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.

Comments

This isn't new

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

[kenwd0elq]

And how is this significantly different from Amazon's "Mechanical Turk"? Same basic concept; get people to do what AI cannot yet do.

What's new: lack of human involvement

[TheRealHocusLocus]

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....