It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country’s chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country’s ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country’s Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist.
I love you Cory, but this is bullshit.
Office 365? Maybe a few companies would loose some documents, and productivity would drop 30% for a few months until they recreated everything in LibreOffice.
iOS shares are negligible in most of the world. Google can’t brick Android devices. Most people run cheap Chinese phones. Worst case, maybe 30% of phones stop working. Everyone else goes to their local phone shop (which will get slammed for business) to install Lineage or Graphene. So some people don’t have smart phones for a few weeks. Annoying, but no biggie.
John Deere? Most food produced in the world is basically local and nearly organic. So some big corporate farms suffer, and there’s a huge boost to the majority small farms.
In all cases, these attacks would have about the same effect as loosing access to chat bots: temporarily productivity loss until workflows are adjusted, and then better sovereignty.
I love you Cory, but this is bullshit.
Office 365? Maybe a few companies would loose some documents, and productivity would drop 30% for a few months until they recreated everything in LibreOffice.
iOS shares are negligible in most of the world. Google can’t brick Android devices. Most people run cheap Chinese phones. Worst case, maybe 30% of phones stop working. Everyone else goes to their local phone shop (which will get slammed for business) to install Lineage or Graphene. So some people don’t have smart phones for a few weeks. Annoying, but no biggie.
John Deere? Most food produced in the world is basically local and nearly organic. So some big corporate farms suffer, and there’s a huge boost to the majority small farms.
In all cases, these attacks would have about the same effect as loosing access to chat bots: temporarily productivity loss until workflows are adjusted, and then better sovereignty.
These attacks would likely kill the American tech economy and might hurt the US more than the rest of the world.