Her daughter said arguing with AI defeated the purpose. Helen disagreed and, she thought, rather proved the point. What worried Helen wasn’t really AI taking over the world. It was people becoming so accustomed to asking technology what to think that eventually they might forget how to think for themselves.
expensive!” Together, they laughed, but of course they were just mucking around. Only because they couldn’t figure out which one was more expensive than the other! Daniel spent his working days speaking to customers worried about money. One morning, a caller apologised three times before admitting he couldn’t make a payment. “I’ve never been behind before,” the caller said. “You don’t need to apologise,” Daniel told him. The strange thing was, Daniel could reassure a complete stranger that struggling financially wasn’t a moral failure, then spend his lunch break wondering where he’d personally gone wrong. Then there was Helen Okafor, who had worked at Hopewell for 29 years. Helen wasn’t anti-technology by any means. She used ChatGPT regularly, although most conversations eventually ended in arguments with Chat. She had also bought a robot vacuum, then taped over its camera because she read somewhere that it was watching her, and the vacuum itself just kept hitting the dining table leg over and over!
Now Hopewell was introducing AI systems across the business, and Helen was helping train one of them. Management assured everyone that the technology wasn’t replacing anybody, and that it was just helping them work more efficiently. So Helen hoped. There was a difference between a robot vacuum learning where she kept the dining table and a There was a difference between a robot vacuum learning where she kept the dining table and a computer learning how she did the job she herself had spent 29 years learning to do.
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ISSUE 28 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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