Slashdot Mirror
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.
If we assume for a femtosecond that this actually happens and content is produced by robots, then what happens to the copyright on that content? The government provides monopoly on copyright for how long, the life of the writer plus 50 or 70 years or some such... what happens if the writer is a machine?
They are talking about business documents, whatever, but what if a machine produces fiction for example?
My position is of-course that government must not be in any form of business, including business of providing monopolies to people for any reason.
You can't handle the truth.
Your account reminded me of this little sketch.
Aye, well..
I once opened a storage cupboard in a comms room, found 25 copies of a well known voice recognition package, 20 unopened, 5 opened.(you probably see where this is going..)
The story I got was, one bright spark though this would be a good idea after seeing it demonstrated on a BBC program, so went and splurged the monies out for the 25 copies. Only then did they do a trial install, setting up 5 copies with 5 victims. It was only then that they found out, to put it mildly, the software had real issues with the West of Scotland accent (or, in the vernacular, the fuckin' heap o' keech didnae fuckin wurk), so quietly buried all the copies in the comms room, in a locked cupboard, with an IT equivalent of the "Beware of the Leopard" notice on it..(something about a server..no unauthorised access)
ISTR at the time of purchase it was several hundred pounds per copy...
It's possible - you don't really need to make the AI any smarter if you can just make the "consumers" dumber instead.
That's funny. And it's actually one of TFA's predictions:
By 2018, 50% of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer smart employees than instances of smart machines. These machines are easy to replicate and there will be a lot more of them.
One way to read this is that the machines will be easier to replicate. Another way to read this prediction is that companies will just stop paying a premium to hire smart people and just listen to dumb "smart" machines instead, while hiring a bunch of mindless worker drones. Actually, that's what TFA goes on to imply:
Smart systems, for example, will be analyzing how a factory is being run, or deciding whether people are completing a task at an appropriate speed.
So in other words, all we're left with is a bunch of mindless "factory" workers "completing a task" within an allotted time, and their mechanical overloads. I guess we're going to replace most mid-level management with "smart machines" to make ridiculous decisions about efficiency on the basis of bad metrics? I suppose it can't be much worse than current management practice at many companies.