<story><title>Automation is reaching more companies</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/rent-robot-worker-less-paying-human/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msoad</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s so fascinating that physical labor seems to be the main concern when it comes to robots doing it better&amp;#x2F;cheaper than humans. If anything, we know that automation is coming after office desk jobs first. Those jobs are much easier to automate. Language models can read a manuscript and spit out a summary&amp;#x2F;judgment with much better my friend that has read so many books and evaluate book projects. The &amp;quot;robot&amp;quot; has read more books, can memorize more of the manuscript as it reads it and does it much much much faster.&lt;p&gt;Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kmeisthax</author><text>We&amp;#x27;ve been automating away office jobs for a lot longer than we&amp;#x27;ve been putting ML in robots to automate factory work, though.&lt;p&gt;For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it&amp;#x27;s such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you&amp;#x27;d write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people&amp;#x27;s desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call &amp;quot;Office&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I&amp;#x27;m worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that&amp;#x27;s why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons.&lt;p&gt;[0] Or if you&amp;#x27;re Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.</text></comment>
<story><title>Automation is reaching more companies</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/rent-robot-worker-less-paying-human/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msoad</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s so fascinating that physical labor seems to be the main concern when it comes to robots doing it better&amp;#x2F;cheaper than humans. If anything, we know that automation is coming after office desk jobs first. Those jobs are much easier to automate. Language models can read a manuscript and spit out a summary&amp;#x2F;judgment with much better my friend that has read so many books and evaluate book projects. The &amp;quot;robot&amp;quot; has read more books, can memorize more of the manuscript as it reads it and does it much much much faster.&lt;p&gt;Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>newhouseb</author><text>100%.&lt;p&gt;Even before you need language models, though, there&amp;#x27;s an insane amount of &amp;quot;digital manual labor&amp;quot; that involved people shuttling files around and validating &amp;#x2F; cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.</text></comment>