Smart Software Is Coming for You. Yes, You!
December 9, 2024
This write up was created by an actual 80-year-old dinobaby. If there is art, assume that smart software was involved. Just a tip.
“Those smart software companies are not going to be able to create a bot to do what I do.” — A CPA who is awash with clients and money.
Now that is a practical, me–me-me idea. However, the estimable Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD, a delightful acronym) has data suggesting a slightly different point of view: Robots will replace workers who believe themselves unreplaceable. (The same idea is often held by head coaches of sports teams losing games.)
Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough.
The report is titled in best organizational group think: Job Creation and Local Economic Development 2024; The Geography of Generative AI.
I noted this statement in the beefy document, presumably written by real, live humanoids and not a ChatGPT type system:
In fact, the finance and insurance industry is the tightest industry in the United States, with 2.5 times more vacancies per filled position than the regional average (1.6 times in the European Union).
I think this means that financial institutions will be eager to implement smart software to become “workers.” If that works, the confident CPA quoted at the beginning of this blog post is going to get a pink slip.
The OECD report believes that AI will have a broad impact. The most interesting assertion / finding in the report is that one-fifth of the tasks a worker handles can be handled by smart software. This figure is interesting because smart software hallucinates and is carrying the hopes and dreams of many venture outfits and forward leaning wizards on its digital shoulders.
And what’s a bureaucratic report without an almost incomprehensible chart like this one from page 145 of the report?
Look closely and you will see that sewing machine operators are more likely to retain jobs than insurance clerks.
Like many government reports, the document focuses on the benefits of smart software. These include (cue the theme from Star Wars, please) more efficient operations, employees who do more work and theoretically less looking for side gigs, and creating ways for an organization to get work done without old-school humans.
Several observations:
- Let’s assume smart software is almost good enough, errors and all. The report makes it clear that it will be grabbed and used for a plethora of reasons. The main one is money. This is an economic development framework for the research.
- The future is difficult to predict. After scanning the document, I was thinking that a couple of college interns and an account to You.com would be able to generate a reasonable facsimile of this report.
- Agents can gather survey data. One hopes this use case takes hold in some quasi government entities. I won’t trot out my frequently stated concerns about “survey” centric reports.
Stephen E Arnold, December 9, 2024
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