Audio links for original podcast:

· Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

· Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

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Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging technologies, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys, binding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hello, everyone. Hi, Jon. Welcome to another episode of Watch This Space. It's been a busy month, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's fall. We're going into the, I guess, we're getting into the colder weather. So it's really feeling like the seasons are changing. And we are heading into this being our really our December edition. This is going to be the last podcast for 2024. We'll talk about December highlights, but that won't come out till January. So this will kind of take us out of our season 7. And just like we've had a lot over the years we've been doing this, every year there's interesting stuff. No shortage of fun things and interesting ideas this month, too. I'm sort of at the end of my busy run for travel for industry events, and we'll get to that soon.

So I think, Chris, you know, we're going to set things up maybe in a little bit more of a structured format We're kind of following what our listeners are asking about. Also, we're going through some updating folks to our format, our look and feel. So a bit of a teaser. Starting in January, the podcast itself is going to have a few modernization fresh ups and look and feel. So watch for that. I think you're going to like it. And we're definitely looking to make this endeavor a little more accessible and digestible for our listeners.

So with that, Chris, I'm just going to maybe outline the flow of what we're going to get to today. And we're going to start with a book review, folks, which we've never done before, but I think it's very apropos and you'll see why when we get through it. And then we're going to talk about where we've been the last month, where you've both been on the road with a bunch of things. And as we go into our last month of the calendar year, we'll maybe just recap with some takeaways for the year itself. What were the big stories and themes? So how's that for a starting point for today, Chris?

Chris Fine

That sounds great. So let's dive in.

Jon Arnold

Okay, so here we go. Topic #1. We have never done a book review and it may seem like an odd thing to do on a podcast, but stick with us, folks. That's why we call it Watch This Space. Got to keep it interesting and different every now and then. So today we are going to talk about a short story from the sci-fi genre. that is a classic in its own right. And Chris, I think I'm going to get you to do the setup of this, but it's a story that I didn't know about and didn't know about the writer. Chris, you sent me, you told me about this and sent me a PDF of the story to read.

You have a long history with this story, as with many others in the genre. But it was new to me, and I've just finished reading it. And boy, oh boy, is it on point for what's happening in the world today. And that will certainly be validated by our last section of the podcast, our takeouts for 2024. So over to you to set the stage, Chris, and we'll talk about it in our own way.

Chris Fine

Okay, Jon, great. I've been a fan of golden age, it's so-called golden age. science fiction short stories for a very long time. And if you want to think about golden age science fiction, it stems back to essentially a revolution in the genre that happened in the late 30s and 40s, mostly under a man named Campbell. And Campbell edited a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction, and his guidance to his authors was it can't just be like a space opera. It has to be treating current themes or eternal themes in a context of a science fiction environment, i.e., you have freedom to change the planet, change the people, change the technology, but you need to talk about human themes.

And it resulted in an incredible outpouring of great science fiction for years. And in fact, if you even go back to Star Trek, that is effectively a later generation version of this, where Star Trek was a framework of science fiction with a lot of human themes. And so they could go to a planet where something was different and use that to emphasize some sort of a point. Anyway, today we're talking about a story called With Folded Hands, which is absolutely classic science fiction. It was written by a man named Jack Williamson, who wrote a lot of other great science fiction too. And he taught at the University of New Mexico for a long time. He died not too long ago.

Jon and I talk a lot about the potential impact of AI. And so we started talking a while ago and we said, well, what would be a short story or a very digestible piece of science fiction that was really on point of what might happen? And With Folded Hands is very much that. And With Folded Hands was published, if you could believe it, in 1948. It's about an Earth of the future where it's a combination of space travel, so other planets have been reached and colonized or whatever, but Earth is still not super futuristic.

It opens up in a very typical town with a very typical guy who's in the household robot business. And these robots are just not that good. And he's not doing very well. And he's on the way home and he sees this new building that owned by something called the Humanoid Institute. And there are these super humanoid robots that are coming to Earth, have come to Earth. And they make everything that is here at the time look like garbage, literal garbage. And their motto, the humanoid's motto, is to serve and obey and guard men from harm.

And so the little robot salesman is on his way home, and he detects that his wife has taken in a boarder who's this guy that nobody's heard of called Sledge. And Sledge is telling this yarn that he invented the humanoids. And he's there to stop them because they've become very bad, even though he designed them to save his own planet, which was on the verge of complete destruction because of war based on a new technology that was literally destroying the planet. But once he built the humanoids with the directive not to hurt people, the humanoids took that far enough where life has absolutely no meaning.

And so the rest of the story is about the humanoid takeover of Earth and how Sledge tries to stop them. And then what happens to him at the end when he becomes assimilated. So Jon, is that a fair synopsis of the story? But it's really AI thought about in 1949 or 48. And so thus very entertaining, but also very thought provoking, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it sure is. And yeah, the town was two rivers, right? They don't tell you where it is. And what was the name of the planet he came from? Something District 4.

Chris Fine

Wing 4.

Jon Arnold

Wing 4.

Chris Fine

And he had fled because when Sledge built the built the humanoids, he provided a certain immunity for himself that they couldn't stop him. They couldn't brainwash him. They couldn't He had immunity, so he was able to escape. And he had devoted his quest of staying just ahead of them so that he could try to fight them. And the story is about how that ultimately becomes something of a futile endeavor. But the humanoids are based on this planet, Wing 4, and they could, but because of the power source that was invented on that planet and almost destroyed it, they can be anywhere. And it's as if they're just there. They don't need separate power. And they're basically invincible.

And, you know, when you think about the intent of artificial intelligence and how it could very easily go awry in a design that's supposed to be good for people, that this is your story. And in fact, I found a quotation on Wikipedia that kind of sums it up. And so I'll read it. It says, in 1977, Williamson's good friend, Frederick Pohl, who was another giant of science fiction, reported that a few years ago, the founder of MIT's AI laboratory, computer scientist, Marvin Minsky, one of the original pioneers of AI, asked to meet Williamson. Jack was surprised, if not pleased, to hear from Minsky's own lips that the humanoids was Minsky's personal candidate for the best non-technical description of the way artificial intelligence was likely to operate that had ever until that time been written.

Williamson reported as of 1980, the story was still being taught at MIT to graduate students in the artificial intelligence department as an example of where computer science might lead. So that's how relevant this story is when somebody like Minsky had it taught at MIT and quoted it as the most accurate potential outcome if things go awry. Thought that was interesting, right, Jon?

Jon Arnold

Oh, yeah. And we are so in the moment with this, like right now in 2024, because we've gone from generative AI and ChatGPT to kind of like the next level of AI, which is really taking over as we speak, right? I mean, all of this, these new advances in AI that are transforming everything now, like we're filtering almost everything we do through the latest iterations of AI. And it's becoming the default for so much, and we're investing so much, obviously, money and resources into mastering speech, mastering language. And just like in 1984, the only thing left that it can't do is thought, right? And as soon as you share any thoughts, speaking, writing, it's tracked by AI.

So at that point, they know what you're thinking. And as long as your thoughts stay inside your head, you like in this book, this novella, you can't do any harm. Your thoughts only stay within you. And it just strikes me that this is so much, you know, it's a bit of a Tower of Babel story, right? Where he or Sledge tries to invent the perfect technology, thinking it will make the world better, but in fact, it turns out to be exactly the opposite. So we, lesson #1 is, we're, there's only one God and humans can't do what God did. And, efforts to do that will end badly, which is exactly what happens here.

But also, it's just the unintended consequences, right? he talks about how These, all these wonderful labor saving devices, you make life so easy and wonderful, but it does everything. And like you say, do no harm. It takes everything away. So all of a sudden we have nothing to do or aspire to. Art has no purpose. There's nothing to strive for in your life because, you know, it's the humanoids have become so advanced. So like my thing with AI is we call it artificial intelligence now. because we're still in charge.

But as soon as AI becomes much more sophisticated and is really, we're working for AI, so to speak, we're gonna call it advanced intelligence because that's what it's moving towards. And like he says in the story, you know, there's no point, like the daughter, what is it? Aurora's the wife. The daughter I think is Gay, I think the name. And she decides, she gives up trying to learn how to play violin. She's like, because there's no point, because the humanoids do it so much better than me.

Chris Fine

I'm going to be better. They're better.

Jon Arnold

They're better. So there's nothing to strive for in life. So there's no meaning. And so there's no, what he thought would create, you know, happiness and bliss turns into the, I think he uses the word futility, is the state of mind that everyone.

Chris Fine

Yes. And the humanoids also have perfected brainwashing and brain surgery so that if you don't like them and you make too much noise, they, in the spirit of calming your troubled soul, will just operate on you. So it's not only the daughter with the violin lessons, the humanoids insinuate themselves. At first, everybody's thrilled to see them because, you know, things like chores disappear, hard, heavy work disappears, you know, the Aurora, the wife, loves the humanoid because they can prepare any kind of food. They can, you know, and they're perfectly mannered and they, but then, you know, they take down your old house that you love and they put up a plastic house that has soft walls that you can't bang into and toys that you can't hurt yourself with.

And, you know, you can't do violent play and, you know, even, even sex is supervised and it's all in the, you know, there's just all of this in the idea of, of guarding people from harm. And the difference between this and a lot of sort of AI stories, classic example being the Terminator movies, is a lot of times, you know, a story will be about some sort of a machine intelligence that really is fundamentally malevolent, right?

So like the world of the Terminator, where that was all invented to fight wars, which is, of course, a very big danger, even in our current day. But With Folded Hands really talks about something that was genuinely built to try to make people's lives better. And you've seen other stories and television and Twilight Zone episodes and things like that that have kind of, you know, echoed this theme after With Folded Hands. But this was one of the original versions of it. And it's just extremely well written and it's not that long, so we can recommend it.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. It's only about, I think the PDF is only about 28 pages, so you could read it. probably an hour or two tops. But I'll find, you know, as the writer in me, I also find it very interesting that it's told in the third person, which I think a lot of science fiction is done that way. So we're not getting the narration from the protagonist, whose name is Underhill. So it's that the story is told kind of from a distance, right? It's just describing everything that's happening.

But we don't get a window into the soul other than through their discussion, the dialogue, right, through the whole story. So it's an interesting perspective. It's kind of got this feeling of detachment because it's not, there's no first-person narrative in it. Here's another maybe unintended consequence to this, Chris. You know, I find it interesting right off the top that his name is Underhill.

Chris Fine

Yes.

Jon Arnold

And all I thought about, of course, is the typewriter, which has been obliterated, but I think at the time it was too early to predict what would come to replace a typewriter. This was in '48, I think, '49, when the story came out. So I don't know if that's just a coincidence or not, but that's what came to mind right away.

Chris Fine

I think it meant buried.

Jon Arnold

Under a hill.

Chris Fine

Under a hill, buried. That was my interpretation of it. But you're right. However, if you want to read another story that was preposterously ahead of its time and predicted the whole internet, you can read A Logic Named Joe, which came, I guess, a couple of years later, maybe 1950. And that's a whole other story. So maybe we'll have another book review one time for A Logic Named Joe. But some of these stories are really worth reading. Like if you can get an anthology and go back and read those short stories from that era. First, they're hugely entertaining, and they tend to be extremely well-written. and really open your mind. I started reading these when I was a kid and I would say it's been really influential in my life and I think a lot of other people too.

Jon Arnold

So I have, yeah, I've got the whole collection of Arthur C. Clarke short stories. That's a retirement project to read them all. Coming out of the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, I mean, there's a lot of like understanding the milieu that they were in at the time. So there was certainly the post-war prosperity in America and, there were all the rise of suburban households and, convenience, everything was there to make our domestic lives easier. So it's easy to understand the appeal, especially to his wife at the time of having all these things done for her.

And that would have been like miraculous at the time for that. So I could understand where that's coming from. But you know, this is also right around the time, Chris, that 1984 was published. And actually, Orwell did not live to see. He died just before it came out. And I've talked, this is my benchmark for all this stuff - has always been 1984. And the parallels are like unbelievable. I don't know if Williamson followed Orwell or read him or had a relationship with him, but the ending is almost identical.

Chris Fine

Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, with folded hands is a little more mechanistic, but remember the technology was an absolutely key part of 1984 too.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, but at the end, when he gets lobotomized, basically, and he comes to accept Big Brother, and like this, he sees why the humanoids are good, and he's had the, they take the bandage at the back of his head, so he knows he's been done, and now he's happy. And all they want is happiness. And that also ties into the contrast to Orwell is Huxley with Brave New World, where everything is run on the idea of perfection and happiness, that's the state we're striving for and how boring life was and pointless life was in that book.

But that was written in the thirties. But still, the parallels to these are all really, really interesting. And as I said, coming up, 'cause the big term, and we'll get to this for our next episode, I think we'll wanna talk a bit about 2025 outlook and AI agent or agentic AI is gonna be one of the big themes.

And that's the reason you should read this story, folks, because Agentic AI is all about, AI has reached a point now, like literally now, where it's being trusted and used enough. And the big guys, the big tech players are investing heavily in it to create capabilities that can be autonomous and done without human intervention. And that is a real sea change for how we've used AI in the past. We're getting it to trust it to a point where it can do its own decision making. And you can see it's not a big leap from that point to the kind of things that happen here with the humanoids.

Chris Fine

Agreed. And I guess my final thought about this, I guess, because we could talk about this all day, but I'll offer this up, is that I don't think with folded hands is really anti-technology. but it's anti-thoughtless technology that gets a lot of power, right? It shows you how you can go into something with very good intentions, and then have it turn out to be really not good. And so the thing with AI is it just has so much potential power that you really wonder, whether humanity is going to do better than its classic track record of understanding the malevolent effects of technology when a new one comes along.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

Right? Because every new technology really has more and more power. And you wonder what battles might be fought because of mistakes that are made with this and what we might lose because of that, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Well, he talks about the central directive, right? And how he said, he even said himself, my logic was too perfect. He created such a perfect mechanism that all the intelligence is controlled centrally. So those humanoids can multiply endlessly and they all have the same capabilities. And he talks about them being naked, but have like, they don't even have eyes, but you know, they can sense everything. And they have, like I say, there's no point in trying to read or write because it, the humanoids do it better. And, but in the name of what, like you say, in the name of happiness, that's, the driver for all of this?

Well, we want to be happier for sure, but are we that unhappy that, we want to give all this up? No. So, one last idea too, Chris, from this is you mentioned, reading this whole kind of class of writers and this whole genre of sci-fi. I also, what I find so interesting about that style of writing is that it's done free tech, so to speak, right? It's done before any computers or Internet came along, and our mentality, the way we thought about technology. was completely humanistic. We didn't have any technology, you know, narrative in our DNA to compare against that.

So we only could think about what we understood as humans. And so the approach to technology was very much about, you know, be wary of it, it's got limitations, it can't really do a whole lot, but we're still in charge. But yet, when it turns against us, it's like, oh, what have we done kind of thing. But their perspective on technology is very different from a contemporary sci-fi writer who was born in the era of the internet and sees that relationship between man and machine very differently. So I just love that era because it's totally unfiltered. It's totally pure. It's not driven by any technology references that we have today, but they didn't have them.

Chris Fine

You know, I think if I went back to school and I was going to get like a master's degree in some sort of liberal arts, like one of my sort of fantasy projects, I think I would write about that era of science fiction because those so many excellent stories were written and so many of them really proved to be quite, quite predictive of event because they really, as you say, they wrote from a humanistic point of view. So a lot of the stories kind of, used human characteristics and imbued the technology with relation to those characteristics, right?

So if you thought about, if you really understood sort of human instincts and then you looked at the direction of technology and you were just very good at putting the framework together, you could actually predict, you could build a world that was very plausible. And one of the rules of the editors back then is you really had to be believable. you couldn't just go so far into fantasy, although there was a counter movement that was dragons and fantasy and all of that, which was became very big too, obviously. But this had to be something that related to human themes and thus very relatable to people. And so you read Some of the stories and the technology is really way out there, but it's about people.

Jon Arnold

Yep. Yep. And emotions.

Chris Fine

And nature and the earth.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

But you're right. It's like when all of that was written, and if you grew up on that, writing science fiction today seems like a little bit like composing classical music in that you can, but you really have, you got a lot less material to mind that's original.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and it's a lot less unknown now compared to what it was back then. We know so much more about technology and so we can, you know, we have a frame of reference to talk about it. Then it was all just hypothetical what we think could happen. But also the undertones of the Cold War, because again, the contrast of the richness of freedom in America after the war and how, you know, we could be very, our emotions could live authentically compared to the Soviet Union, which is, at the time, which was totally based on reason and rationale, logic, no emotion, the whole soulless, Soviet, mentality, that kind of thing.

So those extremes were kind of that driven, drove most of what we lived through in the West in the 50s. and 60s. So there's an element of that, too, that even within our own Earth environment, yes, we have these two competing kind of narratives of how to build an or how to build a civilization. But he didn't get into that and there was no need to. I think there was just enough there talking about what the humanities could do.

Chris Fine

Well, I think it was I think you could describe the Soviet Union as a type of tyranny. And so a lot of these stories were about tyranny of one kind or another.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, again, 1940.

Chris Fine

Right, and the dystopic effects of tyranny. And so whether it was fascism or Bolshevism brand of communism, it was considered to be tyranny. So that thread actually, you're right, that got to be more so in a whole lot of stories that were written like in the early 50s. But it's just really interesting. And I personally believe that you could write a story, you could write a book, one could, that would be a modern interpretation of some of the way that these thoughts were done. And it would be really good and you don't really see it and it wouldn't be derivative. So maybe that's another project.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. All right, we're going to segue out, but just last on this, just to remind the listeners again, the name, the writer and the story name.

Chris Fine

Sure. The story is called With Folded Hands, and it's by Jack Williamson. And it's in most classic sci-fi anthologies, but you can also probably Google around and find a copy online.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and I've got the PDF that came from you. And also, as I read up a little bit, and this too, that it was also extended into a novel as well, right? But was it ever given a screen treatment? Do you know?

Chris Fine

I don't think it was, but it was, if you like With Folded Hands, there's a novel that was actually a sequel to it called The Humanoids, which built a lot of the themes. And also, it also spent a lot more time on Williamson's interest in the potential superpowers of normal human beings and how the superpowers of normal human beings could fight this and who won and who lost. So it's a good book, The Humanoids.

Jon Arnold

Noted. All right, here's the segue, folks. Our analog guys here, fellow listeners, we grew up in a very different time and, you know, music had a lot more social relevance and they were voices. And when you talk about pushback, there is a lot of hurt in today's world, of course, a lot of inequality. And certainly the way things are going in terms of how technology is changing our lives, the way politics is going, the way our economy is going, a lot of unhappy corners of the marketplace. But where, yeah, so Chris, where are the Bob Dylans of today?

Chris Fine

Look, music, it's hard to make blanket statements, right? So let's try to break this down just a little bit, right? And you can agree or disagree. So don't forget that Bob Dylan, he became a very successful guy. And sold out in an old way too. Yeah, to some degree. But I just think music has a different role to a lot of people now. I think it's really, and it's just hard to say this because you're going to have people who are going to say, well, we disagree with you. I think there's still a great potential for protest music, but as it was back in the day that people don't really remember, for a long time, protest music was not in the big business world of music. It just became, it became successful enough that big business noticed, the big labels noticed.

But you know, when you, even when you think about Bob Dylan, you know, Bob Dylan became where he got where he got to because one of the most famous legendary impresarios, you know, talent finders in music. John Hammond discovered him and was able to get him into a studio and get him a contract with Columbia. So I don't think protest I don't think protest via music is a dead thing. I just think that the big mechanism of it is not aimed that way, because why would it be?

I mean, I just listened to an anthology of bubblegum music. And I discovered through one of my favorite magazines called Shindig, which is all about a kind of old garage music and everything. Yeah. And, you can't forget that the Monkees were like the biggest thing for years, that kind of music. But I do think that there's a potential for a protest in music, and you see it on the fringes with folk music and other types of music today. But it's all on the Internet. It's all on, you know, Bandcamp or streaming. And you don't see it as visibly. But if you wanted to compose more socially relevant music, you could and you would have a way to distribute it. It's just not the core of big music, if you want to call it that. I mean, that's my two cents.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. But I mean, the spirit of rock'n'roll, I mean, is what, drove our generation. But it brings me back to Neil Young because, you know, he did it in his own way in the 70s, in the 80s. And then, but he reinvented it. with Pearl Jam, with Rockin' in the Free World in the 90s, just to show, hey, this is how it's done. And there are voices out there who can, you know, who can do what Neil Young did, but there's just less and less of it now. And it's, anyway, it takes me back to the story with folded hands. Like I said, there's no need, there's no role for art or music or personal expression.

Chris Fine

Yeah, With Folded Hands world.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, in that world there's no place for it. And so this makes me think about, you know, I see, and just how everyone feels happy, which is exactly what the humanoids wanted us to do. And so I just feel the contrast there are a little jarring. And I also compare, you know, Taylor Swift in some ways, her popularity is like what the Beatles were at their height. And the Beatles were unstoppable, you know, '65, '66 when they were on top of the world. And as you, I'm sure you remember too from the film, Pennebaker film, Don't Look Back? Don't Look Back, that's it. And there's no apostrophe in the word don't, by the way. I love it.

When he met the Beatles, do you remember this story? They were at the top of the world, like the Monkees, doing pop music, boy meets girl, happy stuff, nothing to be worried about. And he said, remember he said to them, I like what you're doing, but you're not saying anything. And that forever changed the whole dynamic for what the Beatles became. And at that point, they realized he was right.

The times they are changing, as they said, and they started to change the tenor of their music. And they spoke more about, you know, real issues of the day, and they got more psychedelic, blah, blah, blah. But it took just that one thing, that observation from Dylan to say, Look at what I'm doing and how I'm reaching the youth of today. Very different from what the Beatles were doing. And, you know, but there's no one out there, there's no Dylan to counter that. that I can think of that might say, not that we need to change it, but I'm just saying that, the music is of the times and our times today are just as disruptive and chaotic as they were back in the 60s.

Chris Fine

I guess people, musicians and artists have different roles depending on who they are.

Jon Arnold

All right, we're gonna.

Chris Fine

We have to stop. We have to stop.

Jon Arnold

I hope you're liking this stuff.

Chris Fine

Oh my goodness. All right. So let's get back to the future of work, right? So.

Jon Arnold

Okay. All right.

Chris Fine

So what are we going to say at this point?

Jon Arnold

You have two minutes. Where have you been in November?

Chris Fine

Hey, we're supposed to run longer. People say we should run longer. You know.

Jon Arnold

We're already running long. Okay.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I know.

Jon Arnold

Where were you in November, Chris?

Chris Fine

I went to two trade shows in New York, CRE Tech, which is CRE Tech, which is corporate real estate. and ISC East, which is one of the bigger security, physical security kind of show. It's the smaller one, the ISC West is the big one in April in Las Vegas, which is pretty fascinating. And you know, the thing I took away with all of these is just the growing use of video. And we've talked about this. You know, video that started out with surveillance, right? So looking at a door to make sure that nobody broke in and looking outside and make sure nobody's loitering around has gone so far with AI that you really have eyes wherever you want them. And they're getting used for more and more things.

Everything from occupancy analysis, like how many people are there in the space and what's the traffic flow to facial recognition, which really has become eerily good at what it does. both to, it's for use, to replace like a badge, so it verifies your identity, or to detect somebody that's like on the no admit list, or any other thing you could think of with facial recognition. And then correlating that and bringing it all back into an AI backend.

If you looked at kind of the leading-edge products in both of these spaces, That's what you saw. And I think that's going to be open for a big debate, and it's going to depend on what company or organization chooses to adopt it and how they adopt it. But even if you look at some of the products around real estate occupancy analysis that aren't related to security, you're seeing the use of video, even if video isn't what comes out of the back of the camera, even if it's just data that was derived by analyzing the video with technology in the camera, it's still video and you have to wonder where that's going to go.

But to me, the biggest takeaway was video input. Video is a sensor being fed into an AI backend. So that was that was my takeaway from the two shows. Generally interesting to go to if you're into this space. Oh, and also there's just the ongoing debate about back to work, which I want to talk about as a theme of the year. So I'll stop there.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, we talked about video, I think last episode as well. Yeah, for the UC Expo in London, the prevalence of AV exhibitors there. Yeah, I totally agree. And again, it's, you know, comes back to, you know, folding hands a bit, you know, this surveillance thing that they're all seeing, all knowing, and you don't know if it's going to be used for, you know, you know, for good or evil, whatever.

For me, I only had one event travel wise, which was the Talkdesk analyst event, which was just last week in Charleston. Never been to Charleston before, very highly recommended, a lot of history, especially if you're from the East Coast, pretty interesting stuff. And there, just I'll say very briefly, a good example of a pure play contact center vendor that has gone All in, again, here we go with AI and doing very interesting things with, again, agentic AI being a big focus for them and how they're using, you know, all the language capabilities to help agents better understand customer intent and mood and just kind of predicting behaviors and, you know, obviously streamlining processes and workflows.

All in the name of improving CX customer experience, of course, but it's very much, you thought we were doing AI last year, now it's just leaps and bounds ahead of that. So, but one interesting takeaway is, we assume that the market is keeping up with the vendors and it's not. A lot of contact centers are still not stuck with, but they're still invested in premise-based legacy technologies. And they're at risk of, falling way behind because it's hard for them to. to migrate to the cloud, and they have good, valid reasons to stay on-prem otherwise. But companies like Talkdesk also have capabilities that integrate with legacy technology.

So I think a story that maybe not have been told, I think, loudly enough there is that, yeah, you don't have to be cloud-based to get some of the benefits of AI. I think that's a good story for companies that are, you know, for all kinds of reasons, very heavily invested still in premise technologies. And I think That's a good thing. But clearly, there's AI and there's really nothing else right now. I think it's the only story pretty much all the vendors are focused on. So that's my takeaway for being away in November. And otherwise, you know what, I'm not the only analyst. We were happy as some of us at the event there to say, yep, this is our last event for shows for the year. So I'm very happy to be done with that for now.

Chris Fine

So you're done? No more crazy traveling around?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, so I'll be home for a while. Yay.

Chris Fine

That is great. I have to take one quick trip out to California and back in a couple of weeks for a meeting, but I'm looking forward to the meeting. I would've normally wanted to stay a couple of more days, but I gotta get back for a bunch of stuff. But that'll be nice to get out there again, I do like to visit Silicon Valley when I can. You know, I actually had a question. I had a question for you about Talkdesk. Is what do all these contact centers feel is the ideal that they're trying to establish with this AI? Don't, that's too big a question, right? But the reason I'm asking it is I think it's similar in the, you know, moving into the themes to, you know, what are, the operators of the workplace trying to establish, like what's their goal?

And my theme would be for 2024, at least in my world, is it really has been a year of transition. And I don't think that a lot, I think everybody's trying to figure out what the new normal is with respect to work. It's just not there yet. And there's a lot of uncertainty and it's really interesting how different perceptions you get talking to different organizations about what they're trying to accomplish with new technology and new design and new work rules and new job structures and everything else. It's just not really there yet. And so it's gonna be interesting to see in 2025, but coming out of 2024, I see a lot of uncertainty, but a huge amount of interest in, you know, smart building, smart workplace sustainability, all the HR elements of the workplace and how it's laid out and how you divide remote and on in-person work. So it's going to be a good watch this space. That's kind of the number one I came out in my space. But what about you?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I do agree there, Chris. You know, this is kind of a bit of our 2024 look back and maybe a little look ahead. A lot of this ties to what we're going to be doing in February at the Future Work Expo in Lauderdale as part of the IT Expo. And I've been remiss to this point, Chris, to mention that TMC is our media sponsor here for the podcast. I got to do a quick shout out for that. But everything you've been just saying now, yeah, this is beyond, this is kind of on the table for what we're going to be looking at during that event.

So if that's your cup of tea, folks, we'd love to see you at the event February 11th to 13th. And we've got, speakers are lining up now for the program and we've got a lot of good topics and it's much along the lines of what we've been saying here. And so that for me, Chris, as a 2024 takeaway, it's much the same. Another comment from Talkdesk event, which echoes what I've heard as well, is that yes, we know where we are as vendors with the technology and we're showing that it works, that it can deliver benefits. But a lot of the market isn't ready yet. They can't adapt it fast enough. And this ties into, like you say, the transition to what the future of work is going to look like. We haven't figured out hybrid work yet. Yes, the pendulum is going more towards the back to office thing. And so we're struggling.

And I think we said this last time, too, that a lot of the focus on video is to help make that in-office experience better and richer in different ways, not just for virtual meetings, but for in-office experiences. And then the other thing too is, yeah, the AI advances have really come a long way, just like they were very radically different last year. We're going to go into even more, you know, more, I'd still call it disruption into 2025. We just don't know, again, coming back to folded hands, we don't know what the intended and unintended consequences of these technologies are really going to look like. we talk about hallucinations with AI, right?

Whatever inputs you give it, that's what the outputs are based on. But now these language models are getting so advanced. They can really just take the utterances, just two or three sentences that we say is enough for them to produce an entire likeness of you, the way you speak, the way you look on video. And it's going to get harder and harder to tell the difference between human-generated content and AI-generated content. And content is just the easy part, but eventually that's going to be ideas. And whose ideas are really going to be setting the tone for how we approach future work. Is it going to be AI-generated ideas or human-generated? We don't know. We don't know.

But that's my big takeaway for 2024 is, yeah, just the higher level kind of, I don't know, table that's being set with AI now. The expectations are getting higher and higher. And it's just the lead. Almost every company I talk to seems to be pretty much at this point all in with AI. And I couldn't say that last year, but at this point in 2024, I think it's pretty clear.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I agree with you. I think at the end of 2024, what we're seeing is much more of AI kind of woven into ordinary life. Like when you look at the latest version of iOS and all of Apple's other software and also what Microsoft is doing. It's just much more likely that in a given day, you're going to have contact with it. It's assimilating itself into every aspect of interfacing with technology and becoming much more of an ordinary part of the picture. And it's done this in a relatively short period of time.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

You know, when you go into 2025, you can just see that really continuing, but being more and more involved in more and more aspect of life.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and it's benign, and we don't even realize it as it's going along. And again, coming back to With Folded Hands, in the workplace, the way AI, this is my last thought for the year, but the way AI is moving, as I said, with this automated form of AI. This agentic AI, remember that term, folks, AI agent, agentic AI, these are gonna be the big drivers next year. As these autonomous applications come in, they're gonna be doing more and more of our everyday tasks at work, right? Meeting summaries, writing emails, responding to emails, planning meetings, you name it, all the day-to-day tasks that we spend time doing.

Well, when you're basically, your bot, your personal bot is doing all of this, just like in With Folded Hands, Chris, it's like there's nothing left for us to do. So you won't even have to go to meetings anymore because the automated agent is going to attend on your behalf, take the notes. So you won't actually have to do a lot of work. So then what are we going to do? And again, this is a big existential kind of future work issue, but we're kind of going down that path. And again, as a closer here, Chris, it takes me right back to the story. It's like, that's exactly what happened.

Chris Fine

Yeah. And where's the imperfection that generates meaning?

Jon Arnold

It's human nature, right? To me, it's the vagaries of language that this is why AI keeps getting it wrong, because it doesn't quite know the intuition and the nuances of dialect and slang and intent and humor and sarcasm. It's got a long way to go to capture all that. Right. And I hope it never does, frankly, because there'll be nothing left for us.

Chris Fine

I don't know, Jon. I just don't know. I don't want to. make a prediction one way or another. I think it could very easily get away from us. It may not. It seems kind of benevolent right now, but don't forget that even in areas like information, like search retrieval and where people go to seek information, I'll sort of put that in air quotes, information, AI is having more and more of a role. Every time you Google something, right, every time you want to look something up, what comes up first. It's the AI digest of it.

In fact, I was working on a document a while ago with a team. I wrote two sections of it and I submitted it and somebody said, let's see what the AI says. I'm going to ask ChatGPT to come up with a, and you know, maybe we can tack that along to what we've written, you know, or maybe we can take something out of it. And that was not something you would have heard a year ago. And that's, I think, where things are going. I mean, at some point, maybe ChatGPT, right, or its successors writes that entire document. Exactly. So that's what we're going to need to think about, I think, going into 2025.

Jon Arnold

Single source for truth. There'll be nothing left for us to do and we won't be trusted anymore. Okay.

Chris Fine

All right. Oh, gosh. Well, happy holidays.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. Thanksgiving is coming.

Chris Fine

Happy Thanksgiving. We're recording this a little bit before Thanksgiving. You'll listen to it after. So I suppose we hope that everybody had a nice Thanksgiving holiday if you celebrate that. And best wishes going into the holidays at the end of the year from us. And thank you always for listening.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. Okay. With that, We hope you'll continue to stay with us as we explore the future of work here and watch this space. As a closeout, I'll just say, as we always do, you can access our episodes at www.watchthisspace.tech or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, we'd love to hear from you. On the website, there's room to make comments or rating or review, whatever. And also, yes, future work is coming. Our Future of Work Expo, futureofworkexpo.com. if you want to check that out. And we'll be there. And with that, I am Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks for another great discussion, Jon. Thanks, everybody, for bearing with us and listening. And we look forward to having you join us again in a month for another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Google, Talkdesk