Human Abstract Jobs: These May Be Goners
April 12, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
In the late 1960s, the idea of converting technical information to online formats lit a rocket engine under the commercial database industry. I am not going to revisit topics I have covered in this blog since 2008. The key point is that humans created the majority of the digital versions of journal papers, technical reports, and other academic content. The cost of a single abstract in 1980 was about $17 per summary. Some commercial database producers spent less (Agricola, Pharmaceutical News Index, etc.) and other spent more (Chemical Abstracts, Disclosure, etc. )
In terms of time, an efficient production process could select, create, and index an abstract in a two or three day period, assuming a non-insane, MBA efficiency freak was not allowed to fiddle with each knowledge value task making up the commercial database workflow.
That is officially. Good, bad, or indifferent, the old school approach is not possible for many reasons. The big one is the application of technology in the SummarizePaper.com system. Navigate to https://summarizepaper.com and follow the instructions. I exactly two and one half minutes a mostly unreadable Google paper was converted into a list of dot points, a comprehensive summary, a ninth-grade reading level version, and a blog post (maybe a sixth grade reading level?) Plus the summary was indexed with a reasonable set of index terms.
You can plug in the name of the author (Jeff Dean, a Googler famous for his management acumen) and test the process on his November 2022 apologia “Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference.” Snappy, eh?
With the authors’ abstract and the machine-generated dot points, the content of the article is easily absorbed.
Sayonara, commercial database publishers relying on human knowledge workers. Costco and WalMart are still hiring I hear. Why spend money per hour on a human demanding breaks, health care, and vacations, when software can do a job almost as good or better than an expensive bio-centric creature. Software does not take bathroom breaks which is another plus.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2023
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts and the website summarizepaper which is great