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Your career is now a game of musical chairs: you need to be ready when the song stops
...
Although sixty years old, artificial intelligence remained mostly a curiosity until half a decade ago, when IBM's Watson trounced the world's best Jeopardy! players in a televised match. At the time, you might have thought nothing of that - what does a game show matter in the scheme of things?
It didn't stop there. IBM sent Watson to train with oncologists and lawyers and financial advisers. Quite suddenly, three very established professions, just the sort of thing you'd tell your kids to pursue as a ticket to prosperity, seemed a lot less certain of their futures in a world where intelligence, like computing before it, becomes pervasive, then commoditised.
These top-of-their-profession projects show that the driver to bring artificial intelligence into any field isn't the amount of labor, but rather the cost of that labor. A lawyer costs fifty times more per hour than a retail worker and so is that many times more likely to find themselves with an AI competitor.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:46PM
You're joking, but think how many editors and proofreaders have already been automated away by traditional, simple spellcheckers.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:12PM
and yet, i can go to just about any site and find typos, mispelled words, and wrongly used words all day, every day...
not to mention, I CONSTANTLY find spel czech giving me the red squiggles on not-so-uncommon words ALL THE TIME... gotten to the point where i basically ignore spel czech because it is wrong so often...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:38PM
I've seen quite a few of your posts, both here and on Techdirt. I'd say your spell checker has given up from constant abuse and spends its days in drunken stupor :)
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:24PM
funny, and yet my point remains...
(again, i can write rings around most if i choose to go conventional... i do not so choose, writing correctly for ONLINE BULLSHIT (NOT a term paper for school, or an op/ed for a publication, is it ?) is boring, my writing is not... akin to saying that hanging out at the water cooler and not using complete sentences is somehow a failure of communication...)
people just love them some gotchas, don't them ? ? ?
(Score: 2) by fubari on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:12PM
Still timely...
excerpt, full text here: Candidate for a Pullet Surprise [jir.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:25PM
While we're sharing old parodies, another timely one may be "Computers Don't Argue" [wikipedia.org] a 1965 story by Gordon Dickson. (You can read it online here [rainey.net].)
If you've never encountered it, it's a story of how a guy who accidentally receives a book in the mail from some book club ends up charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder through a series of misinterpreted computer inputs. While improbable and outlandish, I can very easily imagine naive AI systems interacting to make similar errors.
(Score: 2) by fubari on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:45AM
thanks, looking forward to reading :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:20PM
Well, if the automated lawyers are as good as the automated spell checkers … eye hope eye wheel never need two use one.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:24PM
s/need/kneed/g
s/one/won/g
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:25PM
Oh, they'll be even better.
//fix this later
If(true)
{
Suggest("Take the plea deal");
}
else
{
DefenseStrategy x=new DefenseStrategy(RetrieveEvidence());
}
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:13PM
Google Maps still frequently gives bad directions on many intersections for years after corrections are repeatedly suggested and yet they're going to give us self-driving cars in just a few years?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:22AM
Don't knock Google. They may be the only place you can search for meatspace lawyers rather than their more charming AI brethren.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:08PM
You're joking, but think how many editors and proofreaders have already been automated away by traditional, simple spellcheckers.
How many? Seriously. I want to know, because I doubt it was that many. Yes, copyediting and proofreadering jobs have been declining in recent years, but that seems more to do with the demand for instant content (particularly online) and a general acceptance of prose with less editing. And that shift accompanied the changes in technology that allow writers to put material out quickly to wide audiences directly (first in growth of self-publishing services in the 1990s and early 2000s, then in growth of blogs, internet news services and other online publications, etc.).
Copyediting was never much about spellchecking, since any decent writer who wrote for a living 30+ years ago would have to know how to spell pretty darn well. If your copyeditor was spending lots of time just fixing your spelling errors, you probably would be fired from your job pretty quickly. Or, more likely, you'd never be hired -- or have manuscripts accepted or whatever -- in the first place. Copyeditors do a lot of stuff [wikipedia.org] that has to do with style, editing for clarity, accuracy, format, layout, inconsistencies, etc., as well as catching errors of grammar, punctuation, and yes spelling. And "proofreading" was definitely NEVER primarily about spell-checking, because traditionally "proofs" follow the more intensive copy-editing process, so few spelling errors should make it to that stage.
I'm sure software spellcheckers helped out most in areas with more "amateur" writing, e.g., business folks having to prepare memos and internal company documents, which might have been spell-checked by a secretary back in the day. But anyplace who had enough funds to hire professional copyeditors and proofreaders probably also spent the money on professional writers in the first place -- and good writers knew how to spell.
So, I really wonder about how many of these jobs were lost. I think the bigger transition happened with the move online and demand for instant content than with the rise of spellcheckers in Word or whatever.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:13PM
Also, I should be clear as someone who has published stuff that the quality of editing and proofreading even at traditionally fastidious publishing houses (e.g., prominent academic presses) has gone down significantly in the past decade or two. Yes, the multiple levels of in-house copyediting in many cases has been outsourced to one guy in India, but I'm not sure that's been driven by the rise in automated spellchecking. It seems publishers are just struggling and making more and more cuts these days, and editorial staff is one place to go.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday November 15 2016, @10:18PM
Which explains the increasingly shitty editing across all media.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh