Oliver Helm

AI

When Labour is Expensive, Innovation Becomes Inevitable: Lessons from Empires for the Age of AI

October 9, 2025

We have AI. The question is whether we will be Romans ignoring the water wheel or entrepreneurs harnessing the steam engine.

October 9, 2025

Why didn’t the Romans mechanise their fields with water wheels or the Egyptians roll their stones on wheels instead of dragging them? History points to economics: labour was cheap. With slaves, serfs, and vast conscripted workforces, there was little incentive to replace human effort with machines. History suggests that technological adoption is not simply a function of what is possible, but of what is economically necessary. Fast forward to today. We live in a world where labour is expensive – at least in advanced economies. Hiring talent is costly, regulations surrounding human resources are strict, and demographic trends indicate a shrinking working-age population in many countries. Unlike the Romans, we do not have limitless human labour. Enter AI. From Empires to Enterprises History is littered with examples of innovation stagnating when labour was abundant. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, given humans’ innate aversion to change and the disincentive for the ruling ‘elite’ of any age to implement change lest they lose control. Ancient Egypt: They had the wheel, but they didn’t use it to build pyramids because dragging stones with cheap, abundant manpower was simply more “cost-effective.” The innovation was available, but the incentive wasn’t. Roman Empire: Romans knew about water power, yet grain was still ground by hand on a massive scale. A water mill could displace hundreds of slaves. But why build it when labour was plentiful and cheap? China: China discovered gunpowder centuries before Europe, but didn’t weaponise it as fast as building labour-intensive armies was easy and viable. The Ottoman Empire: Failed to adopt the printing press as widely as Europe, as scribes where cheep and cultural barriers delayed its adoption. Mesopotamia: Had the arch, but didn’t realise its full potential, using it only in small buildings like tombs, because labour (slaves) was cheap and projects were small. (The Romans, by contrast, despite equally abundant labour, faced massive infrastructure demands across an expansive empire, requiring efficiency. This need for solutions above the capacity of…

AI

The Emotional Challenge: AI, Empathy and the Quest for AGI

October 20, 2023

Is a machines ability to understand emotion blocked only by the lack of appropriate data ‘inputs’ to our models? Or is there an ethereal quality to personality that’s uniquely human?

October 20, 2023

In the rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence, one challenge stands tall: the quest for machines to truly understand and express human emotions, and in so doing both read and create personalities – to move from the mimic to the relatable. This challenge – the current lack in depth of interaction between humans and machines – signifies the gap between the currently limited (if impressive) AI, and the ultimate goal of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Emotion: More Than Just Data One of the primary hurdles for AI in understanding emotions is the intrinsically nuanced nature of emotions themselves. While AI excels at processing vast amounts of data and recognising patterns, emotions are not just data points. They are complex, multidimensional, and deeply intertwined with human experiences, memories, and culture. They often appear fickle on the surface, but really deep underling beliefs. Unlike a mathematical problem, there’s no definitive solution to understanding or expressing an emotion. It’s an increasingly accepted preemies that the human brain works as a predictive tool, but importantly a tool with the ability to rapidly create new neural pathways when reality doesn’t meet our predictions. We have the ability not just to predict, but to continually update our model. The prevailing neural network models strive to replicate this prediction approach, but, they overlook one key element: the unique influence of mirror neurones in a humans brain. It’s mirror neurones that enable us to recognise, and empathise with, a reaction observed in others, by drawing from our past experiences. This is what makes us human and allows us to form relationship. It build our personalities and is a evolutionary output of our social natures. And importantly it’s far, far more nuanced than current models can replicate, however large they grow. Real-time Interaction: The Empathy Gap When it comes to real-time human interactions, the absence of genuine empathy in AI becomes glaringly evident. Imagine a doctor, delivering a life altering diagnosis to a patient: In such…

AI

Musk’s Robot Future – The Path Utopia?

October 1, 2022

We have the propensity for boredom – the greatest sign of intelligence.

October 1, 2022

Today Elon Musk unveiled to much fan-fair the latest iteration of Teslas ‘humanoid’ robot, Optimus. They’ll be mass produced, cost less than $20,000 each and be available in 3 – 5 years. Not a small feet, and I want one. The rhetoric was nothing outside of the normal: “A future of abundance”, “a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it” and “a society in which robots [do] the work and people reaped the benefits “. That robots and AI will become ever more abundant, and will change civilisation as we know it, I think is beyond doubt. But the important question remains: Will this be the utopian dream Musk proclaims, or follow the dystopian nightmares beloved by Hollywood? For years there has been much talk about the impact of robots taking jobs. It’s a well trodden debate about skills, training and the ability to lift the repetitive, sometimes lower-skilled, workforce into the service economy. For me though the question is deeper. In a world where robots and AI do much of work and we ‘reap the benefits’ will we really be happier? And will this really level society or does it risk increasing the already gaping divide between the top and the bottom of the economic food chain? Emotions Do you really want to live in a world where machines do all the work? As humans we are driven by the innate and fundamental impulses, baked into our primeval ‘old’ brain – Protection, nutrition, procreation (and as a subset social status). But what separates us from animals is our ‘new’ brain – the neocortex – our intelligence. It’s this intelligence that created money as a way of measuring worth. It’s this intelligence that drives our complex hierarchies of social status – measured through social cohesion, original thought, innovation and emotional empathy, with money often used as the proxy measure for these. Where an animal would fight it out to find who’s top dog, we measure our status with these…

Broadband Market Commentary

The Digital Divide weakening our economy

March 29, 2021

COVID-19 has significantly increased the Digital Divide across the UK. Poor infrastructure is enforcing digital exclusion. Ubiquitous access to fibre networks is urgently needed to reduce the barriers of accessing work and learning, to reduce the cost of technology and to revitalise our economy.

March 29, 2021

The UK has always had a significant Digital Divide – but COVID-19 has widened it dramatically. It has increased the pace of an already present trend, further restricted social mobility and reduced fair access to education and learning. As we’ve been forced to accelerate even faster into a world where digital skills and access determine prospects far more than traditional ‘hard’ skills and where traditional workforce management styles have been foreclosed, fair access to exceptional connectivity has never been more important. Both employers and employees now expect to work flexibly: Why live in a crowed city when the office can come to you? Why spend time on cramped commuter trains when you can spend longer with the kids? Why maintain expensive offices when you can just equip your workforce with laptops, mobiles and set them going? But what if you don’t have these skills, can’t access that technology and can’t rely on your internet connection being stable enough to support you, the kids, and your partner all at the same time? Whilst for many the accelerated move to remote, flexible, digital working provides opportunities for a better work-life balance and progression for others it is creating greater inequality and less upward mobility. The home-working economy is rapidly changing our social fabric. Nowhere is this inequality more apparent, and important to resolve, than with education. OfCom recently estimated that 9% of households with children don’t have access to a laptop or PC. 51% of household earning £6k – £10k don’t have internet at home, compared to 99% where earnings are over £40k. Only 25% of children eligible for free school meals or who have been adopted or in care achieved 9-5 grades in GCSE English and Maths in 2019. Affordability is a big part of this but basic availability of service is the first big hurdle. Without resolving this we risk allowing digital exclusion to become an intergeneration issue within families…

5G Networks, Broadband Market Commentary

A wholesale approach to 5G delivery

May 12, 2020

An actively adopted wholesale market, where providers have clear standards and methodologies to conform to, will deliver 5G networks faster, at a lower cost, and in ways that enable competition.

May 12, 2020

5G Networks are rolling out. They offer unparalleled opportunities to enhance the connectivity we already rely upon (more so in the wake of COVID-19 than ever before) and to open new avenues in healthcare, distance working, AgriTech and a myriad of as of yet unconsidered opportunities. Reports from 2017 suggest that just a 10% increase in mobile broadband penetration could increase UK GDP by 0.6% – 2.8% and a report from O2 suggest that 5G infrastructure will contribute £7 billion a year in direct measures alone. The upside potential for UK PLCS is vast, but there are significant barriers to the deployment of 5G networks outside the super urban areas that make the business case harder. Underlying these problems is the high frequency required for 5G throughput (at least in the mobile, not Fixed Wireless Access deployments most people understand 5G to be). These high-frequencies have short reach and poor penetration to man-made objects like buildings, and so the density of cell and micro-cell sites will be far greater than that we’ve seen before. They will be dependant on ‘deep’ fibre connectivity. To deliver on coverage promises and objectives the deployment of 5G has five primary hurdles it will have to overcome: Connectivity between the millions of new cell sites needed;Ultra-high-resolution mapping data and sophisticated planning tools;Gaining secured access to sites (wayleaves); Spectrum; andDeployment capital. All of the above are capital intensive. Outside of the super urban areas, where population and demand density (alongside spectrum challenges) skew the economics, the cost of every provider building it’s own 5G network will be unnecessarily high, and in the more rural areas prohibitively so. Not only will this delay delivery to areas that could benefit from the technology the most, but the extreme capital demands will eliminate the opportunity for further competition in the market space. Network sharing agreements among the current MNOs will help, but they will lack the agility needed to…

Broadband Market Commentary

Engaging System 2 in consumer broadband decision making

March 16, 2020

Fear and apathy are the key system 1 responses that we need to overcome. We have to de-risk the process for consumers and in particular, overcome the preconceptions that System 1 decisions are built on.

March 16, 2020

Whether a conscious decision or not, marking tends to focus heavily on System 1 – trying to make people subconsciously elect to engage with and buy/consume a product either (almost) instantaneously or at a friction point. As such, marketing teams focus on continued exposure to the brand, and too often in this market, on the price above all else. But broadband truly is a transformative product. It has a potentially enormous, positive, effect on peoples lives. Both at work and at play it can make communication, collaboration and interaction with our surroundings effortless, seamless and instantaneous. The kicker for full fibre broadband is that most people don’t need it right now. System 1 Consumers don’t tend to think about broadband very often, and when they do it tends to be because they have encountered a friction point and are thus not in a positive mindset. They think through fast heuristic connections that don’t involve checks for accuracy and are often closer to intuition. It is a mental-set trap – a state of readiness to see certain things rather consider others. Typically when it comes to considering making a change (and linked, the option of changing provider – the goal we are trying to achieve) the thought process often follows the same question “Is it really worth the effort of changing anything?”. The answer tends to follow one of three paths: “No, I’ve tried changing in the past and it makes no difference.”;”Your provider says they are ‘Superfast’ and show a bigger number for download speeds”; and, the biggest and most common barrier”Changing is too risky and complicated” And inevitably that leads to a preference for staying with the status quo. Points one and two above overlap and it is only through engaging System 2 that we will have the opportunity to educate the consumer and facilitate customer onboarding, driving past the 30% take-up sticking point. The challenge in doing so…

Broadband Market Commentary

Might more competition in the broadband market drive up the consumer’s bill?

March 10, 2020

Whilst it is a commonly accepted economic principle that in a competitive market prices will drift towards marginal cost, the propensity of the UK consumer not to switch has driven this cost down – and that will change.

March 10, 2020

The UK is not a ‘switching’ market. On average only around 15% of consumers will switch broadband provider year on year, and it is this security that allows both the service providers (ISPs) and the infrastructure builders to drive prices down. Service Providers rely on the fact that a customer will be likely be with them for a period significantly longer than the initial contract term and the acceptance that a customer will be lost within their contract term is mitigated by this low switch rate. So whilst it is a commonly accepted economic principle that in a competitive market prices will drift towards marginal cost, the propensity of the UK consumer not to switch has driven this cost down – and that will change. The price the consumer pays is made up of a basket of items: the cost of acquiring the customer, the tech needed to deliver the service (and increasingly more of that is needed at customer premises as ubiquitous WiFi coverage is expected), estimated support and operating costs for the customer’s lifetime and both the wholesale buy price and technology to integrate with it. All of these areas look likely to be hit. In particular, the more competitive the market place the higher the cost of acquisition will be as providers have to compete harder to stand out and differentiate themselves on something other than just price. On the infrastructure layer competition may have an even greater inflationary effect which will be reflected in wholesale prices. Whilst interest rates are low it is possible for companies and the investors bankrolling them to accept a slower return, and a lower IRR based on lower weighted costs of capital, but this only holds true when relatively safe, and high levels of take up can be expected over the medium term. If the government elect not to extend the fibre rates relief (or preferably remove fibre tax all together)…

Broadband Market Commentary

Spectrum Licensing – The barrier to entry

October 7, 2016

Inefficient and high-cost spectrum licensing is stifling competition, innovation and growth in the UK’s telecommunications market

October 7, 2016

Established by the Office of Communications Act in 2002 Ofcom is, among other things, responsible for issuing, policing and importantly, costing spectrum space in the UK. It is often accused of being inefficient and overly costly with accusations of a “top heavy salary bill” and “extravagant offices” being levied at it continuously. More importantly though, it can be argued that it is inefficient and high-cost spectrum licensing is stifling competition, innovation and growth in the UK’s telecommunications market – something that with the impending cloud of Brexit and an increasingly skills-based economy is an even more concerning situation. Ofcom reports that, for the year 2014/15, total spectrum management costs totalled just under £51.5 million, whilst fees totalled just over £267.9 million (Source: Ofcom: Spectrum management costs and fees 2014-15). Removing the MoD’s contribution from this (as this is essentially just public money moving hands) Ofcom brought in a spectrum licensing surplus of a little over £61.5m. Two questions arise from this: Firstly, it is hard to see how the costs of managing such a fundamentally intangible asset can be so high. Spectrum is, after all, not a physical asset that has to be maintained. Applications for frequency use require a comparatively binary decision as to whether or not the requested assignment is (or should be) available within an area. Applying for a licence at the moment, however is not a straight-forward process. Fixed wireless link licence details still largely have to be submitted in paper form (albeit though PDFs) and are manually processed by Ofcom’s spectrum licensing team. This paper-pushing exercise is slow, ineffective and one directional, often incurring a high opportunity-cost loss to businesses. A self-administered, truly digital, solution with instant licence approval and payment would be an obvious solution to this problem. Secondly, these surplus generating licence fees are simply a tax on business, equivalent to the rates / “fibre tax” paid on traditional infrastructure. As with any…