It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country’s chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country’s ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country’s Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist.
I love you Cory, but this is bullshit.
Office 365? Maybe a few companies would loose some documents, and productivity would drop 30% for a few months until they recreated everything in LibreOffice.
iOS shares are negligible in most of the world. Google can’t brick Android devices. Most people run cheap Chinese phones. Worst case, maybe 30% of phones stop working. Everyone else goes to their local phone shop (which will get slammed for business) to install Lineage or Graphene. So some people don’t have smart phones for a few weeks. Annoying, but no biggie.
John Deere? Most food produced in the world is basically local and nearly organic. So some big corporate farms suffer, and there’s a huge boost to the majority small farms.
In all cases, these attacks would have about the same effect as loosing access to chat bots: temporarily productivity loss until workflows are adjusted, and then better sovereignty.
Office 365? Maybe a few companies would loose some documents, and productivity would drop 30% for a few months until they recreated everything in LibreOffice.
Office 365 isn’t just access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it also includes Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive. Companies that lose access to all of their email, files, and team chats can’t just “recreate everything in LibreOffice.” These companies would be utterly paralyzed as businesses and would essentially have to replace all their computers and IT infrastructure.
Again, that would mean a loss of productive of like 30% until they get replacement infra. It wouldn’t grind them to a complete vault like Doctrow is suggesting.
I can tell you, the company I work for would be completely unable to operate without access to our email and files. All of the work done here flows through email. All of our customers contact us through that channel, even when they don’t realize it (contact through the website gets forwarded through email).
There are lots of other companies that work this way. Email isn’t just for asking questions and setting up meetings, it’s the queue system through which all work gets done.
Sure, and it would take your IT department a couple days to replace your email provider. It takes about a few seconds to a few minutes for MX records to propagate.
You might loose your past emails, but critical email accounts should be back online in a few days. The biggest delay would be getting management to approve a new provider (probably about an hour when they realize the impact) and provisioning the new accounts (probably a few hours for your most critical accounts. Up to a couple weeks for the less important ones).
It’s not “our email provider”, it’s everything. All of the company laptops are provisioned with Windows accounts that run through Microsoft servers. Microsoft could brick every PC in the company and lock us out of all our files.
It’s just the OS that failed. Install a new one that’s not owned by Microsoft.
Files will have to be reconstructed from paper, memories, and your customer’s/partner’s data.
You’re acting like this sort of thing has never happend to companies before. IT departments literally are tasked with generating business continuity plans. Maybe those plans’ software copies will be lost, but they have already thought of this. And just look at what happened to Ukraine in 2017 or SaudiAramco in 2012.
I love you Cory, but this is bullshit.
Office 365? Maybe a few companies would loose some documents, and productivity would drop 30% for a few months until they recreated everything in LibreOffice.
iOS shares are negligible in most of the world. Google can’t brick Android devices. Most people run cheap Chinese phones. Worst case, maybe 30% of phones stop working. Everyone else goes to their local phone shop (which will get slammed for business) to install Lineage or Graphene. So some people don’t have smart phones for a few weeks. Annoying, but no biggie.
John Deere? Most food produced in the world is basically local and nearly organic. So some big corporate farms suffer, and there’s a huge boost to the majority small farms.
In all cases, these attacks would have about the same effect as loosing access to chat bots: temporarily productivity loss until workflows are adjusted, and then better sovereignty.
Office 365 isn’t just access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it also includes Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive. Companies that lose access to all of their email, files, and team chats can’t just “recreate everything in LibreOffice.” These companies would be utterly paralyzed as businesses and would essentially have to replace all their computers and IT infrastructure.
Again, that would mean a loss of productive of like 30% until they get replacement infra. It wouldn’t grind them to a complete vault like Doctrow is suggesting.
Entire government agencies would cease to operate. It would be a force majure fiasco for virtually every contract in the country.
For a few days, you’re right
I can tell you, the company I work for would be completely unable to operate without access to our email and files. All of the work done here flows through email. All of our customers contact us through that channel, even when they don’t realize it (contact through the website gets forwarded through email).
There are lots of other companies that work this way. Email isn’t just for asking questions and setting up meetings, it’s the queue system through which all work gets done.
Sure, and it would take your IT department a couple days to replace your email provider. It takes about a few seconds to a few minutes for MX records to propagate.
You might loose your past emails, but critical email accounts should be back online in a few days. The biggest delay would be getting management to approve a new provider (probably about an hour when they realize the impact) and provisioning the new accounts (probably a few hours for your most critical accounts. Up to a couple weeks for the less important ones).
losing past emails is very serious.
Not saying it isn’t, and I wouldn’t want to be the guy stuck with 80 hour weeks to fix that shit.
But my point is that it’s not existential. It would really harm productivity for a few days…
It’s not “our email provider”, it’s everything. All of the company laptops are provisioned with Windows accounts that run through Microsoft servers. Microsoft could brick every PC in the company and lock us out of all our files.
Again, a few days to fix that for the critical folks
you can’t fix missing files and software
It’s just the OS that failed. Install a new one that’s not owned by Microsoft.
Files will have to be reconstructed from paper, memories, and your customer’s/partner’s data.
You’re acting like this sort of thing has never happend to companies before. IT departments literally are tasked with generating business continuity plans. Maybe those plans’ software copies will be lost, but they have already thought of this. And just look at what happened to Ukraine in 2017 or SaudiAramco in 2012.
These attacks would likely kill the American tech economy and might hurt the US more than the rest of the world.