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Replacement of Writers Leads Gartner's Predictions (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes: Gartner's near-future predictions include: Writers will be replaced. By 2018, 20% of all business content, one in five of the documents you read, will be authored by a machine. By 2018, 2 million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment. This may seem Orwellian, but certain jobs require people to be fit, such as public safety workers. By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40% of mobile interactions. This is based on the belief that the world is moving to a post-app era, where assistants such as Apple's Siri act as a type of universal interface.
Things will progress at roughly the rate they've been progressing. In 3 years, things will look basically the same. Some of these things may start to come true, or be in trial stages, mostly though it's nonsense.
Robobosses will not be a thing. Management as a discipline is not strongly defined. First you have to get executives to widely agree that there is a set method to manage appropriately, at which point you would be able to legitimately evaluate managers. If you've noticed we're nowhere near that happening, you'll realize it won't be automated within 3 years.
Smart agents show few signs of catching on. Surveys everywhere show Siri is barely being used and even those who use it give up on it frequently.
What they refer to as "smart machines" sound like little more than the automation of metric gathering.
I'm tired of reading these stories. Where's the flying cars? Personal space travel for all?
Most of the "amazing" technology we've gotten recently is just a refinement of things we've been working on for 30-40 years. Internet of things? Electric cars? Smart decision systems? It's all been around for decades.
Captcha: Marketed
Do Gartner projections turn out to be accurate? How accurate? How often?
Flawless AI in 5 years to drive those "intelligent" agents?
Yeah, right.
They've been predicting "hard" AI within 20 years for about 35 years now...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
With positions like public safety workers (thinking firemen & EMTs for example), yes their jobs require them to be fit. The kind of people who work these jobs are already aware of it, are already fit enough for the job, and already care enough to stay fit (not to mention regular testing before & during employment). They don't need a machine to monitor them 24/7 or even the length of their working day. Just the beginning of the slippery slope. It's bad enough with taxis & other drivers having GPS tracking forced on them.
If anything, this kind of surveillance is more symptomatic of mistrust than actually useful. When employers believe the employee is guilty before being proven innocent, it creates a hostile workplace from the get-go.
Talk about using tech solving problems that don't exist. Solution in search of the problem.
If the article weren't so badly written, poorly organized and incoherent, I'd suspect it to be the product of a machine -- albeit one hampered by a bad software patch. Anyway, if you replace 2020 with 2040 or 2050, some parts might have some merit. It may provide a bit of insight into the nature of the run_before_you_can_walk "thinking" that will likely precede Silicon Valley's next crash.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
It's a bit like horoscope for management. More some kind of entertainment rather than something you should based your decisions on, and you may consider it amusing should once in a blue moon some prediction actually hit the spot.
Which will instantly be celebrated and danced around by those who really, really want to believe in the crystal ball readings and use it as proof that the system works.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In 1990 or thereabouts Gartner predicted that OS/2 would become the dominant operating system within about three or four years. It wasn't a throwaway statement, it was a detailed report with a chart and table showing the exact percentages and numbers of installations for MS-DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX, and OS/2. Windows was going to fade very quickly.
But that's the way it is with predictions. People will pay for them and just don't seem to care about the accuracy of past predictions.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!