There's an easy way to tell if your baby has swallowed a battery: Take the baby's left hand and right foot and touch them to the end of your tongue.

I agree with you on GM. I've heard Mary Barra speak a dozen times in the past couple of years, and I've never heard her make a lick of sense.

I've been building call centers (we actually call them 'contact centers' these days) based on Twilio and Amazon Connect for large corporate clients for the last 4+ years. I don't think 'Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services' stated the situation correctly. It's not that we'll have a "...'minimal' need for call centres in as soon as a year...". Instead, we'll be reducing the number of contact center agents needed to run a contact center by using AI.

But there's alot more to a contact center that the agents. There's a whole mess of upfront software that accepts inbound customer calls by phone, text, and email. There's routing software, to ensure the caller gets connected to an agent that can actually help them. There's a whole bunch of middleware software that connects those pieces, and the agents, to corporate systems, so agents can look up a customer's history, previous calls, etc. There are numerous corporate systems that agents typically interact with to perform the tasks requested by the caller, such as resetting a password or entering a maintenance work order.

Even when an AI stands in place of an agent, all the other pieces that form a contact center are still needed, even if it's the AI interacting with them. So, replacing human agents with an AI may get rid of humans (sadly), but it certainly won't make the contact center go away.

... in about 5,000 years.

... or cars with parts flying off them?

Did it fly with a perfect operational record? Can we cut humans out of the loop? EEEEK! Terminators!!

Doesn't sound illegal. Barely nefarious maybe? Really smart probably? I'll wager that Walmart and eBay pretended to be Amazon Marketplace sellers at some point. Automakers buy each other's cars to tear them apart and study them. So do makers of electronics. In fact, in probably every competitive marketplace, the participants do this. It's just a sneaky way of learning from each other (going hand-in-hand with poaching each other's top people). I once worked for an electronics company that did this. We had the competitor's product shipped to the home address of the VP's assistant. And that was 40 years ago.

Yup - solid engineering. But engineering that needs to be replaced. This rail system provides a public service, and downtime will cost the local society a bloody mit-full. If it can't be supported, it's gotta be replaced because the cost of failure is so high. But, if there are a half-dozen spares on the shelf and they get tested from time to time, there's nothing to worry about. Boot from paper tape if that's what blows your skirt up.

In movies, when the mob takes over a business, they replace the top leader(s), suck all the profits out it, run up the credit cards, and eventually leave a worthless, indebted carcass in their wake. They'll even burn it down to collect the insurance.

Watching Boeing spiral downwards for the last 20 years has been like watching that mob movie. MBA's took over leadership, drove out the knowledgeable, and hoovered up every dime possible hand over to shareholders, and bonus themselves all the way to the Caymans and back. Is it now a worthless carcass, or worth saving?

Google has been taking our search queries and other data and turning it into targeted advertising dollars for years. I don't recall receiving a check. Why do they think they can charge us for using one of their "data collection portals" ? I'll use something else if that's where they're going.

MBA + AI = Engineer

Therefore, by the associative property:

Engineer - Intelligence = MBA

Fictional ones only, obviously. Were they serious about this they would apply that law to abandoned mines spewing methane into the air, which is a more potent green house case than carbon dioxide.

Oh it's much worse than that. There's soooo much brain damage done by an MBA degree, I now consider it a Pre-existing Condition.

25 years ago I worked in a factory automation group in an Alcan Aluminum plant. We were building a scheduling/tracking system using an Oracle database and C for the back end, and VB for the UI. While we were building ours, one of our sister plants built a scheduling/tracking system using Excel. There was the usual back-and-forth sniping about who's approach was better. We said that theirs would fall over once they tried scaling it up. They said ours was too expensive and would take too long to develop.

They got to production first, of course. And just as quickly, they fell on their collective faces. Their solution was built using a series of "linked" spreadsheets, and apparently referencing external spreadsheets at that time was slow, and would scale only so far. Our team got to production months later, but our solution scaled with ease. Our victory cry back on that day was: "A spreadsheet is not a database!".

Back in 2010, I became friends with a Toronto cop who lived in my building. He was in his mid twenties (half my age), and had just joined the force. In addition to his job, his grandfather had left him an inheritance consisting largely of Boeing stock. When he told me that, I relayed a story I had read 10 years prior.

In the early 2000's, we still had these things called "magazines", and I was an avid reader of the science-y ones. I told my friend the story of Beoing, an engineering-centric company that merged with McDonnell Douglas, a more management-y/profit-y company. Sadly, the McDonnell crew was put in charge and they proceeded to destroy Boing's engineering-centric culture by cutting corners and accelerating schedules. Many talented engineers left, and the Boeing of old was no more.

I warned my friend that such moves have a way of percolating through the product lineup and destroying competent companies. He shrugged it off and left his shares in Boing as they were. Back then, in 2010, Boeing had a stock price of about $70. It climbed and climbed, until 5 years ago, it hit $440. Since then, it's been falling like a doorless 737-Max that's missing a wheel. Now it's down to $180. I hope my old friend gets out of there before the next Boeing plane spontaneously disassembles itself mid-flight.