert financial advisors?
Would children have expert tutors for all of their studies?
When we had a brilliant business idea, would a team of researchers and analysts develop it into options for a start-up business and get agreements in principle on finance and suppliers?
These are all obvious examples. What else can we come up with? What else will we come up with?
The kicker is that meanwhile the “Chatting Jenny” and a hundred other similar machines are getting faster and we’re learning how to get. It took 30 years or so for the Spinning Jenny to go from producing yarn at 4X to 100X a human worker. With generative AI, that increase in efficiency is happening in just months.
Meanwhile, we’re still debating whether and how to use it in our work and lives. Best get on with it.
See you next week. Have fun with the thought experiment. I’d love to hear what you come up with…
Antony