DOGE: Driving Out Great Employees

 

In 1969 or 1970, freshly graduated from university with a degree in philosophy, I joined PriceWaterhouse & Co as a Chartered Accountant in the City of London, the ‘Square Mile’, located between the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange.

At that time, PriceWaterhouse & Co was probably the leader of the ‘Big Five’ accounting firms that controlled the British economy and working out of PW’s head office in the City of London, our clients were the nation’s largest and most prestigious corporations.

As auditors, we had the legal authority to look at, to question and to examine whatever we wanted – from petty cash vouchers and bills of lading to the confidential minutes of the latest meeting of the Board of Directors.

Traditionally. PW&Co and the other Big Five accounting firms employed men who had studied accounting, sometimes at university but more often at trade school or night studies. In the late 60’s however, they decided to employ men [1]who had a broader education, in the humanities, and who could therefore more easily interact in Board Rooms with the Captains of Industry.

PW&Co wanted to understand its clients’ management systems; how and why things worked; what were the rules and the checks and balances. It was a time when accounting firms graduated from mere ‘number crunchers’ to being Management Consultants. That’s why they hired an innumerate philosophy graduate like me to be an auditor.

So, after cutting off my long hippy hair, swapping my tie-dyed outfits for a pin-stripe suit and cutting back on the pot – I entered the world of high finance and corporate respectability.

In my early twenties, dressed in a 3-piece pin-stripe suit and a bowler hat, and armed with a tightly folded umbrella and all the arrogance and ignorance of youth, I and my like-minded colleagues were let loose upon the bastions of corporate Britain.

The early 70s was also a time when large international corporations were switching to the new ‘computer technologies.’ Suddenly, with little preparation and even less understanding, the multi-national corporate clients of PriceWaterhouse & Co and other large accounting firms were switching overnight (usually on December 31^st) from Dickensian hand-written ledgers to vast spinning disks of computer tapes. It was a time of sheer unbridled financial and management chaos.

Into this mix of turmoil and technological anarchy stepped an army of young, ignorant and arrogant young men who, because they had been made moderately familiar with (1970’s) computer technology, thought they understood and could fix everything. We were the young Gods.

For the two or three years I was employed at PW&Co, we swaggered through corporate Britain. The established corporate executives, bewildered by the new technologies, were hapless in the face of our superior and dismissive overconfidence. We made impulsive and ill-informed decisions, and our elders and betters complied meekly. We moved fast and broke things, carelessly

The chaos just got worse, and most historians agree that the 1970s was probably one of the most disastrous decades of the 20^th century.

So, when I look at Elon Musk’s chainsaw wielding young thugs, I catch an embarrassed glimpse of my own misspent youth.

But you know. Somehow, we survived …

So far.

Patrick

Patrick@GablesWine.com

 

---

[1] I use the term ‘men’ because women, in those days, were only employed as secretaries and tea-ladies.

 Democracy vs Dictatorship

My lifelong faith in Democracy is being sorely tested as I witness the daily clown-show in Washington D.C.  Observing our elected representatives squabbling over nonsense is like watching an episode of Mean Girls. While pressure builds on our southern border, Russia destroys its European neighbor, China threatens Taiwan and as tensions in the Middle East spiral out of control, our leaders prove incapable of doing anything except playing musical chairs with the Speaker and indulging in meaningless impeachment trials.

 

Maybe a dictatorship is not such a bad idea after all!

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS A LYING TEENAGER

 

In an article for the Guardian on September 5, 2023, Elif Batuman described how she decided to use ChatGPT to help her locate a half-remember passage in Marcel Proust’s voluminous novel ‘In Search of Lost Time’.  Although ChatGPT kept offering her possible answers, they were always vague, sometimes contradictory and, despite Batuman’s increasingly specific prodding, never actually produced the passage she had been seeking.

Intrigued by her article, I decided to repeat her exercise, and asked ChatGPT to locate a passage in Proust’s novel in which the narrator describes seeing a girl in a railway carriage smoking a cigarette.

As Elif Batuman had discovered, ChatGPT certainly had a general understanding and familiarity with Proust’s seven-volume novel. Like any well-read and educated person, ChatGPT was aware that a major theme of the novel was that memories of past events continue to exist and can be triggered unexpectedly by some trivial act. The most famous example is of the narrator dipping a little madeleine cake in a cup of tea and being transported back to his childhood.

ChatGPT informed me that the incident with the girl in the railway carriage occurred in volume one, Swann’s Way, and the smell of the cigarette smoke transported the narrator back to his youth in the village of Combray.

In fact, the incident occurs in volume four, Cities of the Plain, and there is no mention of cigarette smoke, let alone its smell. Rather than looking backwards, Proust looks forward in time, wondering what happened to the girl, whom he never saw again after that brief encounter.

Just as Batuman’s had described in her article, whenever I corrected ChatGPT, it very politely and immediately agreed with me, apologizing for its mistake, and rephrasing its answer to include the new information that I had provided. But again, it never actually located or quoted the specific passage I was seeking.

Increasingly I felt as though I was dealing with a shifty but quick-witted teenager, trying to conceal the fact he had not done his homework or read the assigned text. The initial answer it provided was a complete lie. It had made an intelligent guess and constructed a fairly compelling answer that would have satisfied the average person. However, having previously written two books about Marcel Proust’s novel, I was not so easily fooled.

So that is probably the state of Artificial Intelligence in the Fall of 2023. No longer in its infancy, it has become a shifty teenager endlessly improvising and lying, if need be, in order to appear plausible, while it plans its next move. As we know, many awkward teenagers grow up to be honest and trustworthy adults, on the other hand, some others do not.