131–140 of 140 posts
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Being a consultant with clients in a wide range of industries I concur. Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort. They are one successful software project from losing their jobs. Lucky for them their companies are terrible at shipping software. Conversely, automating the work of a plumber would require a massive investment in AI and…
> They are one successful software project from losing their jobs. Maybe. However, consider how successful Google has been at automating customer service.
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"Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort." After looking at some of the business processes at my company I am not so sure about this anymore. There are a lot of jobs that are pretty mundane but when you look a little closer most of the processes have a lot of exceptions where the employee makes decisions that don't follow the proce…
This is often a process issue more than anything else. For instance, our finance team spends insane amounts of time dealing with a variety of invoices with varying information and structure.There are a number of exceptions, rules and etc. However what's often ignored,is the fact that we are much bigger than any of our supplier and it would be pretty easy to convince them to invoice us the way we want instead the way…
We put together a document imaging solution to gather all the relevant docs from all loads and made the pickiest customer the default for all invoices and automated the entire system. Instead of laying those people off though, we focused them on calling on unpaid invoices which greatly helped accounts receivable.
Similarly, at an oil and gas company we took the better of several business processes, molded them into one optimized process, automated it, and after a dip in the price of oil and layoffs many jobs were never rehired for.
At both of these places the leadership saw the value of getting the software right, hired for it, and we got the job done. I estimate the oil & gas company saved themselves $1 Billion over the next 10 years.
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While that would eliminate jobs within your organisation, it would clearly create development work in your suppliers. On balance I would guess you would create work overall rather than reduce it.
Tangentially related: The German industry is working on a standard for digital invoices. Invoices would be a human-readable PDF file with an additional XML payload containing a machine-readable version of the same data. I can't say anything about adoption though. The Google keyword is "ZUGFeRD" for those who are interested.
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If you roll over like you suggest and let your boss tickle your belly, what do you say to yourself when you look in de mirror?
More importantly, what will you tell your grandkids, presuming you have any? "I was doing an unnecessary job instead of not wasting resources and doing anything productive"?
The people most worried about AI are the ones not working on it. We don't know how to initialise a simple feed forward neural network yet let alone train it efficiently. It will be centuries before the theory catches up with the proctice. Until then we might as well be monks cross pollinating plants worried about genetic modification.
Likely gross pessimism. We went from clockwork to million-transitor computers in the last 100 years (most of that in the last 25). How long before we hit a billion? A trillion? How long before we hit on the same trick nature blindly hit upon, to initialize her neural networks?
In GPUs, a billion transistors in 2009, twenty-one billion in 2017.
In FGPAs, a billion in 2004 and fifty billion in 2018.
Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason. Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the first one that crashes into a house and causes a…
One drone burning a house - just won't have the effect you suggest, or the world would look very different right now.
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This is often a process issue more than anything else. For instance, our finance team spends insane amounts of time dealing with a variety of invoices with varying information and structure.There are a number of exceptions, rules and etc. However what's often ignored,is the fact that we are much bigger than any of our supplier and it would be pretty easy to convince them to invoice us the way we want instead the way…
This is a great example. I automated away the jobs of a few people at a transportation company that had a few large clients that expected to be invoiced in particular ways with additional documentation. We put together a document imaging solution to gather all the relevant docs from all loads and made the pickiest customer the default for all invoices and automated the entire system. Instead of laying those people of…
> Q: Several studies show technology will disrupt jobs, but they also argue that almost as many jobs will be created. > A: There’s a mismatch of job displacement and job creation. Job displacement is being driven at the speed of digital technology, which is explosive at this moment. And displacement is the business model for the AI geniuses and all those companies. All of them are hoping to get rich by displacing wor…
More generally, claims that just as many jobs are being created need evidence. I can easily provide evidence of jobs being eliminated, in the absence of evidence for job creation the conclusion is obvious.
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Gonna run out that clock when there’s no more natural world to exploit ruthlessly
As Noah Smith says, this type of argument is simply lazy analysis. Much of the "exploitation" occurs not due to singular businesses, but because of governments pursuing their own independent agendas. Take oil drilling, where state sponsored firms in China do not heed environmental regulations. Is that pure capitalism killing the natural world? https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1139994638599589888