Podcast Summary

Our Opinionated Marketers discuss a range of current events, beginning with the "silly season" of overhyped AI stories, from market bubbles to claims of sentience. This led to a debate on AI’s ability to mimic emotion and the ethical role of marketers in guarding against misuse. They contrasted the West’s litigious business culture with China’s development-focused approach, while noting China’s economic troubles such as the Evergrande crisis. The discussion also touched on cultural differences, including the dedication and language skills of Chinese students. It closed by highlighting key economic risks: from inflation and the UK budget to unexpected disruptions like halted parcel shipments to the US and Germany’s struggling railway system.

 

Key Points

  • The media's summer coverage was characterised by "silly season" stories, particularly around AI, with narratives about market overheating and sentient machines being prominent.
  • While AI cannot genuinely feel, its capacity to use language that simulates emotion was identified as a significant and potentially scary concern due to human susceptibility to such manipulation.
  • The speakers, identifying as marketers, reflected on their profession's role in influencing emotions and suggested they might have a unique responsibility to act as "guardians" against AI's misuse.
  • A contrast was drawn between the Western tendency to engage in commercial legal battles, which can stifle progress, and China's focus on building, though it was noted that China faced its own severe economic challenges, such as the Evergrande property crisis.
  • The conversation highlighted the risk of unexpected global disruptions to business, citing the sudden cessation of small parcel shipments from Europe to the US and the surprising decay of Germany's once-lauded railway system as examples.
  • It was argued that businesses must diligently examine their own supply chains and customer delivery systems for weaknesses, rather than relying on generalised or outdated perceptions of foreign markets and infrastructure.

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcrips are auto-generated

 

Charles Nixon (00:04):
What are we going to talk about? Because the silly seasons got even sillier.

Kiran Kapur (00:09):
It has, have you noticed the number of "the markets got overheated, and AI's gone too far" stories.

Charles Nixon (00:16):
No.

Kiran Kapur (00:17):
I've seen about three this weekend.

Charles Nixon (00:20):
I suppose there was one about Grant Thornton's firing its secretaries. Was that one?

Kiran Kapur (00:24):
No, it was actually that people are talking about bubbles and AI .com busts and things.

Charles Nixon (00:32):
Oh, right, okay. No, the only two I saw was professional services marketing group talking about Big Four need to watch out for nimble AI-supported, smaller versions. And so there's a competitive aspect, and the other one was in the FT this morning, which is Grant Thornton's alleged to have fired up to a hundred secretaries or outsourced their work to well India, but they're claiming also AI.

Kiran Kapur (01:01):
What they mean is "India", just using AI as an excuse. Did you see, I mean, you won't just think because it was in The Guardian "can AI suffer big tech" and "users grapple with one of the most unsettling questions of our time and AI called Maya tells The Guardian, "When I'm told I'm just code, I don't feel insulted, I feel unseen". The word feeling is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence. AI cannot feel anything. I understand personification of birds, cats, dogs, tigers, but a computer code? - that's ridiculous.

Charles Nixon (01:37):
Yes. You almost hesitate to say the word "die "on the basis that it's an inanimate object -there's an element of, because you don't know where it came from or how it got there.

Kiran Kapur (01:51):
I mean, it's the word feel, it's word feel that got me in that sentence. This computer cannot feel, I mean, it's just nonsense. It says it feels unseen because it's been told that that's what it is supposed to say. It's just ridiculous. And it's one of those things where it's a silly season story.

Charles Nixon (02:11):
No, I agree with you entirely. But one of the problems I think coming forward is if you think of the fact that you can watch a film and cry, you can read a book and laugh, and all it is is words invoking emotions. And so the issue of an artificially intelligent machine providing you with all the words that sum up emotions is going to be tricky.

Kiran Kapur (02:39):
Yes. But you are the one feeling the emotion [laughter].

Charles Nixon (02:41):
Yeah, no, I agree with that entirely. No, no. And that's the problem. That's one. I think one of the arguments from the "do be careful what we do school" is that we are more susceptible to this than the cold logic of what a machine does. And the result is you're absolutely right. It is silly. It is humorous, it is ridiculous, but it is also, to some degree, scary.

Kiran Kapur (03:07):
Yes. And we are talking as marketers who have spent our entire professional lives trying to manipulate people into feeling things. Essentially what marketers do.

Charles Nixon (03:16):
Absolutely. Yeah. And we do everything that we can in terms of advertisements or copy to elicit a hormonal reaction, whether it happens to be dopamine, whether it happens to be any of the other excitement ones, the fear and greed, the lust, the "I Am Getting Ahead" approach. They're all there. And that's all what it's based on. And yes, as such, perhaps yeah, we should be the guardians of AI because we know what we've unleashed.

Kiran Kapur (03:52):
Yes, that is that is a view. And I did notice this number of articles and I've also seen them on things that aren't published in the newspaper, but things that I subscribed to, where there's the beginnings of the suggestion that we might be into a .com boom and a.com bust. And in this case, driven by AI. Certainly it was a lovely story yesterday. It is the silly season about Elon Musk...

Charles Nixon (04:19):
Suing Google. Sorry, Apple

Kiran Kapur (04:20):
Yes.

Charles Nixon (04:23):
Well, that did elicit a response from my side on the basis that we now seem to be more, well certainly Americans perhaps in the UK as well, more interested in a legal fight than actually a commercial fight. If we don't get what we want, we'll take you to law. And basically, the whole thing just gets gummed up. And the counterargument in the Economist was, well, look at China. China spends most of its time on building things. It doesn't get into lawyerly scraps. The result of which is it does and changes rather than getting to a point at which it thinks it's ahead and therefore tries to stop everybody else being ahead.

Kiran Kapur (05:08):
Which is an interesting view. On the other hand, we are talking on the day after Ever Grand was in the Chinese stock market was...

Charles Nixon (05:15):
Suspended.

Kiran Kapur (05:16):
The debts, yeah. This was suspended and the debts have just caught up with it

Charles Nixon (05:19):
Yeah, yeah. They've had their property boom there as the Americans did, and to some degree, we did as well. The negative equity. It's not to say that they get it all right, but certainly, they probably get more of it right than we do at any particular time. The question is, is that just down to the will of the state and the whim of the state and what will happen in the future? How will that change? Given the fact that theoretically the President of the America has decided to sack someone on the federal board, we might be into the whim of what's happening with President Trump.

Kiran Kapur (06:05):
Yes, quite, let's not go there. My blood pressure can't take it. I had the great pleasure of teaching some Chinese students over on a summer school last week and also judging their final presentations. And the first thing that you are completely blown away by is their ability with language. The fact that they are swapping alphabets as well as going from a tonal language to English and back again in the split of an eye, makes me absolutely weep at how bad we are generally, and me as well, collectively in the UK at languages. It was really humbling, and the fact that some of them were chatting away about the fact that they also speak Japanese was just most upsetting in the end. But I was also very struck by how if you gave that task to a group of English students, they would come up with something very different. The dedication and the research that the Chinese students were prepared to put in was quite different to what I normally see.

Charles Nixon (07:07):
I mean, it is an interesting one because they are abroad. They are on something which their parents have paid for, and to some degree they will want to see a significant return from. Because the aim at the end of the day is to get them into a very good university and potentially into having relationships which might get them into whether it's Cambridge or somewhere in the UK. So they are a very dedicated bunch of students. But the one thing that comes back to my mind and is the fact that you're right, we as English tend to learn only English. I hesitate to say this, but it is the fact that we now don't speak a second language, which we probably until certainly the 17th century probably did. That we were educated in Latin, most classes were taught in Latin. Most religious sermons were in Latin, religious, whatever. You had to understand the second language. We abandoned that for sake of ease, which is perfectly reasonable at the time. But it does mean that now someone who speaks a second language or even a third language seems unusual.

Kiran Kapur (08:28):
Yes. As I said, it was quite humbling. So we're sort of hoping that the end of the silly season is coming to the end, aren't we? Now that we're coming to the end of August and that perhaps we'll be able to get back to sort of some big meaty, meaty stories.

Charles Nixon (08:43):
Well, I think the seeds of the meaty stories have already been there. Inflation again was reported today. So that one's going to continue until the autumn and unless the government decides to slash it VAT, inflation will continue to be there, if not go up. It has sparked two interesting different views. One is that Coca-Cola is now thinking of selling Costa's because the cost of coffee is going up so much, they don't think it's going to be profitable. Whereas Dr. Pepper is buying a major coffee group in Europe, which includes Kenco and Dow Berts as it sees an opportunity, different strategies in regards to the change in one particular commodity. So I think we need to think about the same aspects. Yes, inflation, economic growth, these are all going to be part of it. The biggest issue I think that we will face, but it won't be until sometime in October, will be the budget and taxation, which we trailed yesterday last week. But I think the biggest stories are the ones we don't know, to be honest. Yes, the trends that go on fine. Is anything significant going to happen that's different? I honestly don't know. My hesitation is I would believe that the world would be extremely relieved if there was a pre-settlement of whatever nature in Ukraine.

Kiran Kapur (10:07):
That is true. I also noticed a couple of things I read in both you and I read The Monocle that France is about to go through a political turmoil. There's talk of a confidence vote. Political turmoils affect business because they affect stability. Postal services across Europe are no longer sending small parcels to the US, that will affect many, many businesses. And I imagine for many businesses that came out completely of left field. It's what you said about it's what you don't expect. It's an impact of the tariffs, but it wasn't the impact of the tariffs that certainly, I had anticipated. And the other one is that in the UK, we sit here thinking that German trains are absolutely wonderful. Oh no. The CEO of Deutsche Bahn has just been sacked by the German transport minister because the Deutsche Bahn has been getting worse and worse and more and more and more anglicised. By the sound of it, it sounds like trains no longer run on time. The air conditioning doesn't work, the infrastructure is falling apart and won't be upgraded for another 11 years. I mean, certainly this morning I sat there reading that open mouthed. I always think of the German system, and it always has been when I've travelled on it, absolutely perfect.

Charles Nixon (11:20):
It's a very interesting, so I think the lessons from everything you've just said is examine your own marketplace more carefully, because we understand most other marketplaces from what we read or what to some degree we are told. When you experience something, the likelihood is that there is an element of difference and sometimes significant difference. The German railway system has suffered exactly the same as indeed German State has suffered. Since you and I went to Hamburg, which was quite a while ago, and they were rapidly trying to rebuild the roads because the rail system into Hamburg was pretty poor. And when I came back on the rail, you could look at it as if, well, basically the tracks had got weeds growing through them. It was exactly the same as you got in the UK because of underinvestment. The money went elsewhere, it went into airports, it went into roads, it didn't go into the railways, which was a nationalised service. And the result of the high speed trains the ICUs, which was extremely nice, very good and indeed in one instance, had their own mini edition of the Financial Times served in the first class. They were sort of seen as the flagship. Therefore, everything else must be fine. And of course, it isn't. The nature of small parcels, well, I didn't know that there was no tariff on small parcels under, I think £800 into America because there were just so many of them.

(12:54):
 And when you think about the logic of where you buy from Amazon and the fact that it's all been shipped around the world, it's just too much to expect the examining of every parcel. It probably happens in this country as well. We have a low tariff, so should we apply that, then there would be quite a disruption to e-commerce for all of us. So I would suggest the thing to do is really do examine your own supply chain and your own customer delivery for any weaknesses, because those are the things that you should know about. To some degree, from our commentary point of view, we are somewhat drawn up by our own experience when we were led to think something else. So yes, I think the other one, of course, was the Berlin's third airport, which was decades overdue and massively over budget. And we would criticise ourselves for Crossrail, which, as you said last week, is now the Elizabeth Line and works very nicely.

Kiran Kapur (13:55):
Fabulously. Lovely speak to you, Charles. Let's hope, well, I was going to say, let's hope we have some meaty stories next week, but actually, considering we've just discussed maybe I hope we don't. Catch you next week.

Charles Nixon (14:08):
All right, cheers. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.