- Sam Altman says AI will help bring a fantastic future for humanity
- A new Fierce Network Research report examines AI in telecom network operations
- AT&T is already doing some pretty interesting things with AI in the field
My recently published report entitled “AI-Driven Network Testing” covers the adoption of AI in network operations.
In the report, I note that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims that AI will lead humanity into “The Intelligence Age,” bringing meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.
“I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now,” wrote Altman. “A defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.”
Altman seems to suggest that everyone will benefit from this massive prosperity. And I think that’s a logical fallacy that any high school kid on the debate team could recognize. There is no logical connection between technological advancements and the idea that humans will evolve into kinder, more compassionate beings who share wealth.
If history is any guide, it’s more likely that a few people — the Sam Altmans of the world — will enjoy massive prosperity while the rest of us try to scrape by. My daughter joked that if all the white-collar jobs go away, we could always set up a fruit stand on the side of the road.
Even Altman acknowledges that “this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years.”
Time will tell.
Meanwhile, workers in all industries are scrambling to use AI tools so they don’t become Luddites who fall behind in their careers. Heck, I used AI for my research report. There’s this wonderful app called Otter.ai that records my interviews as I’m conducting them and then presents me with a final transcript. I also used Chat GPT and Perplexity to search the internet for relevant information because these tools often work better than a regular Google Search these days.
Workers in the telecom industry are tapping AI more frequently. In the past couple of years, the practical use of AI has swiftly advanced from AI phone assistants in customer service departments to some pretty cool AI technologies in the field.
AT&T uses AI for network operations
The AI-Driven Network Testing report examines how AI technology is already helping telecom field workers become more efficient.
Alisha Remek, VP for Access and Construction with AT&T, said the operator has a Network Simplification program that crosses almost every aspect of the company’s business, including design and construction of its wireless and wireline networks. Engineers on Remek’s design team can use AI prompts such as: “How would you design for fiber services in this space to enable as many customer locations as possible?” and “What are the best fiber routes?” Answers to these types of questions previously took human designers many hours to run multiple options.
“Once we get to scale across our entire footprint, we should be able to significantly reduce our cycle time when it comes to the design process and get to construction faster,” said Remek.
AT&T also uses AI-based mapping technology to assist employees on site walks in the network. After the initial network design, an engineer must go out to verify that all physical objects are, in fact, where they are supposed to be.
“With any 150-year-old company, our records aren’t pristine, and things change,” said Remek. “So, before we trigger into construction, our engineers do a site walk of that design and go out and literally walk it and canvass it.”
In the past, engineers would use antiquated tools such as graph paper to mark discrepancies between the planned design and the actual network, then return to their desks and input the data. But now, with AI technology on tablets, they can update the network map as they walk.
As Altman said in his manifesto, “Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.”
Let’s hope it works out — for everyone.
Op-eds from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff are opinion pieces that do not necessarily represent the opinions of Fierce Network.