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Even tech and a pandemic can’t erase the humble meeting from our weekly routines, but Billy MacInnes thinks AI might be the answer
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There’s a saying you may remember seeing although it’s often adapted slightly, that goes along the lines of “The only thing that will be left after a nuclear holocaust is XXXX and cockroaches”.
This is testament to the reputation these particular bugs have as survivors. And for good reason. According to this article cockroaches appeared on Earth 150 million years before the dinosaurs and 300 million years before us.
When a giant asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago, it wiped out 80% of all plants and animals. Cockroaches were defiantly unwiped out.
Speaking of that nuclear holocaust, while they might well fall victim to it in the end, it would take a lot longer to destroy them than us because, apparently, a cockroach “can survive 10 times the amount of radiation and for 10 times longer than humans could survive”.
That’s not a very comforting thought except, when you think about it, there won’t be any humans around to object to cockroach behaviour and to be driven to distraction trying to exterminate them. So that’s something of a comfort, I suppose.
Another potential source of comfort is that our extinction will, finally, lead to the eradication of something equally pernicious and possibly as hard to destroy. I speak, of course, of meetings.
Like cockroaches, meetings proliferate wildly. Every time you think you may have found a way to reduce their numbers, they pop up elsewhere, often in even greater numbers.
Every time there’s an advance in technology or a sociological shift, it’s followed by a brief period of optimism when people dare to believe that this time we have truly arrived at the point where meetings will start to diminish and become less frequent.
Not so. E-mail should have helped to kill off many meetings. I send something to a number of people, they all reply with their views and comments. Someone drafts a conclusion and, hey presto, that takes care of most meetings, doesn’t it?
And yet it hasn’t. The meetings might be different now because they may not involve everybody physically sitting together in the same room but they still require a number of people to assemble virtually. So the underlying format of the meeting is still the same. And the ingrained impetus to meet remains.
The great remote working migration might have seemed destined to curtail the frequency of meetings, thanks to the wonders of modern technology which made working remotely possible, but it did no such thing.
Not better, just different
Thanks to technology, we can meet anywhere, anytime. And frequently do. Someone in Germany can talk face-to-face with people in China, Australia and South Africa, all at the same time. They can even talk to someone in an office one floor down over their phone or PC.
The problem is that they all take time. Not just time during the meeting but time preparing for it beforehand and time to produce conclusions and actions afterwards. And like those people in the Old Testament such as Irad who begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech, meetings have a habit of begetting more meetings.
I think I may have begat a solution. And it’s been inspired by all the buzz around AI at the moment. Wouldn’t it be great if one of those supersmart AI boffins could turn their attention to developing a programme that could attend meetings on our behalf? We could call it MeetGPT.
How it would work is that people summoned to a meeting on a particular topic would type in a few sentences representing their perspective and then leave MeetGPT to do the rest. Everyone would be represented at the meeting with their own MeetGPT contribution. MeetGPT would collate everything, arrive at a conclusion, distribute it to the other MeetGPT attendees and then schedule the next meeting. Ad infinitum.
All we humans would have to do is read a summary after each meeting and MeetGPT could have as many meetings as it wanted.
This would serve two purposes. The first would be to help humans to get out of a lot of meetings. The second would be to delay, if not completely negate, the prospect of AI ever replacing us because it would be spending all its time in meetings instead. It would be caught in an infinite loop of meetings and meetings about meetings and meetings about meetings about meetings.
That’s got to be good news for you and me – and the cockroaches. Maybe we should arrange a meeting with some AI people.