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That person apparently didn't talk to copy writers, photographers, content creators and authors.
Or customer service. My last few online store issues have been fully chatbot when they used to be half chatbot for intake and half person.
That person apparently didn't talk to copy writers, photographers, content creators and authors.
It is like expecting cars to replace horses before anyone starts investing in the road network and getting international petroleum supply chains set up - large capital investment is an understatement when talking about how long it takes to bring in transformative tech and bed it in optimally. Nonetheless, time passed and workhorses are rare beasts.
> The economists found for example that "AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do not use the tools themselves." For me, the most interesting takeaway. It's easy to think about a task, break it down into parts, some of which can be automated, and count the savings. But it's more difficult to take into account any secondary consequences from the automation. Sometimes you…
in this case, the total cost would've gone up, and thus, eventually the stakeholder (aka, the person who pays) is going to not want to pay when the "old" way was cheaper/faster/better.
> It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens.
not really, as long as the precondition i mentioned above (the total cost dropping) is true.
This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.
Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer.
We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.
That person apparently didn't talk to copy writers, photographers, content creators and authors.
Or customer service. My last few online store issues have been fully chatbot when they used to be half chatbot for intake and half person.
1: https://xkcd.com/806/ - from an era when the worst that could happen was having to speak with incompetent, but still human, tech support.
In the future, we will do a lot more.
In other terms: There will be a lot more work. So even if robots do 80% of it, if we do 10x more - the amount of work we need humans to do will double.
We will write more software, build more houses, build more cars, planes and everything down the supply chain to make these things.
When you look at planet earth, it is basically empty. While rent in big cities is high. But nobody needs to sleep in a big city. We just do so because getting in and out of it is cumbersome and building houses outside the city is expensive.
When robots build those houses and drive us into town in the morning (while we work in the car) that will change. I have done a few calculations, how much more mobility we could achieve with the existing road infrastructure if we use electric autonomous buses, and it is staggering.
Another way to look at it: Currently, most matter of planet earth has not been transformed to infrastructure used by humans. As work becomes cheaper, more and more of it will. There is almost infinitely much to do.
Demand for software has high elasticity
My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipe…