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Your career is now a game of musical chairs: you need to be ready when the song stops
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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 VLM on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:49PM
Care to imagine dealing with an oncologist, lawyer of financial advisor who doesn’t give a shit about you?
I worked at an outsourcing provider who provided PaaS email, basically a shitty riff on gmail years before gmail existed, but they were paying us. Not much. It was an addon service. This was some time ago. The problem is users think their problem is a shared problem and a $1M business contract is worth $1M to them but to me in upper level support it was worth some variation on my staggering hourly rate vs how much time it would take to hop to their little thing, vs what marketing said the cost of sales was to replace this dweeb with another jerk (who would probably call in with yet another dumb request about his $1M problem thats worth $5 to me).
I remember one PITA customer who continually called in for me to verify and analyze all logs on all servers because the Asians have this cultural thing about not saying "no" so customer would ask the China factory guy where is my goddam shipping receipt for $50M worth of widgets and the factory guy in Asia would be all "yes sir sorry sir I emailed it to you forthrightly last wednesday begging your pardon sir" and sir would slam the phone down and call me and ask where the hell the missing emailed shipping receipt was for his $50M of widgets, when in reality the bastard in Asia was just lying to save face. And believe it or not this was a regular issue and the local customer actually got used to working with me on this because both of us figured out pretty quickly the Chinese SOB was lying every time he opened his mouth, then he'd take my official statement and demand $100K off the contract for the bastards lying to him and being late and wasting his time and my time.
Anyway its like that times a thousand customers and none of them mean a damn to me once they cost more than the cost of sales to replace them. Actually once they require enough labor to eat the profit margin, which is even less, its like F you sir good bye. In the olden days the cost of sales was roughly nothing and the profit off a shitty PaaS email domain on a two year contract was like five bucks, if that, so at my pay rate if any individual customer got sysadmin support from me for more than about 90 seconds we just lost all our profit off that contract.
Now when in an entirely different scenario a long while ago, a VP at my employer is like "you're gonna fix that database schema before you go home or its going to cost you $175K" because I'm gonna be unemployed if I don't fix it, well, that request is worth $175K to me, not roughly $5. Thats because he insourced his database guy not outsourced. If he had outsourced the response from India would have been a resounding "F you".
This is the fundamental problem with outsourcing. In sourced, your huge emergency is worth who knows maybe a years salary to me. Out sourced, your huge emergency is usually worth like $5 to me. Guess which problem I'll work harder on?
So a human oncologist trying to pay his kids way thru college or daydreams of his hot mistress or WTF and not getting a malpractice suit and losing his license is kinda important to him. But... for outsourced? Does that guy really give a F? I sometimes wonder about that with respect to outsourced radiology, a local cares but uploading my xrays to the India equivalent of amazons mechanical turk, they're just not gonna give a F.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:00PM
> This is the fundamental problem with outsourcing.
> a local cares but uploading my xrays to the India equivalent of amazons mechanical turk, they're just not gonna give a F.
Outsourcing?
Outsourcing!
WTF? Nobody is talking about out sourcing to India.
Man, you have become as bad as Michael Crawford. Long rambling posts that are all about you personally that seem like they might have a relevant point, but get to the end, and its just whatever stick happened to be up your butt today.
You have a problem. Get help.