Thinking about Count Rostov and electric motors while lecturing at LSU
Last week I gave an all-day lecture to accounting/internal audit students at Louisiana State University. The topic was AI. It was more discussion and conversation than lecture; no one in the room, including me, had any idea what’s really going to happen in the next five years. Note: the students are bright; I’m borrowing a few of their ideas here. As we talked about near term AI related work/life changes – self coding computers, legal contract reviews, push button financial analysis, big pharma type discoveries – I thought of the TV show A Gentleman in Moscow , portraying a fictional Count Rostov, imprisoned for life in a hotel after the Russian revolution. As an aristocrat, he is out of favor with the commissars; a modestly revolutionary poem he wrote earlier saved him from execution. In his new world, nearly everything was turned upside down – culture, technology, learning, human relations. His choice: adapt or die. The students probably aren’t going to be thre...