Received a company-wide email today from our CEO, informing us of the exciting productivity-enhancing etc etc good news everyone! that they will be installing WorkIQ on every computer in the network (no small feat for a company with 53,000 employees spread all over the country).
Curious as to exactly what this was, I Googled it and discovered it was realtime desktop monitoring software. Terrific… as if my time wasn’t already micromanaged enough with productivity quotas for every single type of task I do, now I have to worry that some schmo in HQ is going to decide I’m not productive enough if he happens to watch the livestream while I’m on my lunch break checking my bank balance, or my screen goes idle for 20 minutes because I’m explaining how to do something to a co-worker who’s stopped by for help.
More interesting though, is that WorkIQ is apparently designed to rate your productivity versus bots doing the same tasks:
You gotta love when a corporate CEO announces to the entire company that he’s installing software with the primary goal of measuring every task you’re doing for the purpose of automating it; and tries to sell it as a wonderful bit of news. I’d be angry if I hadn’t seen this coming for a long time. Unfortunately, once the bot replaces me, I’ve got basically nowhere to go, as I’ve explained upthread. Hopefully my Bitcoins pay off. If not I’ll probably just drive off a cliff. I’ve been homeless before, I don’t intend for that to be the remainder of my life, and the shitshow this world is devolving into wouldn’t be worth it anymore.
Yeah that was a weird decision. Software like this is actually quite common already, but employers usually just slip it on to the system, and most employees are unaware that it’s there.
In a previous company, I was asked the explain how come I’d logged so much time on youTube. The answer was that all of that time had been while I was working overtime, and been correlated with tasks like uploading code or sending emails i.e. I put youtube on for background noise while I’m doing company work in my own time (it was unpaid overtime, incidentally).
So this kind of monitoring software, and the way companies interpret the data, has a ways to go. But I can only see it spreading in use, and annoying-ness, in the future.
I think you’re missing the main point of the software if you think it’s simply keeping track of data: “for the purpose of automating it”. The software is going to know how to do his job in very little time, because it is going to be monitoring the him and hundreds of other people who also do his job “in real time”. It won’t take long for that software to know his job better than he does and be able to do it faster. His company is telling him: you will now be training the bot that will replace you.
Hang in there, AI Proofreader; this world ain’t over yet.
No doubt. When I posted my last post I realized I’d gone on a rant about web tracking software, which is another thing entirely, but missed the edit window to delete it.
If that’s the goal then I think they’ll be disappointed.
If you watch me type words every day you can discern the pattern that I spend X hours typing words, however the words themselves are in fact different every time depending on context.
The only things that are entirely repetitive about my job are making coffee, taking a leak and filling out timesheets, and I’d welcome an AI that does those things for me
I accept I framed my response in a glib/humorous way, but that’s because your post was either very extreme or meant to be humorous too.
No, a non-sentient AI is not going to able to do my job better than me just from watching me.
Wish I could say the same - my job is highly automated already, and the remaining tasks are just a little bit out of reach, but will get there eventually.
For example: Customer Smith wants his primary care provider to be Dr John Doe with American Medical Provider Group, at address 123 XYZ Street. He can request this one of three ways:
Through an online portal or other digitized application - applied automatically.
Through a call to customer service or his agent - who type in the relevant info for the PCP and mark a field indicating they want to change to that PCP - applied automatically, the agent or CSR just took a note and checked a box.
On a paper application - something I need to address, because the bots currently aren’t sophisticated enough to take a wide variety of human pen-scratches that could range from “Doe” to “Dr Doe” to “Dr John H Doe, D.O.” and may or may not include the desired address (doctors typically work from multiple locations), the desired provider group, or the PCP ID. Or might have one, 2, or all of those elements.
I can, and lately have, because of open enrollment involving many, many paper apps, spent entire days doing nothing but taking a person’s desired doctor, examining this against a list of possible selections to find the right / best fit solution for Name / Group / PCP ID / address. And of course making sure the doctor in question is in-network, and not a specialist who can’t do primary care.
This task could be automated a number of different ways - off the top of my head, they could provide a website tool that doctors within their network could use to simply key their patient’s health insurance card number in, it transmits to insurance company, and bam - their patient now officially has that doctor as their PCP.
Or they could provide their agents with the directory listing of PCP entries, and refuse paper applications that don’t have all the needed elements to make the right PCP choice. Or any of a half-dozen other methods, including just making the bots a bit better at discerning that “Dr John Doe at 123 XYZ St - AA Medical Group” is probably the same thing as “Dr Jon Doe at 123 ExYZ St - AAMG,” just match it up with another piece of info to be sure.
This is just one task I do - out of a couple dozen others - but in a massive corporate behemoth with 50 million + customers, everything is quantified, everything is repetitive, everything is tracked. It’s already highly automated and is ready-made to be completely automated. They just need to train the software to do it well enough that fixing its mistakes is cheaper than employing me. I give it a few years at most - and that’s optimistic.
That description of the WorkIQ software is really freaky!
But AI Proofreader, I hate to hear you despairing about the future. You seem like a cool person, and we need those on this planet. Try to have some hope that a mincome or something along those lines is coming down the pike fairly soon.
2030 is just over a decade away, practically right around the corner. I’d wager in 5-7 years we’ll be able to start assessing the accuracy of these reports, eh.
Well, as I pointed very early, I still see this issue coming at us with a little of column A and a little of column B.
Sure, there will be many jobs lost, but I do think that many jobs will come too. Still, I do grant that it will be mostly good if we do get governments that do realize that before the jobs we can not even imagine come, that there will be a time when things like a basic income will have to be deployed in a transition to prevent a disaster.
I however still think that the time line is not going to be that fast on many items (for some it will, but not all), I do remember vividly reading about many predictions of the “electronic years” back in the 1970’s that told us that things like wall size TVs would arrive… in the 1990s.
Well, besides what I do remember when smarter people than me predicted about how fast a technology can be deployed, (it can indeed be a sudden change, but it depends on things going right) there is this:
I remember a writer of science fiction commented once that many could predict the car but very few could predict the freeway yams.
IMHO while I think that items like basic income are needed, there are many politicians that would see that as an anathema to their ideology. Meaning that unrest and/or backlashes against new technologies will be strong in that environment. Unlike the Luddites of the past, many will actually gain power to prevent an outcome where only the well to do would benefit by the new technologies.
And while I see items like autonomous electric cars becoming the norm, I do think that a lot of push back will increase the time lines for the deployment of robots that can take over jobs in general. And more so if things like the basic income are not in place.
Now that is one item, on the optimistic side I do think that a lot of the gloom is not going to happen.
Generally speaking that is; but I do think that in several trades, like people that work in data entry, should had left it years ago; as I did; more than 20 years ago, nowadays I’m busy with IT and administrative tasks.
That’s an impressive argument from the NYT Editorial Board. But in the process of making that rebuttal, they cite two pretty impressive figures who see it the other way:
The other NYT op-ed is also on point–and I have no doubt the ultimate future with AI and automation will be very bright indeed (as long as we escape paper clip maximization, of course). But think about a sample excerpt from that piece:
I myself work as a tutor. :o My wife is a teacher, although since she teaches “special ed”, she will likely last longer than most. And teachers just by themselves make up four million of the roughly 126 million full time workers in the U.S.
Don’t see how impressive when they report that the coming of the robots will cause “some” economic pain.
I also have some experience in teaching social studies and history, using Google forms and spreadsheets for testing is really neat. The point here is that there are tons of drudgery work that many educators will gladly see that it will go away thanks to automation while they do improve for the job that many wanted to do in the first place: to teach.
But this goes back to what I keep saying about how so often AI/automation doesn’t eliminate a job category altogether, it just acts as a force multiplier. Is it so unrealistic to think these tools will allow a single teacher to teach 50 or 100 students at once instead of 25, without sacrificing efficacy? If so, that’s essentially replacing two to three million of the four million teachers with “robots”, even if every student still has a teacher.
A teacher should be a tutor, rather than a babysitter, janitor, blackboard writer, test checker… all those other jobs a teacher has to do.
It would be less about allowing a single teacher to teach more students, but freeing up teachers from chores so that they can focus on smaller classes or even individual attention.
Computers also don’t get bored or frustrated by a student that doesn’t understand. They can repeat as many times as necessary, they can draw from lectures by other teachers on the subject, to find one that the student finds more understandable or relatable.
This leaves teachers to work in small groups or one on one in order to give the attention needed to explore new subjects and ideas, not just rote memory.
I think you are missing that a force multiplier is missed or needed in several job categories now.
Yeah, I know, but as I usually note: the key word is “potential”, years later the service is showing its utility, but as it is noted more recently:
The point here is that co-operation is what will come more often on cases like medicine or education, this is because there is an ocean of information that is not being processed properly nowadays, and while automation will pinpoint the lessons or procedures that are the best to use, the lessons and information will grow more thanks to automation too. We humans will still have to look at the AI constantly to make sure it is going on the proper paths.
Let me say here that many, many times teachers would had loved to have other teachers with them in the classroom (artificial in this case, yes), besides making moot the disciplinary “game” of “the student said, teacher said, principal does not know who to believe”. It will indeed help identify and aid students that not only have special needs, but that it can identify and help advanced students that are not helped properly nowadays.
The multiplier IMHO will not be removing jobs like this, but will enhance them to also lead to benefits for the “customers” IOW, us.
I would call it very optimistic to think that administrators would respond to this by saying “we’ll just keep the same number of teachers but give the students more value”. If they can effectively teach with a smaller payroll, they will do it. (This comes from experience, as my wife is a teacher.) At the very least, they will cut the number of “paras” (what used to be called “teacher aides”), which I assume is not included in that four million number but must be millions more. Or maybe they will use the lower-paid paras more for classroom management and sack the expensive teachers.
Not quite, when did I said that the teachers would not teach to more students?
Some courses of [del]Monthy[/del] Python that I was interested on taking were supervised by professors at MIT, in that example the classes were free and only if you complete them and want to get credit is that then you pay an affordable fee.
As I also have experience, I can tell you that it is not always the case, not having math teachers is affecting one of the schools I help. One can indeed use the computer classes that we have, but in the end most students do not like the teachers in a can. And vote with their feet to get to a school that has teachers that know the subject.
Also by experience: classrooms are still better with aides present.
By experience, they might try, but as administrators that lost teachers told me, when they lost good teachers by them going to better pastures (this is Arizona BTW), that does not work much.
