Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Tech Tuesday: A.I. Is Already Taking White Collar Writing Jobs. Who's Next?

Photo by Yuyeung Lau on Unsplash
In November I was reading an investment update at Zach's when I noticed that the advice regarding a particular stock was not only coherent but straightforward, clear English. Just the facts, but in sentences. In fine print it stated that the paragraph had been written by a machine.

The same kind of thing, converting data into statements, is happening in sports as well. Over 400 articles sent out on the wire services during the last summer olympics were  created by A.I.  

I've been looking at articles and books on Artificial Intelligence lately, many which note how white collar jobs will be vulnerable to these thinking machines. (Assuming that organizing data into sentences is thinking.) On Wall Street no one is looking for poetry. Neither are sports gamblers. It's all about the transmission of information. The words help identify what the numbers refer to, but the machines have few ambitions to dress up their prose in order to obtain a Pulitzer.

Machines have been replacing humans for decades, which is why the subject keeps coming up regarding how we're going to take care of the dispossessed. We're not doing the greatest job now, but what happens when unemployment is 10X what it is today?

According to this article in Fortune the robots are already replacing people in ways we have not yet noticed. Annual report writers, financial analysts, online marketing, programatic advertising, anesthesiologists, diagnosticians and even physicians have already been pushed aside by thinking machines to some extent.

Ten years ago some kid graduated college thinking his internet marketing degree was going to be his ticket to wealth and Caribbean vacations. Little did he know that in fifteen years the skills he learned would be obsolete.

If there's any secret to survival in today's topsy-turvy work environment, it seems we need to teach young people how to think, and to be vigilant about staying current with the changes taking place in their career field. 

* * * 

Meta, formerly Facebook, says it is working on an A.I. computer that will be faster than any in the world. How will it be used? According to this article it will be used to train other A.I. robots. Interesting. Will it teach the machines how to think? Or will it indoctrinate?  Is Meta's A.I. going to train up an army that will serve on behalf of the Haves or Have-Nots? 

Oh well, much more can be said but we'll save that for another space in time.

*This blog post was not written by an A.I. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

AI ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BY STEVEN SPIELBERG was such a beautiful and moving movie on this subject.

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