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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.
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.
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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.
Let's see here. Producing an entry-level human takes over 16 years of high-intensity work involving dozens of skilled workers. More if he needs a post-graduate degree. Doesn't sound that easy to me.
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.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
Rob