 I write this with some trepidation. It’s honesty time. I love writing. And I’m very good at it. But AI is eating my writing work. 😧 I thought I had longer. But no. ⛔
So, while I’m still copywriting when the work comes in, I’m pivoting to events and live moderating and interviewing. Which I also love. 🎤 With over 30 years’ experience as a tech writer, interviewer and presenter, I have a specific skillset. I enjoy people. I find tech fascinating. And live work is great fun! 🌟 But I do wonder how long it will be before I’m replaced by AI-equipped automatons - or life-size holograms – for even this type of work. 🤖 Could happen. Hate to think it will. 😱 Last October, Elon Musk wrote that in 10 to 20 years, “AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store." 🍅 Cheers Elon. I happen to like working. If you were at the 2025 Foundry CIO Summit, you might remember Danilo McGarry predicting that in the next two to five years AI will dominate jobs including cashier, telemarketer, coder, accountant, graphic designer, and financial analyst. 🧮 McGarry also insisted AI counsellors will be in demand, because people feel safer confiding in a non-human replicant. 🤗 After all, 40% of workers fear losing their jobs to AI, up from 28% in 2024 (Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026). Indeed, news stories regularly inform us of more work droughts. Layoffs. Job carnage. As for the CXO role, it will most likely be heavily augmented by AI going forward. Along with doctors, engineers and judges. So, how are you looking to pivot? Takeaways for Tech Leaders ⏩ Your role How are you planning to develop your role as a Tech Leader in the face of AI-augmentation? 💻 Your workforce How are you preparing for an accelerated rationalisation of your workforce? 🥕 Your choice Would you prefer to grow your own vegetables or buy them from the store in the future?
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 Noteworthy Books [Insights for Leaders: 2 min read] I love tech and find our industry endlessly fascinating. As an IT writer of 30+ years I enjoy eating books to fuel my knowledge. ⛽ You too?
Notable early reads of my career are: Being Digital (Nicholas Negroponte, 1995) - prescient. Accidental Empires 📈 (Robert X. Cringely, 1996) - hilarious. Inside Intel (Tim Jackson, 1998) - concerning. 💻 Here are three books I recently ate and enjoyed. 😋 📘 2084 and the AI Revolution, John Lennox (2025 edition) Lennox is an eminent Oxford Uni Maths Professor, philosopher and Christian thinker 🧠. He conscientiously covers AI and related issues such as ethics, transhumanism, autonomous weapons 🔫 and the AI-human relationship. His approach is balanced, considered and academic, whilst being highly readable. A fascinating study. 🍀 📕 The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, Mustafa Suleiman (2020) Legislate, mitigate and proceed with caution ⚡. That’s the message of Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman. Like Lennox, Suleiman envisages a future where AI and synthetic biology proliferate. As co-founder of DeepMind he knows his stuff. He expertly covers security, politics, work & prosperity, global risk and other weighty subjects. Powerful. 💣 📗 Genesis: Artificial intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie (2025) Genesis takes a deep dive into the history of technology. 💡 It also makes some outlandish predictions about AI, with both hubris and panache. This detailed study argues that AI will help humans solve world problems and mysteries. 🌎 Meanwhile, it could challenge our relationship with the divine and spur a new phase in human evolution. 🤖 (In reality, Lennox is far more coherent and realistic on this.) A good read, nevertheless. Takeaways for Tech Leaders 📘 2084 and the AI Revolution A well-researched and provocative read. 📕 The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future Repetitive in places, but insightful and thought provoking. 📗 Genesis: Artificial intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit Ambitious and a tad overwritten, but with many enjoyable historical analogies.  With a calculated brutality, today’s AI chess engines know when to sacrifice the queen. 👑 So, I’m thinking: how can we apply this to real-life situations?
Modern neural-network-based engines – such as Tal, AlphaZero and LCZero – are responsible for some famous queen sacrifices. ⚔ Techies and chess players have learned a lot from these. 📋 The tech: the engines use training-based pattern knowledge with deep-search (like minimax with alpha–beta pruning) to understand, calculate and evaluate. 🤖 The rationale: they may sacrifice the queen if it scores higher materially overall. 📈 Or if the long-term gains outweigh the sacrifice. Maybe it forces a move, a capture, or a checkmate. 💣 It might create a threat scenario – or expose the enemy king. Meanwhile, it takes into account things like king safety, piece activity, pawn structure, and passed pawns. ♟️ So, back to my question. How can we apply this to real-life situations? Business management. End-of-lining an IT system. Sales and marketing strategy. M&A. Retiring the boss early?! 🪓 Takeaways for Tech Leaders 📘 Strategic sacrifices You likely make ‘queen sacrifices’ without thinking about it – perhaps to optimise your time. Put aside a useful book. Forgo a conference. Drop a hobby you enjoy. 🏆 Sacrifice as a leader In your leadership, how often do you think in terms of making a strategic sacrifice? Can you think of a bigger win that could come from a costly forfeit? 🎦 Chess and AI resources I highly recommend watching the documentaries The Thinking Game and AlphaGo - about Google DeepMind - plus, of course, the movie Ex Machina, which illustrates how AI can play the long game!  China has been developing monitoring tech over the last few years and deploying it in schools. 👩🏫 Many parents are on board with this. (It raises educational standards, arguably.)
A 2024 Chinese Government Directive enabled some schools to install CCTV 🎦 to deter bullying and violence. Reasonable, right? Some high schools added facial recognition. It scans pupils' faces every 30 secs to gauge their emotions and level of engagement. 💹 Students can be tagged as happy, sad, angry, or distracted. 😡 The teacher gets notified instantly. Useful tech, yes? More and more Chinese schools are adopting smart wristbands ⌚ for fitness, health and safety. Last August, Shanghai District invested 1.4bn yuan (£150m) in them. AI headbands 👲 were piloted in May 2023. These use EEG sensors to monitor primary pupils’ attention levels and focus in real time. Teachers, parents and Government authorities (it’s thought) receive alerts. ⚠ They know when the kid’s mind wanders. Helps keep them actively involved – a win, surely. 🏆 Remember in the pandemic when businesses used "bossware" to track WFH employee activity: mouse movements, keystrokes, website visits? 🖱 Of course you do. So, how far would you go, as an IT leader, to get the best out of your workforce? 😉 Takeaways for Tech Leaders ❓ Ask the big questions How much tracking and monitoring do you use in your organisation? What’s your strategic approach? What’s the impact on employees, partners and customers? How much is too much? 🤔 The negative effects Key concerns include privacy, ethics, and the impact on emotional wellbeing. 👮 Monitoring and UK law UK‑GDPR; Data Protection Act 2018; Human Rights Act 1998 – Article 8 (Right to Privacy); Employment Law and Contractual Duties.  Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI CEO) predicts everyone will have a personal AI companion within 5 years. 🤖 And they’ll have “humanist superintelligence” that understand you on a deeply intimate level. 😬
You and I both know AI is great for pattern recognition, probabilistic inference, language analysis, ‘learning’, and so on. Understanding you on a deeply intimate level? Let’s be careful with our language. 🗣 Too much anthropomorphising is emotionally unhelpful. It’s also inaccurate. Humans are utterly unique. AI chatbots might emote. 💋 People fall in love with their AI companions all the time, sure. But there are loads of things AI can't simulate - or be. As tech leaders it’s useful to keep this in mind, so we can lead well. 👍 AI systems can’t love, dream, or experience joy 😂, disappointment or curiosity. They can’t exhibit true understanding, remorse, regret, kindness, or have intuitive perception, faith, or free will. Algorithmic computation can’t ever really account for, or generate, human consciousness-related phenomena. We don’t even understand it. 💡 It's one thing to simulate human functions. Quite another to be human. 🍻 Takeaways for Tech Leaders 🧠 Be mindful of language Just as we need to be wary of reductive phrases like – my brain can’t compute that, and I need to recharge my batteries, we should also avoid unhelpful anthropomorphism. Keep mental health in mind 😭 Keep in mind that over-humanising your tech can create unhealthy emotional and psychological attachments and behaviours in yourself, your team and your customers, Stay abreast of AI product developments 💻 These include LePro Ami, a physical 3D Avatar AI desk companion that “aims to create a calm, emotionally aware presence”. Razer’s Project Ava is a holographic AI companion using Grok. Inflection AI’s Pi is an emotionally intelligent chatbot with 1m+ daily users. The team has now moved to Microsoft.  The Beatles, Zeppelin, Elvis, Bowie, Taylor Swift. 🎸 Could AI ever embody the flair of human artists? Might it one day? If so, would you stream it? 🎼
This area of AI fascinates me as a music lover and sax player 🎷. The Wired feature: “A Billion Streams and No Fans: Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case” (Wired, May 20, 2025) caught my imagination. The FBI arrested a businessman who made $10m in royalties 🤑. He used bot armies to continuously play GenAI tracks on streaming platforms between 2017 and 2024. It’s the first AI streaming fraud case in the US. 🕵️♀️ He pleaded not guilty to all charges. “Technically, it’s not illegal to make a bonkers amount of AI-generated music and put it on a streaming service. Tacky, yes. Disrespectful to the art form, probably. But not necessarily against the law,” Wired writer Kate Knibbs, comments. Sounds to me like a starting pistol for AI fraudsters. 🔫 Takeaways for Tech Leaders 🍔 Our art and entertainment platforms are at huge risk of fraudulent manipulation Not just streaming. Art ‘fraud’ – or GenAI art will become even more prevalent as more people gain easy access to powerful Gen-AI tools and flood every channel with pap. Don’t even get me started on deepfakes. 🍟 The music industry is vulnerable to AI‑generated content And so is book publishing. AI-generated autobiographies are a growing problem for sportspeople in particular. They confuse fans, exploit and cheat celebrities, and erode trust in online retail platforms. 🍕 Stay alert to both fraudsters and systemic platform weaknesses Look into ways to protect your brand, IP and creative assets. Blockchain verification for authorship. Stronger fraud detection. Watermarking of AI-generated text (e.g. Google DeepMind’s SynthID). Fight for authenticity - or drown in the swamp of AI ‘art’! 😨 |
Arif MohamedTechnology commentator, presenter and moderator with 30yrs+ experience ArchivesCategories |
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