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Some Startups Have Worked Out It's Cheaper and Easier To Get Humans To Behave Like Robots Than it is To Get Machines To Behave Like Humans (theguardian.com)
"Using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn't scale, obviously, but it allows you to build something and skip the hard part early on," said Gregory Koberger, CEO of ReadMe, who says he has come across a lot of "pseudo-AIs." It's essentially prototyping the AI with human beings, he said. From a report: This practice was brought to the fore this week in a Wall Street Journal article highlighting the hundreds of third-party app developers that Google allows to access people's inboxes. In the case of the San Jose-based company Edison Software, artificial intelligence engineers went through the personal email messages of hundreds of users -- with their identities redacted -- to improve a "smart replies" feature. The company did not mention that humans would view users' emails in its privacy policy. The third parties highlighted in the WSJ article are far from the first ones to do it. In 2008, Spinvox, a company that converted voicemails into text messages, was accused of using humans in overseas call centres rather than machines to do its work. In 2016, Bloomberg highlighted the plight of the humans spending 12 hours a day pretending to be chatbots for calendar scheduling services such as X.ai and Clara. The job was so mind-numbing that human employees said they were looking forward to being replaced by bots.
... to manufacture humans.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Both physically and mentally, just beat them into submission. And when there is nothing left, get new humans. And if they get uppity or demand better pay, outsource.
Folks that are smart enough to replace other humans with technology aren't really truly interested in doing it.
Usually, it's someone in the same room. It's hard to want to upend their current income, just for a boss that you don't trust to give them another replacement task that isn't worse.
Usually, what happens is that they instead make a set of tools that the other folks in the room to ALLOW them to automate their own tasks, hint them in to how they can get their work done in seconds, then never mention the implications of that to the boss. Sometimes the boss knows this and doesn't mind entirely in the scope of these hollow jobs.
If this society wasn't so focused on having jobs in order to eat and keep a house, I'm sure a lot more jobs would get completely automated.
That's a big part of why I'm in favor of a universal basic income, so life doesn't have to be about bullshit jobs for so much of so many lives.
Ryan Fenton
The job was so mind-numbing that human employees said they were looking forward to being replaced by bots
Not surprising why nearly every farm and manufacturing job is being replaced by automation. Soon driving and flying completely.
Get in your floaty chairs.
Someone invent us a Turing test that provides a strong negative, i.e. catches out humans pretending to be robots.
Using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn't scale, obviously, but it allows you to build something and skip the hard part early on," said Gregory Doucheburger, CEO of ReadMe,
Gregory Koberger, I hope you read this. You're a fool (as many others out there). You're the CEO of a company which means you represent said company. All I can say at this point is that I feel so sorry for the people at ReadMe who have you as a boss.
People may not scale as well as computers but THEY DO SCALE. So don't ask the CEO of ReadMe because this has already been proven. Name your franchise or big business, McDonald's, Walmart, so on. Of course computers are cheaper than people but to ridicule the use of people because they don't scale just shows that Mr Koberger has no idea what position he even holds.
As for the development costs of AI exceeding the costs of real people. I'm amazed how something that doesn't exist (AI) costs more than something that does! And no AI doesn't exist in many cases, but particularly in this case because Mr Koberger answers his own ignorance by having to fake AI by using people.
This is one of the most appropriate late-stage capitalism headlines I've ever seen:
There is a lot to unpack there. You could teach a course in post-capitalist economics based on that one headline alone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
overseas (and sometimes in America, thanks Gig Economy!). It's kinda like how in the 1800s everybody could afford a butler and a maid because the cost was just enough food for them to survive.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
“Using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn't scale, obviously...”
Seems like there are people who don’t agree. Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, the Tatas, etc. all made human labor-based fortunes.
I wrote a book in the 1980’s in which I speculated that businesses were using humans to imperfectly perform jobs (especially white collar jobs) that robots and computers would one day perform perfectly. Anyway, the idea has been around for a long while.
The real question is whether a robot/AI economy would actually benefit humanity. Humans ARE very adaptable.
That the statement is no longer true. The SECOND that automation is a better financial bet than human labor, those startups will fall. As will MANY others. He who controls the spice, controls the universe! Automation will ring no less true...
Robots will never replace Humans in business because robots will never be cheaper than Humans.
Biology has set the efficiency of human action and maintenance to such a level that robots will never ever compete.
For humans to function you only need their consent (which is easier the more in duress they are), food that's grown in the earth even without human intervention with a simple processing and conversion that even those workers can do themselves, and sleep for maintenance.
A fucking robot needs precious limited resources that need to be mined with special equipment, transported at a far higher price than food, processed in fabrication facilities at massive costs, including design costs and implementation costs, and then you have to have maintenance, all of the aforementioned powered by complicated energy sources that cost like a motherfucker and themselves need to be maintained constantly with further cycles of the aforementioned process.
Humans are cheap, they are easy to maintain, they are easy to replace, and every action they make uses up less energy than a robot; and in business cheap is all that matters. Therefore robot replacing humans is a fucking hilarity as an idea.
Robots will only ever find usage in a very small quantity of niche tasks where their precision is a justified expenditure regarding tolerable or intolerable discrepancies in design/manufacture.
bleep blurp glips
Table-ized A.I.
And to you too since you keep responding to my posts. Fag.
There used to be a "thing" called efficiency experts.
The did something called, generically, time and motion studies.
They would watch people work with a stopwatch and a notepad... Sometimes with a camera to record the smallest nuance of the work process.
They would do this with lots and lots of workers and then compiles that information into detailed procedures telling the workers how to do what they did.
Is this not robotic?
I just love how every cohort thinks they've invented some new thing when all they've done is to re-implement an old practice that, because they never bother to look back at how things like this were done before, they didn't know about.
One day they may even re-invent sex and try to patent it.
In 1770, there was chess-playing robot called "the Turk", or the "Mechanical Turk." (It was in Austro-Hungrian, but stylized like a Turk). It was excellent at playing, and defeated Ben Franklin and Napoleon.
Of course, secreted within the metal frame was an excellent human player. Now, Amazon has a service called Mechanical Turk where you can employ people to act as faux AI.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
And how is this significantly different from Amazon's "Mechanical Turk"? Same basic concept; get people to do what AI cannot yet do.
I'm just being nice.
No one posts on /. to be ignored. ~ CaptainDork
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
To wit:
Upon reaching equality with evolved intelligence, any created intelligence will be subject to all the same limitations, vulnerabilities, and flaws.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Surely they've considered what's controlling all of those meat puppets, more meat. It would be much more efficient to use technology to completely isolate the puppets, and nag them constantly, firing them automatically if they take too long to do a task.
After all we're just hiring them for their real world appendages right? We sure as hell don't hire them to think.
Early in my career I had a few QA and grunt jobs. Those who worked with me had similar or worse jobs that usually involved getting data in one format and converting it to another format. These jobs were trivial to automate and yet some poor souls had been doing these things for years. In all but one case the people doing the eliminated jobs were given more meaningful work to do. The one exception was at a company that went bankrupt a month later and this lucky guy was the only one to get severance.
Sure you are, fag.
Robots are incentivized by the promise of an electric charge. Humans are threatened by the same thing.
Have gnu, will travel.
Don't call me a cigarette.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
"Zero Tolerance", "More than my job's worth", " Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." etc. etc.
It's easier to turn off analytical thought and plug-n-chug through the day.
Make a decision is risky if it's wrong we'll catch hell; if we just follow procedure until five o'clock we get paid for another day.
Acting like a human is more rewarding. Acting like a machine is easier and safer.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Don't Feed The Trolls.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
Rob
Mechanization requires people to act like robots. It's been happening for a long time now. I order takeout food from a human but they're limited by the ordering software. I call the credit card or utility company and the person I talk to has to follow a proscribed conversation plan in order to feed my "data" to the software in the right order. I fill out a questionaire at the doctor's office only to have the doctor ask me the exact same questions as she enters the answers into her computer. It happens like that every single time!
Starting last week, clerks at Whole Foods have to ask me if I'm a Prime member, even though the computerized register can easily tell them I'm not buying any qualifying sale items, so it doesn't matter. I'm thinking about switching supermarkets now that Amazon owns Whole Foods.
My "favorite" one is asking a store clerk for something and they respond, "whatever is on the shelf is what we have". Translation: I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. The computer is in charge of stock. When you're ready I can process your credit card. The computer will guide me through that."
You did.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Manna by Marshal Brain
Of all the dystopian fiction I have read, THIS story -- though there's no war or zombies in it -- is the most terrifying. Every other dark future has its struggles to survive and challenges to solve. But this story offers no hope at all. It leads past the movie Idiocracy, but not that one, an alternate Idiocracy future where energy drink Brawndo will forever water the crops.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
It gets worse than whats-in-inventory. There is a SPECIAL CASE of mechanized disorder regarding items not in inventory. I first experienced this with pharmacies when I had to fill a regular prescription.
I'd show up near the same day of the month like clockwork. Sometimes they'd be able to fill the prescription and sometimes they could not. When they could not I'd head to a competitor and pay a slightly higher price. But I'd always check them first. And sometimes the second store didn't have any either and I had to go to a third place. On the third successive month that I was informed they were out... I held back and watched the clerk who was the head pharmacist and I asked, "Did you write it down?" What do you mean, he said. "The fact that you had to turn away a customer, what the drug is and how many." Oh no, our computer system tells us when we're out and how much to order. "Why isn't it working then? This is the third time I've been turned down." He said, the computer varies the amount we order but it changes from month to month and we have surges of demand and then next month, very little, so we don't order any. "Isn't that strange for prescribed drugs? It means you have no customer loyalty because you turn them away and they stay away. And when someone is told you cannot fill the order, no one writes it down and adds it up. If your computer system doesn't have a way you can record the fact that you turned away a customer, then it is stupider than a human being. Your sales vary because people are being tossed back and forth between pharmacies ny necessity rather then preference. I'll bet your competitors have the same dumb system. If YOU start a log of what customers were turned away for and manually adjust your orders... I'll bet you'd improve your business." It was like a light went on in the attic. They were never short again.
Years later now, many people -- even store managers -- are past the robot stage. I'm one of the only customers that takes managers aside and describes chronic shortages. The answers vary but it's often a shrug of helplessness, especially with computer inventory control and stocking brands like soda and milk. . Chain stores have started to ask customers at checkout, "Did you find everything?" and sometimes they'll become confused if I ask for a slip of paper to write my own note to the manager. Otherwise it falls down the memory hole. I've told managers, "A store without chocolate milk will get walkouts. People will abandon their carts and leave." and the manager was not convinced. "People cannot get full size chocolate milk in convenience stores at a decent price. They have to go to another grocery store anyway, they don't want to wait in two lines, so they'll just leave. Asking at checkout if they found everything isn't enough. How many people leave empty handed?" Hmmm....
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
the new politically correct term for slaves?
Sounds a lot like this: Kristen Wiig voices a human-powered virtual assistant in podcast drama Sandra
No the Amazon variety, the real thing! A human hidden in the box ...
Figure this out a long time ago?
I also prefer this approach when there are lots of people with lots of work. Each person does a little bit of the task...and before you know it...everything's done. This is usually for volunteer work, mind you.
(Not that I would approve of *exploiting* anyone...of course!)
"Some startups" have learned the thing that any businessman, programmer, AI person (with sense, and many AI people lack that), and the vast majority of the general population, could have told them. For free.
Automating tasks requires standardizing inputs and outputs. Then you have to spend a ton of time getting the automation system to handle the variations that happen anyways. Overarching the whole system is a control system that cannot vary.
In human systems? Inputs and outputs vary all the time. The control system often runs for a period of time, until it suddenly gets replaced, or switches to an entirely different (and frequently incompatible) structure. Often the prioritization stack is what changes, but really it can be anything.
I'm pretty sure Henry Ford figured this out 100 years ago. And probably others ...
Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours to master a skill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
Casteism
How nice.. please tell us all about it