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"It seems pointless to ask whether the spreadsheet is a good or a bad thing. But one prominent contrarian, the technology columnist John C Dvorak, had no doubts last week as he contemplated VisiCalc's 30th anniversary. 'The spreadsheet', he fumed, 'created the "what if" society. Instead of moving forward and progressing normally, the what-if society that questions each and every move we make. It second-guesses everything'. Worse still, he thinks, the spreadsheet has elevated the once-lowly bean-counter to the board and enabled accountants to run the world."

The moral of that story is clear. The spreadsheet was a revolutionary technology when it first appeared in 1978, just as ChatGPT was in 2022. But now it's a routine, integral part of organisation life. The advent of AI "agents" built from GPT-like models looks like following a similar pattern. In turn, the organisations that have absorbed them will also evolve. And then the world may eventually rediscover that famous adage attributed to Marshall McLuhan's colleague John Culkin: "We shape our tools and then the tools shape us."

"The news was not lost on IBM and prompted the company to create the PC and Mitch Kapor to write the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for it. Eventually, Microsoft wrote its own version and called it Excel, which now runs on every machine in every office in the developed world. It went from being an intriguing but useful augmentation of human capabilities to being a mundane accessory - not to mention the reason why Kat Norton (aka "Miss Excel") allegedly pulls in six-figure sums a day from teaching Excel tricks on TikTok. The odds are that someone, somewhere is planning to do that with ChatGPT. And using the bot to write the scripts."

"The aidbot is a chatbot - a type of AI system designed to communicate with its users online - that links to WhatsApp. It is programmed to ask simple questions about the types of aid people require along with their names and locations. This information is then recorded onto a Google spreadsheet which Hania and her team of unpaid volunteers, made up of friends and family, access to distribute aid such as food, blankets, mattresses, medicine and clothes. Hania used her spare time to build the bot using the website Callbell.eu, which is commonly used by businesses to engage with customers on Meta's platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook messenger. She explains that the bot, which is still being used today, makes distributing aid more efficient as it cuts down the amount of time she spends responding to requests for aid over WhatsApp."