An Epoch-Spanning Conversation With TechChannel’s AWS Specialist
Nicole Willing, freelance tech journalist and AWS specialist for TechChannel, shares insights from her adventurous and varied career on IT Social Hour.
Listen to the audio-only version
This transcript was edited or clarity:
Andy:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of IT Social Hour. I’m Andy Wig, senior editor at Tech Channel. And today I have with us Nicole Willing. You might recognize her name. If you’re a tech channel reader, you might have seen her AWS and cloud coverage, which she’s been doing a lot of for us in 2026 as we kind of dive into that space. But anyway, Nicole is a very interesting person. She’s a world traveler who’s been around for a couple different tech transformations you could say. So I think she’s got some interesting perspectives to share. So without further ado, let’s get into it. Hi Nicole, how you doing?
Nicole:
Hey, good. Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to this. I’m not used to being on the other side of the questioning.
Andy:
You’re in the hot seat now. It’s
Nicole:
Quite stuffy too.
Andy:
I promise to go easy on you here. I think this will just be a fun conversation here. Great opportunity for our readers to get to know the people behind the content and learn a little bit about what’s it like to be the person that brings all this information to their inbox or their internet browser every single day basically. So you started as a tech journalist back in, I believe it was the height of the dotcom boom or right before the bubble burst. And now we’re in this new kind of disruptive age right now. So I thought it’d be interesting to just start things off, compare those two moments. And maybe just a good way to start is just how did you get into your job as a tech journalist back at that time? I believe it was kind of the turn of the century, right?
Nicole:
It was, it was. So I started working for a news website where we were. I mean, this is a sign of what was happening at that time. We were literally creating news briefs of all the companies that were getting VC funding because there was so much money being thrown around and every day there were announcements, so and so startup has received X tens of millions of dollars of investment from a VC fund or a bigger tech company and things like that. And there was so many things going on that we literally were just churning out these news briefs every day. And so there definitely are parallels with that time and what’s happening now with crazy amounts of money flying
Andy:
Around. Yeah, right. Yeah. So much money flying around. What was the mood back then? Internet’s still pretty early on, still in its infancy, I think you could probably say. Now the whole AI age I think is in its infancy now. I think the mood ranges from abject terror to full on excitement. But what were people talking about back during this other time around that dot-com bubble burst, I suppose you could say? What was the mood in the air back then and how was that compared to what you’re seeing out there now?
Nicole:
Yeah, it’s so interesting. I mean, like you say, the internet for the everyday user, I mean obviously the tech guys were very well into the internet at that point, but it was starting to become this thing that we were all starting to use every day. And it’s interesting to think about how that compares to AI where you have the early adopters, you have people thinking, “Oh, what’s that useful? That’s never going to take off.” And I remember, and I’d almost forgotten about this, but I remember colleagues or friends, sorry, telling me that their company wouldn’t allow them to use the internet during work hours because it was considered a distraction and it wasn’t necessary for their job. The information on there wasn’t considered to be credible. And so people’s IT systems would block them from using the internet on their work computers, which to think about that now, it’s unbelievable.
Impossible. Looking back that’s what happened considering how our whole lives lived on the internet with no consideration of it in that way that we were thinking about it then.
Andy:
Yeah. And now you can’t get by without it. Do you feel like is there something similar happening with AI? I mean, I feel like a lot of companies are encouraging their employees to use AI, but where do you see that in terms of. Well, how does that fit into your workflow, I guess? I mean, do you get anything out of this new tool?
Nicole:
I do find it useful as a tool. Like you said, I think that’s the key thing is there’s so much debate and commentary around how we’re going to use AI in our lives. Is it replacing us all? Is it going to be the Elon Musk utopia where we all sit back and collect our universal income while AI agents do everything? But I think it does have a place as a tool. I certainly like to use it in my research and thinking process sometimes to give it a prompt and when it spits out some terribly unjournalistic headlines, I’m like, “I hate that. The headline should actually be this.” It helps my thinking in that way. So I think thinking about it as a tool is probably the sensible, I hope, the sensible way to look at it. I mean, things move so quickly, who knows? I think that’s the interesting and exciting thing about it is it’s moving so quickly.
Six months ago, what was happening with agents? We didn’t think that would be happening for maybe years to come and here we are and 12 months from now, who knows what it’s going to look like. It’s exciting, maybe scary, but definitely as interesting time as it was in the dotcom era when we were like. I’m not sure that we knew then how the internet would take over our lives. And right now we don’t know how the AI story is going to play out. So there are definitely similarities and it’s exciting to observe it.
Andy:
Yeah, we don’t. We’re really on pins and needles waiting to see what happens next. What’s the next model that’s going to drop? The conversation at tech channel is really about the practical stuff, how do you integrate this stuff into your systems and all sorts of obstacles there which you cover covering AWS and the cloud and this integration with the mainframe and power systems for tech channel. But I’m curious, with all this hype that’s happening right now, there’s so much AI, and I’m not saying it’s all hype at all, obviously it’s not, but another parallel between now and the early days of the internet, I’m curious how you are able to get through that hype and get to the information that matters to your audience. Because it’s both of our jobs to deliver, we’re not writing science fiction here, we’re trying to deliver practical information that’s useful to our audience.
I’m curious how you cut through all that, for lack of a better term, hype and get at the nuts and bolts that our audience of technologists really care about. Yeah, I
Nicole:
Mean that’s where if it were to talk about AI replacing us in terms of writing, the conversations are so important and I’m not sure. And I had an interesting conversation with somebody about that the other day because technically you can now have an AI avatar. So you could have an AI avatar journalist out there doing these kind of interviews, but who’s actually going to watch that? I mean, I’m sure there will be some people, but I think at the end of the day, the human connection is still valued. And so it’s really talking to people and finding out. I mean, I’ve had some really interesting conversations with people in the last week or so just about what really, like you say, the practical element of this, what really is happening and what needs to happen, what kind of mistakes, because naturally with this new technology, there’s going to be the mistakes that enterprises make in terms of the deployment, things that they don’t plan for, don’t realize that they need to be thinking about because we’re all in this brave new world we’ve never been before.
Nobody’s deployed AI agents before. So as somebody said to me today, there’s nobody with more than six months of experience in this in terms of the practical enterprise deployment. Of course, you’ve got the guys who’ve been working in AI for decades, but not in the enterprise environment. So yeah, I think at the end of the day, it comes down to having the conversations with people, getting the different perspectives, different opinions. There’s several aspects of enterprise deployments right now where I literally will speak to one person and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s definitely going to look like this.” And half an hour later I speak to somebody else that says, “Oh no, that’s not the way forward. It’s definitely going to be like this.” So getting those perspectives is where the interesting stuff is and when you can really cut through, okay, the hype says this, but what’s the reality on the ground and what are people really dealing with day-to-day in those IT departments, in the customer departments?
What are they actually dealing with?
Andy:
Yeah, you said it, nobody has that much experience with at least the technology in its current form since the GPT era, I guess you could say, the generative AI era. Some people have data science experience going way back, of course, and AI experience and all sorts of different things. But yeah, I mean, just they don’t have that much more experience on this particular topic than the rest of us, I guess, even the experts maybe. So everybody’s still experimenting. It’s fascinating. So I think we’ll probably come back to some of this AI and work stuff and how it all fits together, but I want to learn a little bit more about your lifestyle as a. I think you could call you a digital nomad. Is that accurate? Yeah.
Nicole:
Well, I mean, for better or worse, this term has a lot of. I feel like it has some connotations attached to certain people, but no, I think there are great things about the digital nomad life as it were. I love traveling. I love being able to work remotely. I previously, from full-time editorial, I loved it, but I wanted to find a way to combine my love of travel and still being able to do what I do. So freelance is great for that. So yeah, COVID notwithstanding, I’ve had a great time traveling around, especially Southeast Asia, my favorite part of the world. Had some great experiences and being able to work remotely from there has been fantastic.
Andy:
Is digital nomad kind of a pejorative?
Nicole:
Not necessarily. There are certain connotations of the guy who goes to Bali or Thailand and is selling a course to a bunch of other people who are selling courses. But there are plenty of legit digital nomads who have real jobs who are working from different parts of the world. So I don’t want to claim that it’s not. But it’s funny, there’s a whole discourse online and even among friends and colleagues. I remember speaking to one colleague and I’d kind of use the term digital nomad and she burst out laughing, but it was rooted in a bad date she had had with somebody who fit the label in not such a good way. But no, I mean, in fact, when I’ve been in Asia talking to other people who are traveling around and they’re like, “Oh, I want to be able to do that and work remotely and stay traveling around Southeast Asia.” And I’m like, “Yes, absolutely do it.
I’m all about it. It’s great fun.”
Andy:
If you can do it, do it, I guess, right? Yes, exactly. So you travel to, I hear Asia. So whereabouts do you end up. I mean, do you have a circuit you do with a bunch of different spots you like to stop or how does this work?
Nicole:
So for a few years, it was three or four months I would spend in Southeast Asia. And so maybe one year it would be Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, another year, Malaysia, Bali, Hong Kong, Japan. So I plan for a three or four month period and then decide what I want to slot in that timescale. And the last time I did it, it was probably the best experience because halfway through, I basically threw out my itinerary and crowdsourced the rest of my trip because I was meeting so many people who were going in the opposite direction. There’s often a circuit which kind of looks like Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam or reverse. So I happened to be going from Southern Laos into the north, crossing into Northern Vietnam, working my way downwards. And I met people who were going the opposite direction and they were saying to me, “Oh, are you doing this?
If you like this, you have to do that.” I had an idea of what I wanted to do in the time I had, and I ended up just throwing it out and going with what people were recommending. It was probably the best experience I’ve had in several long trips in Southeast Asia.
Andy:
You got to keep an open mind, huh?
Nicole:
Thing I will say is people get scared of going during early rainy season, and you don’t want to be in the height of monsoon season, maybe August, September, where it can be dangerous with extreme flooding, landslide, so on. But if you go in early rainy season, it’s much quieter because people tend to clear out at the end of dry season thinking the worst is going to happen overnight. And so hotels are quieter, sites are quieter. You can literally walk into a hotel and they’ll give you a better rate than you find online. Maybe I shouldn’t be giving all these tips all the secrets.
And so you can actually show up without a set itinerary. For example, if in Europe, you can’t get away with that. But yeah, in Southeast Asia, you can absolutely walk in and get a rate at the door that’s better. And that allows you to have the flexibility to take recommendations and make little detours and extend your time if you find that you really want to spend more time in a certain location. I mean, I’ve met people in Laos who intended to be there for two weeks and ended up getting a job in a local guest house and months or years later were still there. So it’s the kind of thing that happens in that part of the world is very much go with the flow, take things by suggestion and see what happens.
Andy:
Can you imagine that happening to you where you just end up kind of staying put at a place eventually like, “Oh yeah, this seems good.”
Nicole:
It’s definitely tempting. It is. And now there’s so many digital nomad visas as well that makes it easier to. You can stay for six, 12 months, you can renew, extend longer. So there’s really exciting things happening in that part of the world if you are working remotely and love traveling, love sightseeing, love meeting like-minded people. I met somebody in last actually who ended up getting locked down there during COVID and decided to stay, rented an apartment. And then because he was working remotely, he basically said to me he got tired of his own company and so got a small space in town in Wyoming and opened up coworking so that he could meet digital nomads passing through and was telling me about some of the interesting people he’d met and the interesting conversations he was having. So yeah, it’s all kinds of lifestyles and possibilities that you don’t even think about until you go there and meet all these fascinating people.
Andy:
What jobs do these people have then? What jobs allow them to be digital nomads as well?
Nicole:
There’s definitely lots of software development going on, some crypto traders, some stock traders, and all kinds of. If you kind of think anything that you can do remotely, there are people who work US or European hours. There are people who have completely flexible schedules so they can choose their hours. But any kind of job that you can feasibly do remotely, you’ll probably find somebody out there who’s taking advantage of the geographical arbitrage and basing themselves there.
Andy:
And you’re based in the UK, right? Technically, yes. You go off for how many months at a time are usually out traveling?
Nicole:
The maximum was probably, well, six months. Well, not quite six months, let’s say five months in the Caribbean in the winter, and then four months in Southeast Asia bouncing around. So that left three months maybe in London.
Andy:
Okay. And logistically, I mean, how do you pull that off? I’m just wondering if this is something I’ll be able to do someday. Are you always able to have an internet connection and find a place to pop open your laptop?
Nicole:
I mean, that’s definitely something that we mentioned earlier about the early days of the internet. I could never have imagined at that time how ubiquitous internet access is now. A couple of years ago, I read an article that said they did a survey in Thailand and people rated internet access as more important than running water because they spend so much time on Facebook and other social media platforms. So very, very few places in Southeast Asia I found that don’t have very good wifi, if not. And the other thing I do is always make sure I have a local SIM card so if need be, I can hotspot my phone onto my laptop. There was one time I had an issue and it was a very remote location. I’d literally gone to an island off of the east coast of Borneo, which itself is quite remote.
And I had a SIM card, so theoretically I should have had data, but the mobile phone tower had gone down. And so there were just loads of people, locals and tourists are walking around with their phones trying to catch a signal from the end of a jetty. Nice. And you could get a few emails coming that way, but that’s the only time with my freelance clients I had to send them a message and say I was going to be a day or two late with my deadlines.
Andy:
That’s a dangerous situation. So end of a jetty, so you’re out in the ocean, right? A jetty is up here, right? Yeah. So I can imagine people elbowing each other off the jetty in order to get cell signal.
Nicole:
There was a few stressful faces for a day or two, but literally that’s the only time. I mean, out in the jungle, you’re going to find Wi-Fi. I’ve been at the tops of hills catching internet data signal, hotspot into my laptop, getting some articles finished off to send to clients. It’s the amazing thing here we are in 2026 and we take for granted that we can get wifi mobile data everywhere we go.
Andy:
Yeah. It’s really easy to take that for granted. It’s amazing. Yeah, the world is truly connected now, I guess. I mean, you don’t picture jungles as places where you’re still on the grid, but yeah, I guess you are. So last question about being a digital nomad for you here. I’m curious just about all this travel, how does it affect your ability to do your job? They say traveling is supposed to be good for you, broadens your horizons and all that good stuff. Have you had the similar experiences in terms of the way it affects your ability to be a journalist?
Nicole:
Yeah, I mean, I’d agree with that. I think you meet so many interesting people, whether it’s locals or other travelers that you meet along the way, you get so many different perspectives, and especially covering tech, you get to see how people integrate tech into their lives in so many different ways. I mean, you talk about Asia, you go somewhere like Tokyo or Shanghai, or you see how just the different attitudes towards technology as well. I mean, we have some angst about AI, I think, in the West, but when you look at how China is moving ahead so quickly with robotics and using it in ways of food delivery or twenty four seven customer service at kiosks and things like that, and I’ve seen online recently some ads where as much as we have in the west, all of this doom around AI is going to kill us all in the next 10 years or so, the ads in China are AI is going to make your life so much easier and here are the ways.
So I think when you travel and you get opened up to those perspectives, and you may or may not agree with them, but it just gives you a broader idea of the way people think about things so differently.
Andy:
Where do you fall on that, whether AI is going to kill us all or not? Has traveling kind of, I don’t know if it’s maybe moderated your perspective on that a little bit or what do you think?
Nicole:
Yeah, it’s so interesting. I mean, when I started covering AI a good couple of years ago now, I mean, I was speaking then to guys who had been in AI development for 20, 30 years. They were very much on the AI is going to kill us all camp, which I found interesting. In fact, somewhere in my travels, I ended up treating it as a bit of my homework to watch iRobot because so many people were telling me that that was the kind of future we’re talking about with AI. And I was like, “I need to watch this film because clearly there’s a common theme going on here.” So part of me does think if you think that AI was trained on everything on the internet and every piece of literature and every piece of science, all of that says that AI is going to kill us all.
So if that’s the training, it’s a bit worrying. But I would like to be optimistic and say that it won’t get that far, but I mean, this is whole part of being in this era of the unknown that we’re in. Who knows what’s going to happen 12 months from now, let alone 12 years from now. So if we’re still alive, we can discuss how it’s going.
Andy:
Yeah. The last podcast I did, we were talking about, it was kind of about what kids today, what kind of technologists they’ll be when they graduate from high school, what we call high school. And so I’m imagining AI natives, kids who are three, four years old right now, what’s it going to be like when they graduate? Then afterwards I realized then basically we’re recording this in the middle of September, just so people know. So last week, all the talk was about the hugging face incident and the new calls to slow things down and how we’re all going to be dead in 10 years. I’m like, this conversation I just had feels very irrelevant now where I’m trying to imagine the world 15 years from now and it almost seems pointless to even think that far down the line.
Nicole:
Well, I do find that when I’m interviewing people, because generally when I’m having a conversation, I start with the kind of state of play of where we are to set the context and then talk about the opportunities and challenges and then end with the forward-looking part. And I always say now, I feel like the forward looking part is so unknown to all of us because who knows 12 months, who knows six months from now, but who knows what’s going to happen? So it’s very interesting. But then in the same way, 15 years ago, we didn’t know what things would look like in terms of the way. We didn’t think we’d all have ChatGPT on our phones.
Andy:
Yeah. I mean, we weren’t even imagining Facebook at that time. I think it was maybe Myspace was happening. I don’t even know if Facebook was even a thought in Mark what’s his face’s brain at that time. So yeah, even just something as seemingly mundane as social media, I don’t think we had much of a concept of, right? Right. So you don’t cover just cloud for tech channel. What else do you cover in your freelance work? Yeah,
Nicole:
So in terms of freelancing, previously I was editor of the commodities newsletter looking at non-forest metals, so I still keep a hand in that. And as part of that, I used to be covering electric vehicles, so also work with an electric vehicle magazine. I’ve done some work with a semiconductor analyst firm, various other types of content, more about really freelancing and running a small business and so on. But the fascinating thing for me is how everything I’ve covered in my career is coming together in a way I never could have imagined. Following the dot-com era, my first full-time, because I was still a student that time, but my first full-time publication work was covering telecom, networking equipment, so part of that was data center. So then I moved into commodities, so first electricity markets, so obviously electricity demand, power stations, grids, all of that, then moving into metals and clean energy, and some of those metals go into semiconductors.
And so it’s all now coming together in this AI world of data centers, energy, clean energy, how we can feed all of. Because the power grid obviously can’t meet the demand. If everybody’s going to be using AI from enterprise down to individual, what’s the future of energy look like? The whole trade war between the US and China, I mean, we like to talk about how we’re all going to adopt AI, but frankly, AI needs data centers which need equipment, which are full of semiconductors, which are produced from metals that only are refined in China. And the US-China trade war is very much restricting that flow of material. So in a practical level, is that going to be a bottleneck to AI adoption maybe, or who knows? Again, there’s so many unknown questions, but to me, it’s fascinating how everything I’ve covered in my career, which might seemingly be so different, is actually all hub and spoke with AI at the center of it.
Andy:
It’s all a complicated web.
Nicole:
It is.
Andy:
Yeah. I mean, that gives you some unique perspective in terms of. I mean, what’s the most interesting part of the debate to you then? I mean, there’s the whole data center question, the electricity, what’s the biggest unsolved, in your mind, maybe what’s the biggest unsolved challenge that AI adopters are facing or that society is facing in the adoption of AI? Just practical things that we need to figure out, whether it’s energy or maybe it’s the human element, I don’t know.
Nicole:
It’s all challenging in different ways. I mean, energy is a big one. I had an interesting conversation with somebody a while ago now, and part of it is there are answers to some of these challenges. The question is whether companies and governments and everybody can make sensible decisions about it. I mean, one of the solutions to the data center problem is to locate them in remote areas, let’s say Northern Canada in places where that’s possible to do so, because then you don’t need the cooling because it’s naturally cooled. I did have a very interesting conversation with somebody about the whole idea of space data centers, which the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are very much like, “Oh, we’ll solve the problem. We’ll just put data centers in space.” And I had an interesting conversation with a privacy expert who said, “Okay, so even if that is physically viable to have a data center in orbit, what happens to your data as a person, what happens on a national and government level, and what happens when a state actor shoots down somebody’s space data center?
Who is responsible for that?” Which international court deals with that and tries it?
Nicole:
I mean, again, it’s fascinating to think about the implications of some of these things. But again, possible answer, ridiculous challenge. So who knows? There’s
Andy:
Always another question. Yeah, I didn’t think of that. Data sovereignty in space.
Nicole:
How that work?
Andy:
How does that work? Yeah. I mean, I assume power-wise, they’re going to be solar powered, right?
Nicole:
But again, it’s a resource question because solar panels require those same metals that we’re saying it’s difficult to get them out of China and other parts of the world to use now on earth, let alone having enough material available to build vast data centers that can withstand space conditions. Maybe
Andy:
Find an asteroid somewhere, then you can put the data center on the asteroid, also mine it for the materials you need. I don’t know. I mean,
Nicole:
We’re deep into sci-fi and I mean, I love sci-fi, so let’s see what we can do. I know. It’s questions that lead to other questions. So yeah, it’s fascinating. But I do think resources are kind of. I find same thing happened with electric vehicles and I think the market has kind of saved itself in the sense that it slowed down a lot more than people expected. But there was a great example in the pre – COVID times of there was a big. I don’t want to get too much into the technicalities of this now, start talking about it.
Andy:
You can get technical if you
Nicole:
Want. The short version is if you want to have high performance safe electric vehicle batteries, the car companies are saying, “Well, we want to use solid state.” And the mining companies are saying, “Well, that requires a different type of material to what we produce.” And I remember going to a conference where the car companies are like, “Well, we thought that if we want it and the demand is there, you as a producer will go and meet that demand.” And they were like, “Well, there’s science involved in the logistics of actually mining these chemicals and materials that you have not thought about and literally we can’t do that.” So I think there’s often a disconnect in the supply chain. And I think the same thing can be happening with AI where there is a disconnect of you’ve got the AI developers saying, “Well, the whole world is going to adopt AI and use it for everything.” But you have a physical resource bottleneck of, well, the actual equipment that contains electronics are going to struggle to physically
Andy:
Meet this demand. Yeah. You’ve got the dreamers up here that have all the big ideas and then dang reality, the physical world kind of gets in the way, I guess.
Nicole:
Yeah. So I guess we meet in the middle somewhere. It’s just a question of where that is.
Andy:
Yeah, right. Yeah. And in your work, it’s not just these kind of highfalutin big questions that we’re having fun talking about here with the AI and the data centers, how it all fits together, but it’s also just like you have to wrap your head around these just complex work a day, not to call it mundane, but just regular technical concepts. I imagine if you’re like me, it’s every day you have to learn something new to prepare for whoever you’re talking to that day and wrap your head around it. I don’t know. How do you do that?
Nicole:
No, it’s true. What I find is it’s about asking the questions and sometimes asking the stupid questions. I was thinking about this again recently because it came to mind when I was interviewing somebody, but I remember clearly a couple of years ago, a CNBC journalist, they were actually on air talking about this in discussions on the desk. They were saying that sometimes when you interview somebody to get the information out to make it accessible to the viewer or the reader, you have to ask the very basic question to get the interviewee to give you back the information. Somebody they were interviewing said to them that when they say, “Oh, that’s a very good question or that’s a great question, that’s an interesting question,” that actually meant it was a really stupid question.
Andy:
Oh, is that what they mean when they say? Shoot.
Nicole:
And so now I got in my head because then every time I interview somebody and they say, “Oh, great question, Nicole.” I’m like, “Oh man.” But the CNBC journalist was making the point that sometimes you have to take on that role. It does make you paranoid, but you need to be that facilitator between this person who has all this great technical knowledge and can get carried away sometimes in explaining these technical concepts to make their point. But our job is to ask the stupid questions sometimes to pull out that information, to break it down for the audience and explain, okay, this is the thing we’re talking about, this is what it means. I find in a way, no matter what the actual technical subject you’re talking about, ultimately the questions are kind of the same. What’s happening? What are the main trends? What are the themes?
What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? I find this a really interesting question right now with everything going on in enterprise AI. It’s what are people misunderstanding or what are they missing out on that they need to be considering that they’re not? Because again, as we were saying, everyone’s new to this, so naturally there’s going to be things that people don’t foresee and that’s what we can learn from. So what are people getting wrong? You can probably learn more from that than what they’re getting right at this point. And then what does the future look like? So although, as you say, we have to get our head around all these technical things, I think the core questions are pretty similar and it’s about putting ourselves, being humble enough to put ourselves in that position to get the information because you can’t be an expert on everything.
You’ll probably expose your brain trying to get your head around all this stuff, but that’s not what our job is. Our job is getting the information and interpreting it and presenting it to the audience.
Andy:
Right. Yeah. It’s not our job to look smart. It’s maybe to make the other person look smart, I guess.
Nicole:
Yeah, exactly.
Andy:
And like you said, there’s always those kind of questions that kind of work in every interview. Another one I suppose is what gets you excited about your work?
Nicole:
Yeah.
Andy:
So there’s my next question for you, Nicole. What gets you excited about your job?
Nicole:
Well, all the things we talked about that we are in such an interesting time, possibly scary, hopefully not. I’m going to try and stay optimistic, but it’s going back to what we’re saying, how things have changed so much in the last two decades in ways that we can’t have imagined. I would be fascinated to look back in two decades from now and see how it’s played out. So that keeps me excited and talking to so many interesting people all the time. Yeah, I love what I do and I hope I can continue to do it.
Andy:
Yeah, I guess that’s one of the exciting things is there’s always changes. There’s always an unanswered question and the next question and we’re just seeing where things go. And then bringing the AI back into the conversation here just a little bit. I’m curious, we talked a little bit about how it fits into your workflow as a journalist. It helps with research and maybe it’s a place to bat ideas around and that kind of thing. Is there any part of your job or maybe just journalism in general where AI just shouldn’t touch, that maybe parts that should be left untouched by AI just for I guess the good of the craft maybe or the good of society even? Any thoughts there? Well, I
Nicole:
Hope that we’re not going to replace journalists with AI avatars to do the reporting. So yeah, I hope we keep the human element. I mean, what I find, and again, who knows how this will change, but at the moment I find there is such a specific way of writing and reporting that AI generated text doesn’t do that. And it wasn’t designed to do that. And so why should we force the peg into the shape that doesn’t fit? But even if I look at AI generated text, and even if you’re not consciously looking for it, I find sometimes when you see it, your brain is kind of like, there’s something different about it just in the phrasing. Obviously in journalistic writing, we’re using active voice, we’re using certain terms of phrase and ways of writing that AI doesn’t. And so again, who knows if in the future AI will be able to do that, but right now it doesn’t.
I also find it doesn’t. Especially as an experienced journalist, you look at something and you see where the story is, you see what the angle is, whereas AI is obviously very general in its observations and it might miss what the story actually is. So that’s our job as a journalist is to actually pick out among all the stuff that’s going on, what actually is the story? What’s the unique, maybe controversial, certainly more interesting angle? AI doesn’t have the human judgment.
Andy:
So it sounds like part of your answer was that one of the things that maybe should be untouched by AI is the actual writing, the actual kind of human output, you think, the expression?
Nicole:
I mean, I would love to say that.
Andy:
Okay.
Nicole:
I think a lot of journalistic writing is being replaced by AI. I think that’s why we’re all turning to video to prove that there’s a human behind this output.
Andy:
Exactly. So has AI changed the way you write in terms of. Do you find yourself changing the way you write because you know AI, maybe you’re worried that it would sound like AI? Are there certain. The M-Dash was a big thing for a while and so everybody maybe stopped using em-dash.
Nicole:
I was going to say that I am defined in that you will pry the em-dash from my cold dead hands because I’ve been using it for 26 years and I will continue to use it.
Andy:
Right there with you.
Nicole:
To an extent, AI learned correct punctuation from correct writing that it was trained on. The M Dash to me is indispensable in punctuating quotes. I mean, certainly I’ve always done a lot of interview based work and if you’re quoting somebody, I find that because people don’t speak in complete sentences, the easiest way to denote that in text is to use the MDash to signify the way they’ve spoken. So yeah, I’m at the point where I don’t care if somebody thinks that it’s AI generated, I’m going to use it because that’s the correct way to use it.
Andy:
Yes, stay true to yourself. And I think they’ve already gotten that. I feel like they’ve dealt with the em-dash thing already anyway and AI, so there’s less of it. At least that’s what I heard.
Nicole:
Yeah, I think so.
Andy:
Stick to your guns. Let the AI—whatever AI is doing, let that kind of move on to the next thing maybe, and then you can still have your em-dash.
Nicole:
Because there’s still now people say, “Oh, well that em-dash is a clear sign of AI writing.” And I’m like, “No, no, we’ve moved on. You keep up. Things are moving fast.”
Andy:
The people who said that, they’re kind of telling on themselves, I feel like. It’s like, “You didn’t know what an M Dash was before, did you?”
Nicole:
Oh, somebody said that to me. They were like, “There’s not even a keyboard shortcut for it.” I was like, “Excuse me, Alt 0151 is imprinted in my brain for the last two decades.”
Andy:
I always go shift alt dash.
Nicole:
See, that also gives me a way as being a Windows user rather than a Mac user. And that’s not been by choice. That’s been the publications I’ve worked at in Windows based publications. But yes, anybody who wants to claim there’s not a keyboard shortcut, you’re telling on yourself because there definitely is.
Andy:
Yep. Yep. So maybe last question here. We’ll stick on the AI subject here. Well, actually, so you talked about, I want to ask about this, the video. So you’ve pivoted to video a little bit to stay AI relevant, basically. You want to tell me a little bit about that? What are you doing in the video space right
Nicole:
Now? Yeah, so doing lots of video interviews these days, which is interesting because obviously since COVID, interviews were being done on picture platforms, Zoom, Google Meets, Teams, whatever. So it’s kind of then the next step of, okay, let’s record these conversations and publish those. I mean, it’s kind of proof of life in a way to be rather than having a written interview-based article to actually publish the video. And that’s fun in getting to hear people’s views and getting them out there on video is a good way around all of this. And it’s interesting that people, like we were saying before, people have so many interesting perspectives that it’s good to get all that on video as well and let the audience see the kind of debate that’s going on and visualize it rather than reading it through reported speech.
Andy:
Like you said, I mean, the way people speak, there’s a lot of nuances in there. There’s a lot of richness that you’re not necessarily capturing with the written words. So yeah, prove to the world that you are a person on one hand, and then also you’re just capturing a little bit more flavor too. So yeah. Anything else you’re doing to stay AI relevant? And I guess another way of asking that question really is what do you see as things that you can do that the AI can’t? I feel like that’s a question everybody’s asking, whether you’re a journalist or a technologist. But yeah, I mean, what’s the human edge, I guess? What can people do that AI can’t and will continue not to be able to do for at least a few more years?
Nicole:
Well, hopefully we still have our jobs and it’s not. As much as I find Elon Musk’s vision of the future interesting, I hope that we’re not all out of work in the next couple of years. I think it is, at the end of the day, that human connection and contact. I mean, I haven’t had the experience yet, but many people who have been interviewed for jobs by an AI, right? I’ve
Andy:
Heard of it.
Nicole:
Yeah, that’s an experience.
Andy:
Yeah.
Nicole:
But they’re like, “I hated it,” because it’s really weird being interviewed by an AI. In fact, just recently, very recently, I had a conversation with somebody who said that they’re seeing. There was that initial, “Oh, all customer service is going to be automated and it’s just going to be AI, and so companies can cut costs on customer service and it’ll be great.” But customers are pushing back and saying, “We want to deal with a human when we contact a company.” Yes, there are certain things that AI can do efficiently, but at the end of the day, if I want to deal with a company, I don’t want to be fobbed off by an AI bot trying to speak like a human. So yeah, that human connection, I think. When you think about it, all of sci-fi, that’s the question ultimately is trying to address at the end of the day, we’re humans and we want human connection, so we can think about all these weird and wonderful ways that we’re going to incorporate technology in our lives in the future.
And I’m sure we will, and I’m sure some of it will be great, but at the end of the day, humans crave human contact, and that’s what they’re interested in. Somebody had mentioned chess. So you have these competitions now where you have two AI chess players playing each other. People want to see the human chess players play each other because that’s the human aspect of overcoming and competing and winning. Two computers competing against each other and winning is kind of a given and not very interesting.
At the end of the day, it’s about the human connection.
Andy:
I mean, you can build a machine that can dunk a basketball, you can build a machine that can jump 20 feet and dunk a basketball, whatever. No human is as strong as a forklift, but we still want to see. There’s other things out there that are better at humans at all this stuff kind of at this point, but we still want to see the human.
Nicole:
You just reminded me a few weeks ago, the humanoid games in China. I mean, I was watching those videos of fascination. That was incredible to see how the technology developed and it was great fun to watch, but does that mean that we’re not going to watch the World Athletics Championships anymore?.
Andy:
The best part was the crashes.
Nicole:
Oh, the crashes were fantastic. That was amazing.
Andy:
That was the best part. Yeah, that was amazing. I don’t know. Part of me is like, dang, those robots are so cute sometimes the way they’re slopping around like that. No, don’t anthropomorphize them. Exactly.
Nicole:
Exactly.
Andy:
Keep your head on straight here.
Nicole:
Those little baby ones that they dressed up. Yeah, it would be very easy to do that. But I think that’s an example of a way where it doesn’t have to be this all or nothing. It doesn’t have to be AI or robots replacing humans. We can enjoy multiple things. We can enjoy watching robots crashing into walls and we can watch sports competitions still with human athletes. And when you think about it, I think that’s actually a great example with sports because you can watch a robot do a high jump and beat all records, but is that as satisfying and emotional as watching an Olympian has trained their whole life in this four year cycle for them to achieve a personal best, even if it’s not a world record or Olympic record, that human story, that’s the interesting part. So I hope that as journalists, we still get to tell stories about humans.
Andy:
Me too. Me too. I think that’s a great place to leave it. I think we’re solving some of these problems. I think we got somewhere in this conversation.
Nicole:
We’ve solved it.
Andy:
Little bit at a time. Well, great. So Nicole, let’s see. Aside from Tech Channel, where can people find you?
Nicole:
You can find lots of my work over on CX Today. I also, probably for my freelance work, my portfolio is over on intellence.co.uk. So you can find lots of the things that I’ve been doing over many years over there. Yeah. And increasingly you’ll see my videos on YouTube, my interviews with various fascinating tech people.
Andy:
All right. Well, yeah, everybody make sure to look up Nicole Willing on YouTube and plenty more where this conversation came from. And I should let everybody know out there that you can find more of Nicole’s work and stuff I do and stuff a whole host of technologists and subject matter experts and contributors do over at techchannel.com. Go to techchannel.com/subscribe to subscribe to TechBeat newsletter, get that in your inbox every day. And then we’ve also got a new newsletter coming out that’s going to feature lots of Nicole’s stuff. It’s called Cloud Beat, and that’s coming up here very shortly. If you’re watching this sometime in October, it should be already going. So we’re very excited about that. But anyway, Nicole, thanks so much for this conversation. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely.
Nicole:
Thank you so much. And it’s definitely been fun to be on the other side of the questioning for a change.
Andy:
Yeah. Did it go all right? I felt like it went pretty good.
Nicole:
Yeah.
Andy:
Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, thanks again and talk to you later.
Nicole:
Thank you.
Andy:
All right. Bye.
Nicole:
Bye.