90secs to Our Own p(doom)
I couldn't quite believe I caught this snippet. An English rolling newscaster. On what is now the country's most watched such channel. I sense this vibe is in part why the tired old legacy dinosaurs are falling behind.
An electronic whiteboard style prop. Nowadays like a giant tablet touchscreen, with drawing app at the ready.
In the final moments of his co-hosted 3-hr slot, he bounds up to explain after being set-up by, "Elon Musk says artificial intelligence could deliver incredible abundance for all, and argues we shouldn't hit the 'stop' button, even if there's a risk of killer robots annihilating humanity... Right".
What follows is a bravura ninety-seconds.
His 240 words as clip are at the foot[*], if you'd like to try follow his movements from first drawing a stick-human, top-left.
It's not perfect, but needn't be.
Just like how so many an in-person meeting slot of just this type of treatment ought go on our Sales calls.
Full of beans. Knows the flow. Makes his point.
With adroit use of the smart board menu (bottom-right).
And well remembering to turn to face audience as much as possible with accompanying exuberant hand gestures.
Given it bounces off Elon Musk, I asked Grok what it thought to it.
"[It] is effective for grabbing attention and getting a complex idea across quickly. It hits the core intuition without getting too bogged down. Overall, it's accessible and doesn't overhype or underplay the stakes. Good TV."
Where I think he also scores, is with the pace. Tempo stays high.
Sure, ideally you'd want to vary it a touch, but this is top speed flat out all the way.
Then the actual drawings. I love this stuff. Always been big on it.
Here for instance, the growing robot heads visual is cheesy but memorable.
It feels natural, and a first-time effort. Yet know it's been roundtabled and rehearsed. Exactly how it should be.
Purists might bemoan the 'singularity' red blob. And the piechart. Not it's placement - which although crowded is alright - but it would've been just as swift to slash diagonal hash lines for the 'abundance' three-quarters.
On which note, the 75/25 split is fine. An easy slicing. Although in reality is our doom chance that high? Here, over-simplification hardly matters. It's the underlying message.
And you gotta love the capital-lettered final punch.
In our room, the sign-off 'who knows...' would be either handed to the floor, or a close swapped in. In any case, we ought be thinking how we too can spark buyer curiosity without seller misinformation in this very same way.
[*]
Right, well, I'm going to try and explain something that Elon Musk seems to believe that we are on course for and simply cannot avoid hitting.
It's called the singularity.
So currently human beings are developing AI - and here's my little AI robot to represent AI.
So human beings are currently developing these AIs.
But what happens when AI becomes so reliable and clever that it's not a human being developing AI it is then an AI developing the next even brainer AI.
And then what happens next if that one develops another even brainer AI - and representing this with an even larger head if you can see with my amazing drawings here.
Here's what the point is. We might call this point the singularity. [scribbles red oval]
The moment at which the AI is designing the next level of AI which is designing the next level of AI.
It's all beyond human comprehension.
And these things are so clever that frankly humans are out of the loop.
At that point we have what people talk about as perhaps an existential risk.
Say this is a nice piechart. [scribbles top-right, in yellow]
What if it was all good. This is our chance of it all going good.
A world of abundance, no-one wants for anything, all jobs are obsolete.
Well, Elon Musk talks about something called a ᴘᴅᴏᴏᴍ.
What is a P-Doom?
That's this quadrant; [scribbled in with red]
What if the robots decide to kill us all?
Who knows...