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> Already, clients are signing on to the idea: Toyota and the National Institutes of Health, to name a couple. Toyota I can understand & accept, but is it appr

> Already, clients are signing on to the idea: Toyota and the National Institutes of Health, to name a couple. Toyota I can understand & accept, but is it appropriate for a branch of the executive to hire lobbyists to lobby the legislature? Just feels a bit unseemly to me. > Quorum says its system also powers one well-known late-night comedy show—it won’t reveal which one—helping staffers scan YouTube to pull together almost instantly a selection of footage about topics they might use on that night’s show. Says Wirth, “They’re like, ‘What kinds of Roy Moore clips do we have?’” The software has already machine-read heaps of video footage, turning them into tagged transcripts, and sends off exactly the correct clip to that evening’s show. Millions of Americans, without knowing it, are getting their political news curated for them in part by a Quorum bot. Sounds a bit like Last Week Tonight. In the cases of lobbying & clip-selection alike, what I worry about is how we'll groom the higher-level people without running them through their lower-level paces (since the lower levels will all be automated). What I mean is that a lower-level job has at least two purposes: one is to perform a job, and the other is to audition for the next higher job. The former is what AI excels at. It's really, really easy to automate the job of an 18-year-old who answers phones and hands them to the next person. It's not so easy to automate the job of a 24-year-old who answers phones and hands them to the right person. It's really, really difficult to automate the job of a 36-year-old who answers phones and decides whether the topic is important enough to hand to his boss. It's really supremely difficult to automate the job of a 48-year-old who answers phones and makes decisions. The problem is that every 18-year-old answering phones isn't just answering phones; he's also auditioning to be that 24-year-old finding the right person (experience he gets from the job itself). Likewise, every experienced 24-year=old is auditioning for the job of the very experience 36-year-old. And all those 36-year-olds are auditioning for the few slots as decision-making 48-year-olds. We can really easily automate those lower levels away. But what will be our 'farm team'? Where will we grow the talent and depth of experience necessary for the higher levels?

pm90 9y ago
This isn't really surprising, nor is it new. Remember the days when one needed to know how OS's really worked to write code? Or when code was in assembly? All of today's code does compile down to that, but I'm willing to bet a large majority of programmers can't grok assembly (nor do they need to). Historically, we've seen the more tedious jobs get automated away to create better jobs that require more "human" skills. This is a good thing.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> The problem is that every 18-year-old answering phones isn't just answering phones; he's also auditioning to be that 24-year-old finding the right person (experience he gets from the job itself). Likewise, every experienced 24-year-old is auditioning for the job of the very experience 36-year-old. Having interned in a political office, the other problem is that the 18- and 24-year-old described often doesn't exist, because there aren't enough to people to have the heirarchy you describe exist at all; the 18-24 year old answering phones is doing much more what you describe for the 36-year old (answering phones, logging constituent positions appropriately if it's a position call, directing constituent services calls (and any other calls they don't handle themselves) to the right staff person. And, on top of that, doing a lot of non-phone tasks like drafting correspondence, assisting legislative staff with research, etc., etc. Of course, lots of staff are never college interns and do their first staff job as a graduate fellow, or as professional staff often after completing a law, business, or public policy and/or administration degree. So, I'm both not worried that the lower level will be automated easily or much concerned that there won't be an entry path if it is.

pm90 9y ago

This isn't really surprising, nor is it new. Remember the days when one needed to know how OS's really worked to write code? Or when code was in assembly? All of today's code does compile down to that, but I'm willing to bet a large majority of programmers can't grok assembly (nor do they need to). Historically, we've seen the more tedious jobs get automated away to create better jobs that require more "human" skills. This is a good thing.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> The problem is that every 18-year-old answering phones isn't just answering phones; he's also auditioning to be that 24-year-old finding the right person (experience he gets from the job itself). Likewise, every experienced 24-year-old is auditioning for the job of the very experience 36-year-old. Having interned in a political office, the other problem is that the 18- and 24-year-old described often doesn't exist, because there aren't enough to people to have the heirarchy you describe exist at all; the 18-24 year old answering phones is doing much more what you describe for the 36-year old (answering phones, logging constituent positions appropriately if it's a position call, directing constituent services calls (and any other calls they don't handle themselves) to the right staff person. And, on top of that, doing a lot of non-phone tasks like drafting correspondence, assisting legislative staff with research, etc., etc. Of course, lots of staff are never college interns and do their first staff job as a graduate fellow, or as professional staff often after completing a law, business, or public policy and/or administration degree. So, I'm both not worried that the lower level will be automated easily or much concerned that there won't be an entry path if it is.