SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
What it doesn't mention is whether this resulted in more tax being received. Still entirely possible the low tax payers have come in and high tax payers have moved out.
Just trying to imagine the opprobrium if someone from the Government front bench had made a similar comment about a Labour frontbencher.
I suspect we'd get all sorts of comments about the nasty Tories and discrimination.
Agreed that it's not to be applauded.
Even if it was indeed a former government front bencher who coined the phrase in respect of Sunak.
I should add, in the interests of balance, that Cameron once made an oblique joke about John Bercow's height by referencing to the Seven Dwarfs as well.
As dislikeable as Bercow is that wasn't in order or Prime Ministerial either.
He also referred to Dorries as being frustrated.
Did he? I thought it was “now now dear”.
It was contemptuous and dismissive certainly but not - on the face of it - rude and crass. That’s the difference. Politics is a rough game and there’s room for mockery but it should be more subtle than Rayner’s attempt and certainly not based on a physical characteristic that Sunak can’t control
Indeed. I seem to remember the Tories getting very nasty indeed and baiting Ms Rayner en masse about "a physical characteristic that [Ms Rayner] can’t control".
I don't think the Tories can have any complaints after the racist £15 million.
"Should be shot".
Oh, what was that £15 million? I must have missed it in all the other sharn being spread ...
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
SG policy is set up to massively benefit middle income, middle class voters with stuff like free Uni education. Will take a lot more than tinkering with income tax rates to see people actually sell their homes, uproot their families and move to somewhere of comparable affordability and, frankly, quality.
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
What it doesn't mention is whether this resulted in more tax being received. Still entirely possible the low tax payers have come in and high tax payers have moved out.
More information required.
"In 2021-22 – the latest year of available data – £200 million in extra taxable income was brought into Scotland, with more higher and top rate taxpayers moving to Scotland than leaving."
Edit: presumably your 'low tax payer' is in fact a low high tax payer? And so on. Fair enough.
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
Carnyx, issue is the tax take appears to have dropped. I refuse to pay it and just stuck extra £10K a year into pension instead. Attractive for retirees to sell up in England and buy better property in Scotland at half the price , most if not all will not be paying higher tax rates.
Labour is going to preside over some serious unemployment
“The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.”
FT ££
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
Few will mourn these repetitive jobs (tho the people who get made redundant might); AI will not stop there
Why do none of our politicians talk about this? This isn’t some distant prospect, this is happening shortly - “in as soon as a year”
A challenge for Reeves and Starmer
People hate talking to a computer.
Often you want empathy and understanding and not a chatbot.
Everyone's situation is different.
Trouble is, this is entirely untrue. Klarna recently AI’d many of their call centre jobs and discovered that not only did they save loads of money, 1. The AI was more efficient than humans and 2. Surveys reported greater customer satisfaction
“Klarna’s AI Assistant Does the Job of 700 Customer Service Agents”
“When you think of positive customer service experiences, AI definitely isn’t what comes to mind. But Klarna might be changing that”
Chatbots are getting seriously good, and they are far smarter than a nice 97 IQ woman working in Dundee with an accent so thick (however pleasant) you can’t understand every third word
Moreover, the menace gets worse: studies shows that humans consistently prefer to interact with AI rather than other humans, even if they are told, indeed if they are told it often improves things. You can’t offend a machine, it has no feelings
Also, people prefer AI photos to real photos of “real people” and people are happier taking orders from AI than humans (the latter I have actually experienced for myself)
Personally I cannot wait to get past the bots and reach a human who can think. The fecking bots go round and round and drive you crazy.
The problem is that management don't trust the human call centre drones to do anything to fix your problem. So you have to get past the people who are there to fob you off to someone who actually can do something about it.
If management trust AI chatbots enough to give them the power to fix customer problems - because management would have at least an illusion of greater control - then it could end up being better.
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
Carnyx, issue is the tax take appears to have dropped. I refuse to pay it and just stuck extra £10K a year into pension instead. Attractive for retirees to sell up in England and buy better property in Scotland at half the price , most if not all will not be paying higher tax rates.
The other issie is whether they are fiddling the income tax/dividend tax balance for their firms. Less likely if retired.
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
Labour is going to preside over some serious unemployment
“The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.”
FT ££
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
Few will mourn these repetitive jobs (tho the people who get made redundant might); AI will not stop there
Why do none of our politicians talk about this? This isn’t some distant prospect, this is happening shortly - “in as soon as a year”
A challenge for Reeves and Starmer
People hate talking to a computer.
Often you want empathy and understanding and not a chatbot.
Everyone's situation is different.
I think "chatbots" are just a way for multinational companies to avoid talking to their customers. After the 5th time a computer gives you a link to their (automated) complaints procedure, you just give up.
Yes, it's just poor customer service.
AI won't destroy all these jobs, but when we have a national shortage of workers redeployment some of these to other work is a plus. Less need for immigration.
It's hack travel journalists that need to worry most.
It’s really not. Travel journalists will be some of the last to go (amongst writers); an AI trying to pretend it’s having a human experience would be exposed and the company would be in deep shit - and an AI cannot have a human experience. Those jobs are safe for now, the ones that require intrinsic humanity and a human presence
Everyone else in a cognitive job where they don’t have to show a face and be there in the moment is in grave trouble. That’s most office jobs and a lot of artistic jobs
For some reason I've just thought of the travel writer who wrote a guidebook about something like the Canadian Rockies, and later on it turned out he hadn't actually visited them.
I don't understand. I thought the whole point was that L**n *was* AI, hence always banging on about it all the time. (I didn't name him, because it's like a fairy tale - if we do, he appears.)
I’ve actually been very restrained on AI recently and barely mentioned it - because I know it sometimes irks @rcs1000 and @TSE
I will return to generally not talking about it unless it is mentioned first
However I just HAD to cite that FT report on call centre because
1. It vindicates me. I predicted this in early March when the Klarna story came out - AI successfully taking over a call centre
And
2. It has real world implications for UK politics. Labour are gonna be in power when AI really hits, throwing many out of work. Yet they seem absolutely unaware of this, or at least they are entirely silent on it
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
There over 6000 call centres in the United Kingdom There are around 812,000 agent roles within these centres Over 4% of the UK’s working population is employed at a call centre
And a lot of those call centres are a complete waste of time and energy - all those involved in oiling the wheels of the retail energy 'market' for a start. (Although I assume since the failure of said market the number of call centre roles there has significantly reduced.)
But that’s 800,000 jobs. Gone in a year or two - and then all the other cognitive jobs as AI moves up the food chain, lawyers, bankers, brokers, designers, accountants, musicians, writers, nearly all of them - gone
This is going to be devastating for so many, yet zero people discuss it. By the end of Starmer’s term - certainly his 2nd term - we could have five million unemployed - or we could be living in an era of perpetual abundance
Again, look at offshoring. We used to worry that accountancy and law jobs would be offshored, even medicine for things like reading scans. Some were, most weren't.
AI will doubtless cost some jobs. It will also create new ones. What it will mostly do is open up services for those who cannot currently afford them. You could employ AI to draw cartoons for your Gazette columns. That has not cost any cartoonist their job. Only when the Telegraph replaces Matt will a cartoonist lose his job. Likewise you could have AI translate your AI-cartoon captions into French or Japanese, but again no humans have lost their jobs. Forget AI. Have you cost a photographer his job by taking your own travel snaps for the Gazette, or would they not have sent one anyway?
Of course AI will destroy jobs. That guy in the FT makes the same claim as you - “oh yes millions will be made unemployed in a year or two but don’t worry they will do other jobs, AI will create jobs”
He just doesn’t say what these new jobs ARE. Because they don’t exist, I suspect
If 700k of the 800k UK call centre workers lose their jobs in a couple of years, what will they all do?
Photography, by the way, has basically been destroyed by the internet. It is not a viable career, not any more
Other artistic jobs will follow
I don't see many AI drones taking wedding photos yet.
You understand it's legitimate to criticise someone for obnoxious use of language, right? That there's a difference between doing that and demanding someone be thrown out of public life?
Who is calling for cancellation? Name these warriors at which you're 'giggling'. I'm perhaps a bit sleepy, so I may have missed those calling for Rayner to no longer be an MP.
Give over. "Obnoxious use of language" - if that is a thing you want to ban - is something to aim at Nadine Dorries.
It is an entirely legitimate political action to hoist politicians up with their words, deeds and actions. A Conservative ex Cabinet Minister and direct colleague of Sunak called him a "Pint-Sized Loser". Various posters on here seem very upset that she threw that back at the Tories - shouldn't be said, not legitimate as you put it.
You want to cancel such "obnoxious" language, yes?
Lets look at who thinks it was fine - the Speaker. He is very quick to call out unparliamentary language. Is scrupulous about the rules of what can and can't be said whilst staying in order. And he found it to be in order. Because it IS in order.
Rayner seemed to be quoting Dorries approvingly, I didn't have you or Rayner down as Dorries fans.
'pint-size' not acceptable, less of this from Labour please.
Labour didn't say it. The Tories did. Worse, it came from Sunak's former close colleague.
Was musing about Sunak with a friend the other day. When I met him in 2020 I saw a guy relaxed with the burden of keeping the economy going through Covid, with best-in-class media team and advisors.
What the hell went wrong?
The 'someone else said it first' defence is really pathetic, unless you are explicitly quoting someone to criticise what they said. Rayner is atttacking Sunak here - I mean Dorries isn't even an MP any more. Or was Rayner trying to be supportive of Sunak against Dorries's insult? Pull the other one.
In your world pretty much anything would be acceptable. 'It wasn't *me* being racist when I used that racist insult against someone, I was quoting someone else'. (I'm not comparing 'pint-size' with racist abuse - just wondering where would YOU draw the line when insulting someone using someone else's words)
When it comes down to what language is in order in parliament, the arbiter is Mr Speaker. And he didn't bat an eyelid.
Had she thrown a racial slur then he absolutely would have intervened. Not that she would have quoted that. As you know very well.
It isn't my fault that the Bad Ship Tory is both sinking fast and is inhabited by political rats who savage each other.
Rayner's abusive remark wasn't aimed at people who knew it was a quote. It was aimed at the kind of yobs (of whatever caste) who shout "shortarse" at a bloke because he's of below average height. It will have gone down badly not just with short men, but also with short women, with women who are married to short men, and with women and men who have sons or dads or whatever who are short. The fact that it's unoriginal just shows she and her team couldn't even think up a good insult. Also note that she wasn't saying it to Rishi Sunak's face, and she seemed to be praising Boris Johnson. What an idiot.
And I don't know why there's reluctance to say it's similar to racism, because it is. Height and skin colour are characteristics you can't usually change and they have nothing to do with your skill or lack of it at running the country.
You'd never hear Jeremy Corbyn saying something like this. He had politics that were opposed to the Tory party's.
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
Please, pretty please, make it happen!
From a betting POV, I wonder what the effect on the SNP vote will be? I would expect it to lose them some votes in the cities, which would benefit Labour, but regain them some votes in rural and small town Scotland, which would mean the Tories would be less likely to hold onto their seats and for the Lib Dems to be less likely to gain seats, so also indirectly benefiting Labour.
announced Fairlie, even LBC have it reported. Greens left and have had to get on tricycles rather than ministerial cars.
Great news, Malc. Every policy the Greens have been responsible for has been an unmitigated disaster. Bottles, trans, not dualling the A9 and A96 ….. However they were all policies that Sturgeon supported. Maybe when they get out of jail, the Sturgeons will join the Greens, which should totally finish them.
Wish the current SNP cabinet would join them as well, jsut as crap as they are all Sturgeon talentless donkeys. I would not trust any one of them to run a bath.
If you look through history, the effect of a technological change is very hard to predict. At least, you can make hundreds of predictions, none of which turn out to be correct.
Take t'Internet. I've been involved with the Internet since just before the WWW; and used Mosaic as a browser back in 93-4. I thought it would change things; but the amount of change, and the direction, were very different from how I thought (*). But also, I don't think many other people saw it either. Yes, we all thought it would change things. But this much?
Also, there are many predictions of tech that will change the world that turn out to be nothingburgers despite massive hype. Driverless cars being a brilliant example so far. All promise, massive hype, and lacklustre results.
IMV current AI is somewhere between the two; it's not good enough to be truly transformative, but it is very hard to see exactly how it will change things.
(*) If I had got it right, I might be very rich.
We often differ on this, but actually I agree with your summary. AI is a singularity and by definition there is an event horizon. We can’t see beyond - it’s extremely hard to make good medium term predictions - 5-10 years. They will be inspired guesswork at best; bollocks at worst
However you can make good short term predictions based on actual evidence. In early March Klarna said they had successfully replaced their call centre with AI - they explicitly said the reason they announced this was its profound implications
I therefore predicted on here that all call centre work was imperilled. Et voila
Labour is going to preside over some serious unemployment
“The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.”
FT ££
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
Few will mourn these repetitive jobs (tho the people who get made redundant might); AI will not stop there
Why do none of our politicians talk about this? This isn’t some distant prospect, this is happening shortly - “in as soon as a year”
A challenge for Reeves and Starmer
People hate talking to a computer.
Often you want empathy and understanding and not a chatbot.
Everyone's situation is different.
I think "chatbots" are just a way for multinational companies to avoid talking to their customers. After the 5th time a computer gives you a link to their (automated) complaints procedure, you just give up.
Yes, it's just poor customer service.
AI won't destroy all these jobs, but when we have a national shortage of workers redeployment some of these to other work is a plus. Less need for immigration.
It's hack travel journalists that need to worry most.
It’s really not. Travel journalists will be some of the last to go (amongst writers); an AI trying to pretend it’s having a human experience would be exposed and the company would be in deep shit - and an AI cannot have a human experience. Those jobs are safe for now, the ones that require intrinsic humanity and a human presence
Everyone else in a cognitive job where they don’t have to show a face and be there in the moment is in grave trouble. That’s most office jobs and a lot of artistic jobs
For some reason I've just thought of the travel writer who wrote a guidebook about something like the Canadian Rockies, and later on it turned out he hadn't actually visited them.
I don't understand. I thought the whole point was that L**n *was* AI, hence always banging on about it all the time. (I didn't name him, because it's like a fairy tale - if we do, he appears.)
I’ve actually been very restrained on AI recently and barely mentioned it - because I know it sometimes irks @rcs1000 and @TSE
I will return to generally not talking about it unless it is mentioned first
However I just HAD to cite that FT report on call centre because
1. It vindicates me. I predicted this in early March when the Klarna story came out - AI successfully taking over a call centre
And
2. It has real world implications for UK politics. Labour are gonna be in power when AI really hits, throwing many out of work. Yet they seem absolutely unaware of this, or at least they are entirely silent on it
You might like to see the piece in The Times this morning on why Captcha images ("Tick all the boxes with a motorbike" etc) are becoming more difficult, because the computers are learning how to do them.
For anyone thinking of attending the Proms, get tickets to see Yunchan Lim, if you can. Possibly the best pianist in the world, and certainly of his generation.
Labour is going to preside over some serious unemployment
“The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.”
FT ££
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
Few will mourn these repetitive jobs (tho the people who get made redundant might); AI will not stop there
Why do none of our politicians talk about this? This isn’t some distant prospect, this is happening shortly - “in as soon as a year”
A challenge for Reeves and Starmer
People hate talking to a computer.
Often you want empathy and understanding and not a chatbot.
Everyone's situation is different.
I think "chatbots" are just a way for multinational companies to avoid talking to their customers. After the 5th time a computer gives you a link to their (automated) complaints procedure, you just give up.
Yes, it's just poor customer service.
AI won't destroy all these jobs, but when we have a national shortage of workers redeployment some of these to other work is a plus. Less need for immigration.
It's hack travel journalists that need to worry most.
It’s really not. Travel journalists will be some of the last to go (amongst writers); an AI trying to pretend it’s having a human experience would be exposed and the company would be in deep shit - and an AI cannot have a human experience. Those jobs are safe for now, the ones that require intrinsic humanity and a human presence
Everyone else in a cognitive job where they don’t have to show a face and be there in the moment is in grave trouble. That’s most office jobs and a lot of artistic jobs
For some reason I've just thought of the travel writer who wrote a guidebook about something like the Canadian Rockies, and later on it turned out he hadn't actually visited them.
Guidebook writing will mostly be done by AI
But the journalism will be a last redoubt of the human. By the time the spooky looms come for the poor travel hack, having his final mojito in the Maldives, we will either all be dead or living in total AI abundance anyway. The Singularity will be at hand
I’ve been trying to work out why no politicians are even talking about this - the imminent prospect of AI taking millions of jobs. I deduce it is because
1. They don’t understand it, they can’t quite believe it 2. They’re scared 3. They have no idea what to do, better to go into denial
Sometimes a mix of all three
Not only politicians.
Many of those casually going to university in the next few years without any thought of what they might do afterwards will regret it.
Rayner's abusive remark wasn't aimed at people who knew it was a quote. It was aimed at the kind of yobs (of whatever caste) who shout "shortarse" at a bloke because he's of below average height. It will have gone down badly not just with short men, but also with short women, with women who are married to short men, and with women and men who have sons or dads or whatever who are short. The fact that it's unoriginal just shows she and her team couldn't even think up a good insult. Also note that she wasn't saying it to Rishi Sunak's face, and she seemed to be praising Boris Johnson. What an idiot.
And I don't know why there's reluctance to say it's similar to racism, because it is. Height and skin colour are characteristics you can't usually change and they have nothing to do with your skill or lack of it at running the country.
You'd never hear Jeremy Corbyn saying something like this. He had politics that were opposed to the Tory party's.
Indeed. Which is why Corbyn led the Labour Party to its worst defeat since ages.
Rayner's abusive remark wasn't aimed at people who knew it was a quote. It was aimed at the kind of yobs (of whatever caste) who shout "shortarse" at a bloke because he's of below average height. It will have gone down badly not just with short men, but also with short women, with women who are married to short men, and with women and men who have sons or dads or whatever who are short. The fact that it's unoriginal just shows she and her team couldn't even think up a good insult. Also note that she wasn't saying it to Rishi Sunak's face, and she seemed to be praising Boris Johnson. What an idiot.
And I don't know why there's reluctance to say it's similar to racism, because it is. Height and skin colour are characteristics you can't usually change and they have nothing to do with your skill or lack of it at running the country.
You'd never hear Jeremy Corbyn saying something like this. He had politics that were opposed to the Tory party's.
Meanwhile Sunak is happily accepting millions from a bloke who said she should be shot. Same old conservative hypocrisy.
Labour is going to preside over some serious unemployment
“The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.”
FT ££
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
Few will mourn these repetitive jobs (tho the people who get made redundant might); AI will not stop there
Why do none of our politicians talk about this? This isn’t some distant prospect, this is happening shortly - “in as soon as a year”
A challenge for Reeves and Starmer
People hate talking to a computer.
Often you want empathy and understanding and not a chatbot.
Everyone's situation is different.
I think "chatbots" are just a way for multinational companies to avoid talking to their customers. After the 5th time a computer gives you a link to their (automated) complaints procedure, you just give up.
Yes, it's just poor customer service.
AI won't destroy all these jobs, but when we have a national shortage of workers redeployment some of these to other work is a plus. Less need for immigration.
It's hack travel journalists that need to worry most.
It’s really not. Travel journalists will be some of the last to go (amongst writers); an AI trying to pretend it’s having a human experience would be exposed and the company would be in deep shit - and an AI cannot have a human experience. Those jobs are safe for now, the ones that require intrinsic humanity and a human presence
Everyone else in a cognitive job where they don’t have to show a face and be there in the moment is in grave trouble. That’s most office jobs and a lot of artistic jobs
For some reason I've just thought of the travel writer who wrote a guidebook about something like the Canadian Rockies, and later on it turned out he hadn't actually visited them.
I don't understand. I thought the whole point was that L**n *was* AI, hence always banging on about it all the time. (I didn't name him, because it's like a fairy tale - if we do, he appears.)
I’ve actually been very restrained on AI recently and barely mentioned it - because I know it sometimes irks @rcs1000 and @TSE
I will return to generally not talking about it unless it is mentioned first
However I just HAD to cite that FT report on call centre because
1. It vindicates me. I predicted this in early March when the Klarna story came out - AI successfully taking over a call centre
And
2. It has real world implications for UK politics. Labour are gonna be in power when AI really hits, throwing many out of work. Yet they seem absolutely unaware of this, or at least they are entirely silent on it
But it doesn’t actually tell me anything I don’t already know.
For the past x years I’ve been helping companies roll more and more of the mundane customer support queries away from actual humans and towards AI usually in more complex ways to hide the AI from the equation.
Yes more people are going to be impacted by it but you typical AI isn’t going to replace a human until they stop hallucinating without understanding that they have done so
If you look through history, the effect of a technological change is very hard to predict. At least, you can make hundreds of predictions, none of which turn out to be correct.
Take t'Internet. I've been involved with the Internet since just before the WWW; and used Mosaic as a browser back in 93-4. I thought it would change things; but the amount of change, and the direction, were very different from how I thought (*). But also, I don't think many other people saw it either. Yes, we all thought it would change things. But this much?
Also, there are many predictions of tech that will change the world that turn out to be nothingburgers despite massive hype. Driverless cars being a brilliant example so far. All promise, massive hype, and lacklustre results.
IMV current AI is somewhere between the two; it's not good enough to be truly transformative, but it is very hard to see exactly how it will change things.
(*) If I had got it right, I might be very rich.
We often differ on this, but actually I agree with your summary. AI is a singularity and by definition there is an event horizon. We can’t see beyond - it’s extremely hard to make good medium term predictions - 5-10 years. They will be inspired guesswork at best; bollocks at worst
However you can make good short term predictions based on actual evidence. In early March Klarna said they had successfully replaced their call centre with AI - they explicitly said the reason they announced this was its profound implications
I therefore predicted on here that all call centre work was imperilled. Et voila
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
There over 6000 call centres in the United Kingdom There are around 812,000 agent roles within these centres Over 4% of the UK’s working population is employed at a call centre
And a lot of those call centres are a complete waste of time and energy - all those involved in oiling the wheels of the retail energy 'market' for a start. (Although I assume since the failure of said market the number of call centre roles there has significantly reduced.)
But that’s 800,000 jobs. Gone in a year or two - and then all the other cognitive jobs as AI moves up the food chain, lawyers, bankers, brokers, designers, accountants, musicians, writers, nearly all of them - gone
This is going to be devastating for so many, yet zero people discuss it. By the end of Starmer’s term - certainly his 2nd term - we could have five million unemployed - or we could be living in an era of perpetual abundance
Again, look at offshoring. We used to worry that accountancy and law jobs would be offshored, even medicine for things like reading scans. Some were, most weren't.
AI will doubtless cost some jobs. It will also create new ones. What it will mostly do is open up services for those who cannot currently afford them. You could employ AI to draw cartoons for your Gazette columns. That has not cost any cartoonist their job. Only when the Telegraph replaces Matt will a cartoonist lose his job. Likewise you could have AI translate your AI-cartoon captions into French or Japanese, but again no humans have lost their jobs. Forget AI. Have you cost a photographer his job by taking your own travel snaps for the Gazette, or would they not have sent one anyway?
Of course AI will destroy jobs. That guy in the FT makes the same claim as you - “oh yes millions will be made unemployed in a year or two but don’t worry they will do other jobs, AI will create jobs”
He just doesn’t say what these new jobs ARE. Because they don’t exist, I suspect
If 700k of the 800k UK call centre workers lose their jobs in a couple of years, what will they all do?
Photography, by the way, has basically been destroyed by the internet. It is not a viable career, not any more
Other artistic jobs will follow
I don't see many AI drones taking wedding photos yet.
That’s because photography has already been destroyed as a career. Trust me, I know this. I have lots of friends and acquaintances who USED to work in photography. Virtually all have now moved into other jobs. Just one is left, he’s a genius photographer, with a definite style - ergo very hard to replace - he struggles to make a living but gets by
The rest of the ecosystem of photography has largely collapsed. Destroyed by the internet and smartphone cameras
If you look through history, the effect of a technological change is very hard to predict. At least, you can make hundreds of predictions, none of which turn out to be correct.
Take t'Internet. I've been involved with the Internet since just before the WWW; and used Mosaic as a browser back in 93-4. I thought it would change things; but the amount of change, and the direction, were very different from how I thought (*). But also, I don't think many other people saw it either. Yes, we all thought it would change things. But this much?
Also, there are many predictions of tech that will change the world that turn out to be nothingburgers despite massive hype. Driverless cars being a brilliant example so far. All promise, massive hype, and lacklustre results.
IMV current AI is somewhere between the two; it's not good enough to be truly transformative, but it is very hard to see exactly how it will change things.
(*) If I had got it right, I might be very rich.
We often differ on this, but actually I agree with your summary. AI is a singularity and by definition there is an event horizon. We can’t see beyond - it’s extremely hard to make good medium term predictions - 5-10 years. They will be inspired guesswork at best; bollocks at worst
However you can make good short term predictions based on actual evidence. In early March Klarna said they had successfully replaced their call centre with AI - they explicitly said the reason they announced this was its profound implications
I therefore predicted on here that all call centre work was imperilled. Et voila
Where I disagree is when you say rubbish like: "AI is a singularity"
And I remind you of all you predictions about driverless cars.
Labour is going to preside over some serious unemployment
“The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.”
FT ££
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
Few will mourn these repetitive jobs (tho the people who get made redundant might); AI will not stop there
Why do none of our politicians talk about this? This isn’t some distant prospect, this is happening shortly - “in as soon as a year”
A challenge for Reeves and Starmer
People hate talking to a computer.
Often you want empathy and understanding and not a chatbot.
Everyone's situation is different.
I think "chatbots" are just a way for multinational companies to avoid talking to their customers. After the 5th time a computer gives you a link to their (automated) complaints procedure, you just give up.
Yes, it's just poor customer service.
AI won't destroy all these jobs, but when we have a national shortage of workers redeployment some of these to other work is a plus. Less need for immigration.
It's hack travel journalists that need to worry most.
It’s really not. Travel journalists will be some of the last to go (amongst writers); an AI trying to pretend it’s having a human experience would be exposed and the company would be in deep shit - and an AI cannot have a human experience. Those jobs are safe for now, the ones that require intrinsic humanity and a human presence
Everyone else in a cognitive job where they don’t have to show a face and be there in the moment is in grave trouble. That’s most office jobs and a lot of artistic jobs
For some reason I've just thought of the travel writer who wrote a guidebook about something like the Canadian Rockies, and later on it turned out he hadn't actually visited them.
I don't understand. I thought the whole point was that L**n *was* AI, hence always banging on about it all the time. (I didn't name him, because it's like a fairy tale - if we do, he appears.)
I’ve actually been very restrained on AI recently and barely mentioned it - because I know it sometimes irks @rcs1000 and @TSE
I will return to generally not talking about it unless it is mentioned first
However I just HAD to cite that FT report on call centre because
1. It vindicates me. I predicted this in early March when the Klarna story came out - AI successfully taking over a call centre
And
2. It has real world implications for UK politics. Labour are gonna be in power when AI really hits, throwing many out of work. Yet they seem absolutely unaware of this, or at least they are entirely silent on it
Possibly because the effects over the next five years will be relatively limited. I'd expect quite a cull of AI companies over the next couple of years - possibly along the lines of what happened with internet stocks back in 2000 - since a lot of them are spending a lot of cash without a revenue model to back it up.
Then, just as Leon declares AI to have been overhyped, it will really start to take off.
Rayner's abusive remark wasn't aimed at people who knew it was a quote. It was aimed at the kind of yobs (of whatever caste) who shout "shortarse" at a bloke because he's of below average height. It will have gone down badly not just with short men, but also with short women, with women who are married to short men, and with women and men who have sons or dads or whatever who are short. The fact that it's unoriginal just shows she and her team couldn't even think up a good insult. Also note that she wasn't saying it to Rishi Sunak's face, and she seemed to be praising Boris Johnson. What an idiot.
And I don't know why there's reluctance to say it's similar to racism, because it is. Height and skin colour are characteristics you can't usually change and they have nothing to do with your skill or lack of it at running the country.
You'd never hear Jeremy Corbyn saying something like this. He had politics that were opposed to the Tory party's.
Actually, I think I agree with you here. I have no idea why Sunak is criticised for his height: there are manifold other things one can reasonably attack him for, without resorting to this sort of stuff. I think it's distasteful and I'm on the short side of six foot. It probably won't make much difference, but I think Rayner was out of order using it (in what was otherwise a fun bombastic session if, as ever with the PB pantomime, more heat than light).
If you look through history, the effect of a technological change is very hard to predict. At least, you can make hundreds of predictions, none of which turn out to be correct.
Take t'Internet. I've been involved with the Internet since just before the WWW; and used Mosaic as a browser back in 93-4. I thought it would change things; but the amount of change, and the direction, were very different from how I thought (*). But also, I don't think many other people saw it either. Yes, we all thought it would change things. But this much?
Also, there are many predictions of tech that will change the world that turn out to be nothingburgers despite massive hype. Driverless cars being a brilliant example so far. All promise, massive hype, and lacklustre results.
IMV current AI is somewhere between the two; it's not good enough to be truly transformative, but it is very hard to see exactly how it will change things.
(*) If I had got it right, I might be very rich.
We often differ on this, but actually I agree with your summary. AI is a singularity and by definition there is an event horizon. We can’t see beyond - it’s extremely hard to make good medium term predictions - 5-10 years. They will be inspired guesswork at best; bollocks at worst
However you can make good short term predictions based on actual evidence. In early March Klarna said they had successfully replaced their call centre with AI - they explicitly said the reason they announced this was its profound implications
I therefore predicted on here that all call centre work was imperilled. Et voila
Where I disagree is when you say rubbish like: "AI is a singularity"
And I remind you of all you predictions about driverless cars.
The invention of an alien intelligence, autonomous, apparently sentient, and superior to our own, is ABSOLUTELY a Singularity
It’s the biggest thing to happen to planet earth since life began, arguably. And it’s probably going to happen on our watch
There has been life on earth for four billion years. It chose to change irrevocably for the handful of decades that WE here, we happy few, we band of PB brothers and sisters, are around to witness it
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
There over 6000 call centres in the United Kingdom There are around 812,000 agent roles within these centres Over 4% of the UK’s working population is employed at a call centre
And a lot of those call centres are a complete waste of time and energy - all those involved in oiling the wheels of the retail energy 'market' for a start. (Although I assume since the failure of said market the number of call centre roles there has significantly reduced.)
But that’s 800,000 jobs. Gone in a year or two - and then all the other cognitive jobs as AI moves up the food chain, lawyers, bankers, brokers, designers, accountants, musicians, writers, nearly all of them - gone
This is going to be devastating for so many, yet zero people discuss it. By the end of Starmer’s term - certainly his 2nd term - we could have five million unemployed - or we could be living in an era of perpetual abundance
Again, look at offshoring. We used to worry that accountancy and law jobs would be offshored, even medicine for things like reading scans. Some were, most weren't.
AI will doubtless cost some jobs. It will also create new ones. What it will mostly do is open up services for those who cannot currently afford them. You could employ AI to draw cartoons for your Gazette columns. That has not cost any cartoonist their job. Only when the Telegraph replaces Matt will a cartoonist lose his job. Likewise you could have AI translate your AI-cartoon captions into French or Japanese, but again no humans have lost their jobs. Forget AI. Have you cost a photographer his job by taking your own travel snaps for the Gazette, or would they not have sent one anyway?
Of course AI will destroy jobs. That guy in the FT makes the same claim as you - “oh yes millions will be made unemployed in a year or two but don’t worry they will do other jobs, AI will create jobs”
He just doesn’t say what these new jobs ARE. Because they don’t exist, I suspect
If 700k of the 800k UK call centre workers lose their jobs in a couple of years, what will they all do?
Photography, by the way, has basically been destroyed by the internet. It is not a viable career, not any more
Other artistic jobs will follow
My friend's wife, I was recently astonished to learn, is a textile designer. Who is now having to find other niches because she expects it all to be done by AI in two years time. If it's all about creating abstract designers, who cares whether most of those abstract designs weren't exactly what I specified? They're quite nice and they'll do. Not necessarily quite as well, but far, far more cheaply. However, it turns out there is more to being a textile designer than designing textiles. You have to say what will be fashionable in 18 months time and also go to Paris and go shopping. I don't understand why. But these jobs will still be done by humans for a while yet.
I'm increasingly getting drawn down the midjourney rabbithole and am fascinated by the outputs it gives. Not expecting much, I asked it to draw a picture of me with my wife doing something exciting. It returned a nice picture of two pleasant looking strangers (a man in his 60s and a woman in her early 40s? father and daughter) standing in a slightly-too-narrow street proudly holding up a hand-drawn picture of a nice old car. I mean, it's quite a nice picture and a fascinating story starter. But midjourney's definition of exciting is different to mine.
I report all this not to make any judgement on AI, but just to allow you to share my baffled fascination.
It’s all in the promptcraft
Look at what results other people are getting and examine their prompts. I found one guy sourcing brilliantly weird and spooky images - I checked his prompts and there were two significant words he was using
Not sure how to do that, but I'll have a hunt. And I'll have a play and see what I can do. It seems bizarrely resistant to do some quite innocuous things. It gives you a nice picture at the expense of giving you what you've asked for. I quite accept this may well be because I'm not doing it right (though this doesn't bode particularly well for AI doing a call centre's job). Ooh - I've just seen you can give it a face reference. I've just shown it a picture of my wife and asked it to put her in an Elizabethan style green dress in front of a fireplace in a tudor manor house. Might have to go and have a lie down now.
If you look through history, the effect of a technological change is very hard to predict. At least, you can make hundreds of predictions, none of which turn out to be correct.
Take t'Internet. I've been involved with the Internet since just before the WWW; and used Mosaic as a browser back in 93-4. I thought it would change things; but the amount of change, and the direction, were very different from how I thought (*). But also, I don't think many other people saw it either. Yes, we all thought it would change things. But this much?
Also, there are many predictions of tech that will change the world that turn out to be nothingburgers despite massive hype. Driverless cars being a brilliant example so far. All promise, massive hype, and lacklustre results.
IMV current AI is somewhere between the two; it's not good enough to be truly transformative, but it is very hard to see exactly how it will change things.
(*) If I had got it right, I might be very rich.
With mobile phones, I never thought people would be using them all the time because one assumed it would continue to be the case (as it used to be) that each time you used one it would cost money, so you'd only use them when you really needed to.
Rayner's abusive remark wasn't aimed at people who knew it was a quote. It was aimed at the kind of yobs (of whatever caste) who shout "shortarse" at a bloke because he's of below average height. It will have gone down badly not just with short men, but also with short women, with women who are married to short men, and with women and men who have sons or dads or whatever who are short. The fact that it's unoriginal just shows she and her team couldn't even think up a good insult. Also note that she wasn't saying it to Rishi Sunak's face, and she seemed to be praising Boris Johnson. What an idiot.
And I don't know why there's reluctance to say it's similar to racism, because it is. Height and skin colour are characteristics you can't usually change and they have nothing to do with your skill or lack of it at running the country.
You'd never hear Jeremy Corbyn saying something like this. He had politics that were opposed to the Tory party's.
Actually, I think I agree with you here. I have no idea why Sunak is criticised for his height: there are manifold other things one can reasonably attack him for, without resorting to this sort of stuff. I think it's distasteful and I'm on the short side of six foot. It probably won't make much difference, but I think Rayner was out of order using it (in what was otherwise a fun bombastic session if, as ever with the PB pantomime, more heat than light).
I've met him - he isn't particularly short. I read "pint-sized loser" as his political stature. Dorries was comparing him to Boris! Sunak's height isn't really the issue - she thinks he is a political pygmy compared to her beloved.
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
TUD, Which of the competing opinions was correct yesterday , one said £200M new tax income others said £60M reduction in overall income tax take. I assume both could be correct and to suit purpose , ie £200M in and £260M out.
For anyone thinking of attending the Proms, get tickets to see Yunchan Lim, if you can. Possibly the best pianist in the world, and certainly of his generation.
I will be watching paint dry instead.
I didn't have you down as a philistine, malc. Or are you just not into piano music ?
You understand it's legitimate to criticise someone for obnoxious use of language, right? That there's a difference between doing that and demanding someone be thrown out of public life?
Who is calling for cancellation? Name these warriors at which you're 'giggling'. I'm perhaps a bit sleepy, so I may have missed those calling for Rayner to no longer be an MP.
Give over. "Obnoxious use of language" - if that is a thing you want to ban - is something to aim at Nadine Dorries.
It is an entirely legitimate political action to hoist politicians up with their words, deeds and actions. A Conservative ex Cabinet Minister and direct colleague of Sunak called him a "Pint-Sized Loser". Various posters on here seem very upset that she threw that back at the Tories - shouldn't be said, not legitimate as you put it.
You want to cancel such "obnoxious" language, yes?
Lets look at who thinks it was fine - the Speaker. He is very quick to call out unparliamentary language. Is scrupulous about the rules of what can and can't be said whilst staying in order. And he found it to be in order. Because it IS in order.
Rayner seemed to be quoting Dorries approvingly, I didn't have you or Rayner down as Dorries fans.
'pint-size' not acceptable, less of this from Labour please.
Labour didn't say it. The Tories did. Worse, it came from Sunak's former close colleague.
Was musing about Sunak with a friend the other day. When I met him in 2020 I saw a guy relaxed with the burden of keeping the economy going through Covid, with best-in-class media team and advisors.
What the hell went wrong?
The 'someone else said it first' defence is really pathetic, unless you are explicitly quoting someone to criticise what they said. Rayner is atttacking Sunak here - I mean Dorries isn't even an MP any more. Or was Rayner trying to be supportive of Sunak against Dorries's insult? Pull the other one.
In your world pretty much anything would be acceptable. 'It wasn't *me* being racist when I used that racist insult against someone, I was quoting someone else'. (I'm not comparing 'pint-size' with racist abuse - just wondering where would YOU draw the line when insulting someone using someone else's words)
When it comes down to what language is in order in parliament, the arbiter is Mr Speaker. And he didn't bat an eyelid.
Had she thrown a racial slur then he absolutely would have intervened. Not that she would have quoted that. As you know very well.
It isn't my fault that the Bad Ship Tory is both sinking fast and is inhabited by political rats who savage each other.
SNP source: "The SNP breaking the BHA unilaterally is an incredible act of self harm and shows that members’ voices don’t matter as much as big donor money. "Many will be reevaluating their membership status today and in the weeks to come."
SNP leadership hopeful Humza Yousaf has said his party cannot afford to risk a minority government amid concerns over the future of the powersharing agreement with the Scottish Greens.
The Health Secretary – who will find out on Monday if he has beaten Kate Forbes and Ash Regan to replace Nicola Sturgeon as party leader and first minister – said any move away from the Bute House agreement would “destabilise” the Scottish Government.
It comes as the Greens sent a strong signal that they may not work with Ms Forbes if she is elected as Scotland’s next leader.
I wish the powers that be would realise that just because an orchestra plays it doesn’t make the music Classical.
I see from the piece that it is “BBC Radio 3's mission to engage new audiences in classical music.” It’s probably doesn’t make it easier to achieve this aim if you throw over increasing parts of the festival to non-Classical Music.
There have been orchestra's playing the theme to Gerry Anderson TV series and also Dr Who incidental music.
Also under the guise of "mission to engage new audiences in classical music"
I actually went to the Utilita in Newcastle to see the Dr Who one, it was pretty good but not a classical music event.
Robert Newman, in 1894. "I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music..."
I really liked both the Joe 90 and UFO theme played by an Orchestra.
Space 1999 season 1 would be brilliant played by an Orchestra
For anyone thinking of attending the Proms, get tickets to see Yunchan Lim, if you can. Possibly the best pianist in the world, and certainly of his generation.
I will be watching paint dry instead.
I didn't have you down as a philistine, malc. Or are you just not into piano music ?
Not piano Nigel , just Proms in general. I do prefer orchestra's and opera to be fair. Was meant as a jest at the Proms which I am not a fan of.
SNP source: "The SNP breaking the BHA unilaterally is an incredible act of self harm and shows that members’ voices don’t matter as much as big donor money. "Many will be reevaluating their membership status today and in the weeks to come."
Last week they had 8000+ new members join due to one of the Murrell's getting measured for a stripey pyjama suit. Will they want their £1 back this week.
I think Rayner was more making the point that Sunak was a loser rather than the comment primarily aimed at his height . That was my take away . I see Rayners comments as having zero effect on voting intention and the Tories really need to stop the pearl clutching given some of the attacks they’ve aimed at both Starmer and Rayner .
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
There over 6000 call centres in the United Kingdom There are around 812,000 agent roles within these centres Over 4% of the UK’s working population is employed at a call centre
And a lot of those call centres are a complete waste of time and energy - all those involved in oiling the wheels of the retail energy 'market' for a start. (Although I assume since the failure of said market the number of call centre roles there has significantly reduced.)
But that’s 800,000 jobs. Gone in a year or two - and then all the other cognitive jobs as AI moves up the food chain, lawyers, bankers, brokers, designers, accountants, musicians, writers, nearly all of them - gone
This is going to be devastating for so many, yet zero people discuss it. By the end of Starmer’s term - certainly his 2nd term - we could have five million unemployed - or we could be living in an era of perpetual abundance
Again, look at offshoring. We used to worry that accountancy and law jobs would be offshored, even medicine for things like reading scans. Some were, most weren't.
AI will doubtless cost some jobs. It will also create new ones. What it will mostly do is open up services for those who cannot currently afford them. You could employ AI to draw cartoons for your Gazette columns. That has not cost any cartoonist their job. Only when the Telegraph replaces Matt will a cartoonist lose his job. Likewise you could have AI translate your AI-cartoon captions into French or Japanese, but again no humans have lost their jobs. Forget AI. Have you cost a photographer his job by taking your own travel snaps for the Gazette, or would they not have sent one anyway?
Of course AI will destroy jobs. That guy in the FT makes the same claim as you - “oh yes millions will be made unemployed in a year or two but don’t worry they will do other jobs, AI will create jobs”
He just doesn’t say what these new jobs ARE. Because they don’t exist, I suspect
If 700k of the 800k UK call centre workers lose their jobs in a couple of years, what will they all do?
Photography, by the way, has basically been destroyed by the internet. It is not a viable career, not any more
Other artistic jobs will follow
My friend's wife, I was recently astonished to learn, is a textile designer. Who is now having to find other niches because she expects it all to be done by AI in two years time. If it's all about creating abstract designers, who cares whether most of those abstract designs weren't exactly what I specified? They're quite nice and they'll do. Not necessarily quite as well, but far, far more cheaply. However, it turns out there is more to being a textile designer than designing textiles. You have to say what will be fashionable in 18 months time and also go to Paris and go shopping. I don't understand why. But these jobs will still be done by humans for a while yet.
I'm increasingly getting drawn down the midjourney rabbithole and am fascinated by the outputs it gives. Not expecting much, I asked it to draw a picture of me with my wife doing something exciting. It returned a nice picture of two pleasant looking strangers (a man in his 60s and a woman in her early 40s? father and daughter) standing in a slightly-too-narrow street proudly holding up a hand-drawn picture of a nice old car. I mean, it's quite a nice picture and a fascinating story starter. But midjourney's definition of exciting is different to mine.
I report all this not to make any judgement on AI, but just to allow you to share my baffled fascination.
It’s all in the promptcraft
Look at what results other people are getting and examine their prompts. I found one guy sourcing brilliantly weird and spooky images - I checked his prompts and there were two significant words he was using
Not sure how to do that, but I'll have a hunt. And I'll have a play and see what I can do. It seems bizarrely resistant to do some quite innocuous things. It gives you a nice picture at the expense of giving you what you've asked for. I quite accept this may well be because I'm not doing it right (though this doesn't bode particularly well for AI doing a call centre's job). Ooh - I've just seen you can give it a face reference. I've just shown it a picture of my wife and asked it to put her in an Elizabethan style green dress in front of a fireplace in a tudor manor house. Might have to go and have a lie down now.
But it wouldn't surprise me if the occasional flub like that is treated as part of the cost of doing business. (And for call centre voice interactions who routnely records those to use as evidence later?)
Despite the cold spring the supermarkets are already filling up with British strawberries.
Given time of year I imagine English ones as they will not have long harvested the turnips up here. Never as good this early having been forced and no way are foreign ones much good.
Don't the SNP have a working majority even without the support of the Greens?
Why would they have aligned with raving lunatics if they had a majority, even they are not that mentally deranged.
I thought in 2011 when they did have a majority they were still working with the Greens, but might have misremembered.
When the SNP lost their majority in 2016 they did work with the Greens to pass legislation and budgets, but it was on an ad-hoc basis.
I think that's a better way to approach things than a formal coalition, as it means that different majorities, made up of different co-operating parties, can be created over different issues, instead of having one coalition decide on everything.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
There over 6000 call centres in the United Kingdom There are around 812,000 agent roles within these centres Over 4% of the UK’s working population is employed at a call centre
And a lot of those call centres are a complete waste of time and energy - all those involved in oiling the wheels of the retail energy 'market' for a start. (Although I assume since the failure of said market the number of call centre roles there has significantly reduced.)
But that’s 800,000 jobs. Gone in a year or two - and then all the other cognitive jobs as AI moves up the food chain, lawyers, bankers, brokers, designers, accountants, musicians, writers, nearly all of them - gone
This is going to be devastating for so many, yet zero people discuss it. By the end of Starmer’s term - certainly his 2nd term - we could have five million unemployed - or we could be living in an era of perpetual abundance
Again, look at offshoring. We used to worry that accountancy and law jobs would be offshored, even medicine for things like reading scans. Some were, most weren't.
AI will doubtless cost some jobs. It will also create new ones. What it will mostly do is open up services for those who cannot currently afford them. You could employ AI to draw cartoons for your Gazette columns. That has not cost any cartoonist their job. Only when the Telegraph replaces Matt will a cartoonist lose his job. Likewise you could have AI translate your AI-cartoon captions into French or Japanese, but again no humans have lost their jobs. Forget AI. Have you cost a photographer his job by taking your own travel snaps for the Gazette, or would they not have sent one anyway?
Of course AI will destroy jobs. That guy in the FT makes the same claim as you - “oh yes millions will be made unemployed in a year or two but don’t worry they will do other jobs, AI will create jobs”
He just doesn’t say what these new jobs ARE. Because they don’t exist, I suspect
If 700k of the 800k UK call centre workers lose their jobs in a couple of years, what will they all do?
Photography, by the way, has basically been destroyed by the internet. It is not a viable career, not any more
Other artistic jobs will follow
My friend's wife, I was recently astonished to learn, is a textile designer. Who is now having to find other niches because she expects it all to be done by AI in two years time. If it's all about creating abstract designers, who cares whether most of those abstract designs weren't exactly what I specified? They're quite nice and they'll do. Not necessarily quite as well, but far, far more cheaply. However, it turns out there is more to being a textile designer than designing textiles. You have to say what will be fashionable in 18 months time and also go to Paris and go shopping. I don't understand why. But these jobs will still be done by humans for a while yet.
I'm increasingly getting drawn down the midjourney rabbithole and am fascinated by the outputs it gives. Not expecting much, I asked it to draw a picture of me with my wife doing something exciting. It returned a nice picture of two pleasant looking strangers (a man in his 60s and a woman in her early 40s? father and daughter) standing in a slightly-too-narrow street proudly holding up a hand-drawn picture of a nice old car. I mean, it's quite a nice picture and a fascinating story starter. But midjourney's definition of exciting is different to mine.
I report all this not to make any judgement on AI, but just to allow you to share my baffled fascination.
It’s all in the promptcraft
Look at what results other people are getting and examine their prompts. I found one guy sourcing brilliantly weird and spooky images - I checked his prompts and there were two significant words he was using
Not sure how to do that, but I'll have a hunt. And I'll have a play and see what I can do. It seems bizarrely resistant to do some quite innocuous things. It gives you a nice picture at the expense of giving you what you've asked for. I quite accept this may well be because I'm not doing it right (though this doesn't bode particularly well for AI doing a call centre's job). Ooh - I've just seen you can give it a face reference. I've just shown it a picture of my wife and asked it to put her in an Elizabethan style green dress in front of a fireplace in a tudor manor house. Might have to go and have a lie down now.
But it wouldn't surprise me if the occasional flub like that is treated as part of the cost of doing business. (And for call centre voice interactions who routnely records those to use as evidence later?)
I guess we're going to have to get used to doing so. I routinely save the scripts of online chats with customer services, whether human or robot.
Despite the cold spring the supermarkets are already filling up with British strawberries.
Given time of year I imagine English ones as they will not have long harvested the turnips up here. Never as good this early having been forced and no way are foreign ones much good.
Strawberries especially from Spain are crap . Too big and too watery .
Despite the cold spring the supermarkets are already filling up with British strawberries.
Given time of year I imagine English ones as they will not have long harvested the turnips up here. Never as good this early having been forced and no way are foreign ones much good.
The British tomatoes now in the supermarkets are pretty good.
The Dutch ones available in the winter were tasteless.
Don't the SNP have a working majority even without the support of the Greens?
Why would they have aligned with raving lunatics if they had a majority, even they are not that mentally deranged.
I thought in 2011 when they did have a majority they were still working with the Greens, but might have misremembered.
Not that I remember Andy, they did do a bit of horse trading with Tories when a minority and it suited both. PS: same with Greens I believe but not formal like the recent shambles when they gave those two clowns ministerial posts and allowed them to do real damage.
I see Angela vdB left the PO not because she messed up, was complicit in the entire shebang, but because the PO wasn't acting quickly enough to compensate SPMs.
She is actually trying to brazen it out. Magnificent.
Despite the cold spring the supermarkets are already filling up with British strawberries.
Given time of year I imagine English ones as they will not have long harvested the turnips up here. Never as good this early having been forced and no way are foreign ones much good.
Strawberries especially from Spain are crap . Too big and too watery .
Labour is going to preside over some serious unemployment
“The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.”
FT ££
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
Few will mourn these repetitive jobs (tho the people who get made redundant might); AI will not stop there
Why do none of our politicians talk about this? This isn’t some distant prospect, this is happening shortly - “in as soon as a year”
A challenge for Reeves and Starmer
People hate talking to a computer.
Often you want empathy and understanding and not a chatbot.
Everyone's situation is different.
I think "chatbots" are just a way for multinational companies to avoid talking to their customers. After the 5th time a computer gives you a link to their (automated) complaints procedure, you just give up.
Yes, it's just poor customer service.
AI won't destroy all these jobs, but when we have a national shortage of workers redeployment some of these to other work is a plus. Less need for immigration.
It's hack travel journalists that need to worry most.
It’s really not. Travel journalists will be some of the last to go (amongst writers); an AI trying to pretend it’s having a human experience would be exposed and the company would be in deep shit - and an AI cannot have a human experience. Those jobs are safe for now, the ones that require intrinsic humanity and a human presence
Everyone else in a cognitive job where they don’t have to show a face and be there in the moment is in grave trouble. That’s most office jobs and a lot of artistic jobs
For some reason I've just thought of the travel writer who wrote a guidebook about something like the Canadian Rockies, and later on it turned out he hadn't actually visited them.
I don't understand. I thought the whole point was that L**n *was* AI, hence always banging on about it all the time. (I didn't name him, because it's like a fairy tale - if we do, he appears.)
I’ve actually been very restrained on AI recently and barely mentioned it - because I know it sometimes irks @rcs1000 and @TSE
I will return to generally not talking about it unless it is mentioned first
However I just HAD to cite that FT report on call centre because
1. It vindicates me. I predicted this in early March when the Klarna story came out - AI successfully taking over a call centre
And
2. It has real world implications for UK politics. Labour are gonna be in power when AI really hits, throwing many out of work. Yet they seem absolutely unaware of this, or at least they are entirely silent on it
Possibly because the effects over the next five years will be relatively limited. I'd expect quite a cull of AI companies over the next couple of years - possibly along the lines of what happened with internet stocks back in 2000 - since a lot of them are spending a lot of cash without a revenue model to back it up.
Then, just as Leon declares AI to have been overhyped, it will really start to take off.
Remember the internet stock boom of the late 1990s. The stocks collapsed in 2000 and it wasnt until the invention of the iphone in 2007 that the internet started to hit its true potential.
According to Lewis Goodall and James O Brien PMQs was an unmitigated triumph for Rayner. Which f course it was over Dowden - but noone knows or cares who the completely forgetable and mediocre Dowden is. 24 hours later and it's not looking so good for her with the throwaway gag regarding Rishi's height. Of course everyone's forgotten about how poor Dowden was - in that sense he's the perfect PMQs stand in.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
So a shopkeeper cannot hire a few bouncers and lock the shoplifters in with them ?
For anyone thinking of attending the Proms, get tickets to see Yunchan Lim, if you can. Possibly the best pianist in the world, and certainly of his generation.
I will be watching paint dry instead.
I didn't have you down as a philistine, malc. Or are you just not into piano music ?
Not piano Nigel , just Proms in general. I do prefer orchestra's and opera to be fair. Was meant as a jest at the Proms which I am not a fan of.
Fair enough. He's an astonishingly talented pianist, though.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I would give security staff carte blanche , batons , pepper spray , etc and tell them to beat the crap out of any scroat trying to get out the door with something they had not paid for. Guaranteed we will suffer for it , will be having to give your card on entry to be precharged 100 quid or such , photographed and will only get out if you are scanned and photo evidence shows you got a receipt.
You understand it's legitimate to criticise someone for obnoxious use of language, right? That there's a difference between doing that and demanding someone be thrown out of public life?
Who is calling for cancellation? Name these warriors at which you're 'giggling'. I'm perhaps a bit sleepy, so I may have missed those calling for Rayner to no longer be an MP.
Give over. "Obnoxious use of language" - if that is a thing you want to ban - is something to aim at Nadine Dorries.
It is an entirely legitimate political action to hoist politicians up with their words, deeds and actions. A Conservative ex Cabinet Minister and direct colleague of Sunak called him a "Pint-Sized Loser". Various posters on here seem very upset that she threw that back at the Tories - shouldn't be said, not legitimate as you put it.
You want to cancel such "obnoxious" language, yes?
Lets look at who thinks it was fine - the Speaker. He is very quick to call out unparliamentary language. Is scrupulous about the rules of what can and can't be said whilst staying in order. And he found it to be in order. Because it IS in order.
Rayner seemed to be quoting Dorries approvingly, I didn't have you or Rayner down as Dorries fans.
'pint-size' not acceptable, less of this from Labour please.
Labour didn't say it. The Tories did. Worse, it came from Sunak's former close colleague.
Was musing about Sunak with a friend the other day. When I met him in 2020 I saw a guy relaxed with the burden of keeping the economy going through Covid, with best-in-class media team and advisors.
What the hell went wrong?
The 'someone else said it first' defence is really pathetic, unless you are explicitly quoting someone to criticise what they said. Rayner is atttacking Sunak here - I mean Dorries isn't even an MP any more. Or was Rayner trying to be supportive of Sunak against Dorries's insult? Pull the other one.
In your world pretty much anything would be acceptable. 'It wasn't *me* being racist when I used that racist insult against someone, I was quoting someone else'. (I'm not comparing 'pint-size' with racist abuse - just wondering where would YOU draw the line when insulting someone using someone else's words)
When it comes down to what language is in order in parliament, the arbiter is Mr Speaker. And he didn't bat an eyelid.
Had she thrown a racial slur then he absolutely would have intervened. Not that she would have quoted that. As you know very well.
It isn't my fault that the Bad Ship Tory is both sinking fast and is inhabited by political rats who savage each other.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I don't think it's the threat of a false imprisonment or assualt charge that prevents shopkeepers attempting to detain suspects, more the likelihood the perps are tooled up tbh.
Contrary to the vitriol poured over the Scottish Greens on here, and the experience of most junior coalition partners, they've done quite well in the opinion polls for the next Holyrood election.
According to Lewis Goodall and James O Brien PMQs was an unmitigated triumph for Rayner. Which f course it was over Dowden - but noone knows or cares who the completely forgetable and mediocre Dowden is. 24 hours later and it's not looking so good for her with the throwaway gag regarding Rishi's height. Of course everyone's forgotten about how poor Dowden was - in that sense he's the perfect PMQs stand in.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I would give security staff carte blanche , batons , pepper spray , etc and tell them to beat the crap out of any scroat trying to get out the door with something they had not paid for. Guaranteed we will suffer for it , will be having to give your card on entry to be precharged 100 quid or such , photographed and will only get out if you are scanned and photo evidence shows you got a receipt.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I don't think it's the threat of a false imprisonment or assualt charge that prevents shopkeepers attempting to detain suspects, more the likelihood the perps are tooled up tbh.
employ real security bods and get them tooled up, rather than old codgers who double for collecting trolleys.
If you look through history, the effect of a technological change is very hard to predict. At least, you can make hundreds of predictions, none of which turn out to be correct.
Take t'Internet. I've been involved with the Internet since just before the WWW; and used Mosaic as a browser back in 93-4. I thought it would change things; but the amount of change, and the direction, were very different from how I thought (*). But also, I don't think many other people saw it either. Yes, we all thought it would change things. But this much?
Also, there are many predictions of tech that will change the world that turn out to be nothingburgers despite massive hype. Driverless cars being a brilliant example so far. All promise, massive hype, and lacklustre results.
IMV current AI is somewhere between the two; it's not good enough to be truly transformative, but it is very hard to see exactly how it will change things.
(*) If I had got it right, I might be very rich.
We often differ on this, but actually I agree with your summary. AI is a singularity and by definition there is an event horizon. We can’t see beyond - it’s extremely hard to make good medium term predictions - 5-10 years. They will be inspired guesswork at best; bollocks at worst
However you can make good short term predictions based on actual evidence. In early March Klarna said they had successfully replaced their call centre with AI - they explicitly said the reason they announced this was its profound implications
I therefore predicted on here that all call centre work was imperilled. Et voila
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
So a shopkeeper cannot hire a few bouncers and lock the shoplifters in with them ?
I knew a shopkeeper who did that on one occasion.
He only needed to do it once.
Extra legal violence?
Well, that is one way to run a country.
A local Tesco franchise had a shoplifting problem. A "cousin" of the owner took to hanging around. Problem character - one of those who never has a steady job, always in trouble. He scraggs the shoplifters. Who then charged him with assault. He goes to court, claims he is nothing to do with the Tesco (not employed by them).
My favourite was a corner shop on an estate - after serious problems with the local junkies, a regular suggested that he (the shop owner) join his (the regular customers) local social club. Never actually go there, of course. Amusing, because this is exactly how policing worked before the Peelers.
You understand it's legitimate to criticise someone for obnoxious use of language, right? That there's a difference between doing that and demanding someone be thrown out of public life?
Who is calling for cancellation? Name these warriors at which you're 'giggling'. I'm perhaps a bit sleepy, so I may have missed those calling for Rayner to no longer be an MP.
Give over. "Obnoxious use of language" - if that is a thing you want to ban - is something to aim at Nadine Dorries.
It is an entirely legitimate political action to hoist politicians up with their words, deeds and actions. A Conservative ex Cabinet Minister and direct colleague of Sunak called him a "Pint-Sized Loser". Various posters on here seem very upset that she threw that back at the Tories - shouldn't be said, not legitimate as you put it.
You want to cancel such "obnoxious" language, yes?
Lets look at who thinks it was fine - the Speaker. He is very quick to call out unparliamentary language. Is scrupulous about the rules of what can and can't be said whilst staying in order. And he found it to be in order. Because it IS in order.
Rayner seemed to be quoting Dorries approvingly, I didn't have you or Rayner down as Dorries fans.
'pint-size' not acceptable, less of this from Labour please.
Labour didn't say it. The Tories did. Worse, it came from Sunak's former close colleague.
Was musing about Sunak with a friend the other day. When I met him in 2020 I saw a guy relaxed with the burden of keeping the economy going through Covid, with best-in-class media team and advisors.
What the hell went wrong?
The 'someone else said it first' defence is really pathetic, unless you are explicitly quoting someone to criticise what they said. Rayner is atttacking Sunak here - I mean Dorries isn't even an MP any more. Or was Rayner trying to be supportive of Sunak against Dorries's insult? Pull the other one.
In your world pretty much anything would be acceptable. 'It wasn't *me* being racist when I used that racist insult against someone, I was quoting someone else'. (I'm not comparing 'pint-size' with racist abuse - just wondering where would YOU draw the line when insulting someone using someone else's words)
When it comes down to what language is in order in parliament, the arbiter is Mr Speaker. And he didn't bat an eyelid.
Had she thrown a racial slur then he absolutely would have intervened. Not that she would have quoted that. As you know very well.
It isn't my fault that the Bad Ship Tory is both sinking fast and is inhabited by political rats who savage each other.
Worst speaker in history by a country mile.
By no means as bad as Bercow. Or, IIRC, Martin.
I disagree OKC. Personally I rated Bercow and bad as Martin was he was better than this clown.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I would give security staff carte blanche , batons , pepper spray , etc and tell them to beat the crap out of any scroat trying to get out the door with something they had not paid for. Guaranteed we will suffer for it , will be having to give your card on entry to be precharged 100 quid or such , photographed and will only get out if you are scanned and photo evidence shows you got a receipt.
Well, the funny thing is that most tills don't automatically give you a receipt now. You have to ask for it. So if they aren't going to automatically give you a receipt they can hardly ask for it as proof you've paid.
For anyone thinking of attending the Proms, get tickets to see Yunchan Lim, if you can. Possibly the best pianist in the world, and certainly of his generation.
I will be watching paint dry instead.
I didn't have you down as a philistine, malc. Or are you just not into piano music ?
Not piano Nigel , just Proms in general. I do prefer orchestra's and opera to be fair. Was meant as a jest at the Proms which I am not a fan of.
Fair enough. He's an astonishingly talented pianist, though.
I bet and played well the piano is magnificient. No more bad jokes from me.
SNP power sharing agreement with the Greens is over
And that is important news not the childish name calling at PMQs
There was me thinking that the Greens were making a stand on a point of principle over Net Zero.
Turns out it is connected to trans shit.
I'm struggling to think what the Scottish government actually stands for. Other than failing to deliver independence and declining the economy and social fabric of Scotland at a slightly slower rate than England.
The fact is that the Scottish economy is the strongest outside of the SE of England and has been growing at roughly the same pace as the rest of the UK. It's public spending that is the issue.
You could argue that the SNP's damage, if it exists, will only be apparent in years to come, or that comparing to rUK isn't particularly positive, but ultimately the SG has very few levers over economic growth and the economy is far too integrated with rUK for those levers to make much of a difference.
Talking about that, the PB Scotchexperts predicting the flood of higher paid tax payers over the border ...? They got the flood right, bujt not the direction, at least for 2021-22. Willbe interesting to see what the data for 2022-23 bring.
TUD, Which of the competing opinions was correct yesterday , one said £200M new tax income others said £60M reduction in overall income tax take. I assume both could be correct and to suit purpose , ie £200M in and £260M out.
I got lost in the smoke and mirrors tbh. The one unarguable fact afaIcs is that more folk have moved from England to Scotland than the reverse.
Roddy Dunlop KC going down south to check out house prices then scuttling back presumably cancelled himself out.
How many people work in call centres in the UK? I imagine it is not a trivia number
There over 6000 call centres in the United Kingdom There are around 812,000 agent roles within these centres Over 4% of the UK’s working population is employed at a call centre
And a lot of those call centres are a complete waste of time and energy - all those involved in oiling the wheels of the retail energy 'market' for a start. (Although I assume since the failure of said market the number of call centre roles there has significantly reduced.)
But that’s 800,000 jobs. Gone in a year or two - and then all the other cognitive jobs as AI moves up the food chain, lawyers, bankers, brokers, designers, accountants, musicians, writers, nearly all of them - gone
This is going to be devastating for so many, yet zero people discuss it. By the end of Starmer’s term - certainly his 2nd term - we could have five million unemployed - or we could be living in an era of perpetual abundance
Again, look at offshoring. We used to worry that accountancy and law jobs would be offshored, even medicine for things like reading scans. Some were, most weren't.
AI will doubtless cost some jobs. It will also create new ones. What it will mostly do is open up services for those who cannot currently afford them. You could employ AI to draw cartoons for your Gazette columns. That has not cost any cartoonist their job. Only when the Telegraph replaces Matt will a cartoonist lose his job. Likewise you could have AI translate your AI-cartoon captions into French or Japanese, but again no humans have lost their jobs. Forget AI. Have you cost a photographer his job by taking your own travel snaps for the Gazette, or would they not have sent one anyway?
Of course AI will destroy jobs. That guy in the FT makes the same claim as you - “oh yes millions will be made unemployed in a year or two but don’t worry they will do other jobs, AI will create jobs”
He just doesn’t say what these new jobs ARE. Because they don’t exist, I suspect
If 700k of the 800k UK call centre workers lose their jobs in a couple of years, what will they all do?
Photography, by the way, has basically been destroyed by the internet. It is not a viable career, not any more
Other artistic jobs will follow
You are right it will destroy a huge number of jobs.
You are also right that the new jobs may not exist. However we have been around this revolution several times in the past and new jobs have evolved out of that revolution, not least the call centre jobs that didn't exist before, became a thing with new technology and will now go again. The industrial revolution and the computer based information age, both destroyed and created a huge number of jobs.
However just because it happened in the past, it doesn't mean it will happen again in the future so maybe these unknown future jobs will remain unknown. Who knows? So he shouldn't assume it will happen and we shouldn't assume it won't, but we need to prepare for these jobs not materialising.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I don't think it's the threat of a false imprisonment or assualt charge that prevents shopkeepers attempting to detain suspects, more the likelihood the perps are tooled up tbh.
The shop lifting gangs are well organised and briefed on what to do. They try and bait assistants into touching them. Then they call the police. Meanwhile the others carry on looting the store.
You understand it's legitimate to criticise someone for obnoxious use of language, right? That there's a difference between doing that and demanding someone be thrown out of public life?
Who is calling for cancellation? Name these warriors at which you're 'giggling'. I'm perhaps a bit sleepy, so I may have missed those calling for Rayner to no longer be an MP.
Give over. "Obnoxious use of language" - if that is a thing you want to ban - is something to aim at Nadine Dorries.
It is an entirely legitimate political action to hoist politicians up with their words, deeds and actions. A Conservative ex Cabinet Minister and direct colleague of Sunak called him a "Pint-Sized Loser". Various posters on here seem very upset that she threw that back at the Tories - shouldn't be said, not legitimate as you put it.
You want to cancel such "obnoxious" language, yes?
Lets look at who thinks it was fine - the Speaker. He is very quick to call out unparliamentary language. Is scrupulous about the rules of what can and can't be said whilst staying in order. And he found it to be in order. Because it IS in order.
Rayner seemed to be quoting Dorries approvingly, I didn't have you or Rayner down as Dorries fans.
'pint-size' not acceptable, less of this from Labour please.
Labour didn't say it. The Tories did. Worse, it came from Sunak's former close colleague.
Was musing about Sunak with a friend the other day. When I met him in 2020 I saw a guy relaxed with the burden of keeping the economy going through Covid, with best-in-class media team and advisors.
What the hell went wrong?
The 'someone else said it first' defence is really pathetic, unless you are explicitly quoting someone to criticise what they said. Rayner is atttacking Sunak here - I mean Dorries isn't even an MP any more. Or was Rayner trying to be supportive of Sunak against Dorries's insult? Pull the other one.
In your world pretty much anything would be acceptable. 'It wasn't *me* being racist when I used that racist insult against someone, I was quoting someone else'. (I'm not comparing 'pint-size' with racist abuse - just wondering where would YOU draw the line when insulting someone using someone else's words)
When it comes down to what language is in order in parliament, the arbiter is Mr Speaker. And he didn't bat an eyelid.
Had she thrown a racial slur then he absolutely would have intervened. Not that she would have quoted that. As you know very well.
It isn't my fault that the Bad Ship Tory is both sinking fast and is inhabited by political rats who savage each other.
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I would give security staff carte blanche , batons , pepper spray , etc and tell them to beat the crap out of any scroat trying to get out the door with something they had not paid for. Guaranteed we will suffer for it , will be having to give your card on entry to be precharged 100 quid or such , photographed and will only get out if you are scanned and photo evidence shows you got a receipt.
If a company did your first suggestion, they would be sued into the ground by the shop lifters.
The automated entry control systems are already being trialled.
I see Forbes was out the blocks fast: As the First Minister has terminated the Bute House Agreement, I firmly believe ScotParl is strongest when there is thorough, public debate; the Gov is most effective when its priorities match the public's & theSNP is most electable as a broad tent, representative of the nation
1) Shop assistants are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground. 3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store 2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store 3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores. 4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
I would give security staff carte blanche , batons , pepper spray , etc and tell them to beat the crap out of any scroat trying to get out the door with something they had not paid for. Guaranteed we will suffer for it , will be having to give your card on entry to be precharged 100 quid or such , photographed and will only get out if you are scanned and photo evidence shows you got a receipt.
Despite the cold spring the supermarkets are already filling up with British strawberries.
Given time of year I imagine English ones as they will not have long harvested the turnips up here. Never as good this early having been forced and no way are foreign ones much good.
Strawberries especially from Spain are crap . Too big and too watery .
You understand it's legitimate to criticise someone for obnoxious use of language, right? That there's a difference between doing that and demanding someone be thrown out of public life?
Who is calling for cancellation? Name these warriors at which you're 'giggling'. I'm perhaps a bit sleepy, so I may have missed those calling for Rayner to no longer be an MP.
Give over. "Obnoxious use of language" - if that is a thing you want to ban - is something to aim at Nadine Dorries.
It is an entirely legitimate political action to hoist politicians up with their words, deeds and actions. A Conservative ex Cabinet Minister and direct colleague of Sunak called him a "Pint-Sized Loser". Various posters on here seem very upset that she threw that back at the Tories - shouldn't be said, not legitimate as you put it.
You want to cancel such "obnoxious" language, yes?
Lets look at who thinks it was fine - the Speaker. He is very quick to call out unparliamentary language. Is scrupulous about the rules of what can and can't be said whilst staying in order. And he found it to be in order. Because it IS in order.
Rayner seemed to be quoting Dorries approvingly, I didn't have you or Rayner down as Dorries fans.
'pint-size' not acceptable, less of this from Labour please.
Oh, is 454cm3-size better?
Only joking - your point is a fair one.
So he’s a 454ml American pint size, rather than a 568ml British pint size?
Argh - just as well I don't work for an airport refuelling company. I meant 568 ...
Refuelling planes is an exercise in maths. The pilot wants to know how many lb or kg of fuel he has on board, as energy is related to weight and the density of the fuel changes considerably with temperature.
So you need to know the weight requested, the fuel temperature, and the formula to convert into the litres or gallons which your fuel bowser uses to transfer the fuel.
The fueller, dispatcher, and pilot, will all do the same maths and cross check each other!
Cass has done for Yousless's prospects what great big meaty rapist "Isla Bryson" did for Sturgeon's.
Palling around with science denying Greens while gay/autistic youth are treated as live experiments at the gender abattoir now comes with serious political consequences
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Edit: presumably your 'low tax payer' is in fact a low high tax payer? And so on. Fair enough.
Attractive for retirees to sell up in England and buy better property in Scotland at half the price , most if not all will not be paying higher tax rates.
If management trust AI chatbots enough to give them the power to fix customer problems - because management would have at least an illusion of greater control - then it could end up being better.
Telling that one of the ALBA unelectables is joining in the Yoon yeahbutnobutyeahing with added blood and soil.
https://x.com/ChrisMcEleny/status/1783243842684166434
Scottish Green co-leader Lorna Slater BLASTS Humza Yousaf as "weak" and as "selling out future generations"
It's a furious statement where they say the First Minister can "no longer be trusted"
Scottish Green co-leader Lorna Slater BLASTS Humza Yousaf as "weak" and as "selling out future generations"
It's a furious statement where they say the First Minister can "no longer be trusted"
https://x.com/conor_matchett/status/1783413487957426480
I will return to generally not talking about it unless it is mentioned first
However I just HAD to cite that FT report on call centre because
1. It vindicates me. I predicted this in early March when the Klarna story came out - AI successfully taking over a call centre
And
2. It has real world implications for UK politics. Labour are gonna be in power when AI really hits, throwing many out of work. Yet they seem absolutely unaware of this, or at least they are entirely silent on it
Had she thrown a racial slur then he absolutely would have intervened. Not that she would have quoted that. As you know very well.
It isn't my fault that the Bad Ship Tory is both sinking fast and is inhabited by political rats who savage each other.
And I don't know why there's reluctance to say it's similar to racism, because it is. Height and skin colour are characteristics you can't usually change and they have nothing to do with your skill or lack of it at running the country.
You'd never hear Jeremy Corbyn saying something like this. He had politics that were opposed to the Tory party's.
However you can make good short term predictions based on actual evidence. In early March Klarna said they had successfully replaced their call centre with AI - they explicitly said the reason they announced this was its profound implications
I therefore predicted on here that all call centre work was imperilled. Et voila
Many of those casually going to university in the next few years without any thought of what they might do afterwards will regret it.
For the past x years I’ve been helping companies roll more and more of the mundane customer support queries away from actual humans and towards AI usually in more complex ways to hide the AI from the equation.
Yes more people are going to be impacted by it but you typical AI isn’t going to replace a human until they stop hallucinating without understanding that they have done so
AI alert.
AI alert.
ROBERT!!!!!!
The SNP is the only party ever to have a majority in Holyrood, in 2011.
The rest of the ecosystem of photography has largely collapsed. Destroyed by the internet and smartphone cameras
And I remind you of all you predictions about driverless cars.
I'd expect quite a cull of AI companies over the next couple of years - possibly along the lines of what happened with internet stocks back in 2000 - since a lot of them are spending a lot of cash without a revenue model to back it up.
Then, just as Leon declares AI to have been overhyped, it will really start to take off.
Germany joins France in having significant far right support among the young.
Scottish Green source said: "Everyone in that chamber is now more concerned with fucking with the SNP than passing good law.
"The idea that they can just pivot back to how they governed as a minority gov is just nonsense and will become clear as day immediately"
https://x.com/conor_matchett/status/1783407706545508621
Not that they’ve passed much good law…
Oh good. So we can look forward to a speedy vote of no confidence in Humza's administration.
It’s the biggest thing to happen to planet earth since life began, arguably. And it’s probably going to happen on our watch
There has been life on earth for four billion years. It chose to change irrevocably for the handful of decades that WE here, we happy few, we band of PB brothers and sisters, are around to witness it
What are the chances of that?!
Ooh - I've just seen you can give it a face reference. I've just shown it a picture of my wife and asked it to put her in an Elizabethan style green dress in front of a fireplace in a tudor manor house. Might have to go and have a lie down now.
I assume both could be correct and to suit purpose , ie £200M in and £260M out.
Or are you just not into piano music ?
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/shoplifting-in-england-and-wales-hits-highest-level-in-over-20-years-as-thieves/
The party of Laura Norder.
SNP source: "The SNP breaking the BHA unilaterally is an incredible act of self harm and shows that members’ voices don’t matter as much as big donor money.
"Many will be reevaluating their membership status today and in the weeks to come."
https://x.com/conor_matchett/status/1783411810130895095
Space 1999 season 1 would be brilliant played by an Orchestra
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know
But it wouldn't surprise me if the occasional flub like that is treated as part of the cost of doing business. (And for call centre voice interactions who routnely records those to use as evidence later?)
Her work on the DRS was exemplary. Ruddy Tories.
We may end up feeling sorry for her as a human being. But probably not.
Who would want to face Jason Beer if you weren't whiter than white.
I think that's a better way to approach things than a formal coalition, as it means that different majorities, made up of different co-operating parties, can be created over different issues, instead of having one coalition decide on everything.
Begining to sound like a resignation speech to me
Could be wrong
2) Security guards are forbidden to physically intervene. If a company doesn't aggressively forbid this, they will get sued into the ground.
3) Police officers, historically, didn't intervene. They turned up to take the detained shop lifters away. Often hours later.
In the Goode Olde Days, the shop assistants/security guards would detain the shoplifter and the police would come and get them. Do that today, and you'd be looking at assault and false imprisonment charges. For the assistants/security guards.
So either
1) We station police officers in every store
2) We go back to vigilante squads of staff in every store
3) Automated face ID entry and exit from stores.
4) Enjoy the shop lifting.
The Dutch ones available in the winter were tasteless.
PS: same with Greens I believe but not formal like the recent shambles when they gave those two clowns ministerial posts and allowed them to do real damage.
Interesting that Beer is opening by spending a long time on why she left the PO
She is actually trying to brazen it out. Magnificent.
Jason, go to work.
24 hours later and it's not looking so good for her with the throwaway gag regarding Rishi's height. Of course everyone's forgotten about how poor Dowden was - in that sense he's the perfect PMQs stand in.
I knew a shopkeeper who did that on one occasion.
He only needed to do it once.
He's an astonishingly talented pianist, though.
Guaranteed we will suffer for it , will be having to give your card on entry to be precharged 100 quid or such , photographed and will only get out if you are scanned and photo evidence shows you got a receipt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Scottish_Parliament_election
Well, that is one way to run a country.
A local Tesco franchise had a shoplifting problem. A "cousin" of the owner took to hanging around. Problem character - one of those who never has a steady job, always in trouble. He scraggs the shoplifters. Who then charged him with assault. He goes to court, claims he is nothing to do with the Tesco (not employed by them).
My favourite was a corner shop on an estate - after serious problems with the local junkies, a regular suggested that he (the shop owner) join his (the regular customers) local social club. Never actually go there, of course. Amusing, because this is exactly how policing worked before the Peelers.
Roddy Dunlop KC going down south to check out house prices then scuttling back presumably cancelled himself out.
You are also right that the new jobs may not exist. However we have been around this revolution several times in the past and new jobs have evolved out of that revolution, not least the call centre jobs that didn't exist before, became a thing with new technology and will now go again. The industrial revolution and the computer based information age, both destroyed and created a huge number of jobs.
However just because it happened in the past, it doesn't mean it will happen again in the future so maybe these unknown future jobs will remain unknown. Who knows? So he shouldn't assume it will happen and we shouldn't assume it won't, but we need to prepare for these jobs not materialising.
LAB lead up to 25
Trend!
The automated entry control systems are already being trialled.
As the First Minister has terminated the Bute House Agreement, I firmly believe ScotParl is strongest when there is thorough, public debate; the Gov is most effective when its priorities match the public's & theSNP is most electable as a broad tent, representative of the nation
So you need to know the weight requested, the fuel temperature, and the formula to convert into the litres or gallons which your fuel bowser uses to transfer the fuel.
The fueller, dispatcher, and pilot, will all do the same maths and cross check each other!
Palling around with science denying Greens while gay/autistic youth are treated as live experiments at the gender abattoir now comes with serious political consequences
https://x.com/Jebadoo2/status/1783405490258526236