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

There's also this factor

[RyanFenton]

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

It's harder to get humans to behave like humans

[karlandtanya]

"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.