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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-jump-the-shark dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday November 15 2016, @11:18PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @11:18PM (#427263)

    Did anyone ask him why he did this?

    If I spent years making preferences and some IT guy came in and just blew them away because he liked my desktop a different way; he would certainly not be welcome back. I'd fear what he'd do to stuff that actually mattered. Maybe he didn't like how the APs were installed, or decided to recable the wiring closet to better suit his style?

    Sometimes, people do things because they do not have enough to do. Sometimes they believe they are correct and only the foolish and unwise would ever doubt them. Some people don't realize the problems they cause and would be more than willing to stop and will be embarassed to learn they caused issues when they thought they were just fixing preferences or tidying up.

    If you have known him in some capacity for 40 years or so, you likely would know the differences in these approaches and which applies to him... but you also did say he was probably smarter than you in many ways, and tactfully brought about you are smarter when it comes to tact. Perhaps you can find out what he was doing specifically, and the perceived reasons as to why, and let him know a version of that along with the fact that with admin rights comes responsibility that involve not changing personal settings or reading emails and such... even if he is manually 'blocking spam' or 'optimizing their experiences'.

      He may be hurt to know the value he thought he was adding wasn't really what they wanted him there for, but he should know... otherwise he may continue to do the same actions elsewhere. Ignorance can be fixed; if it's his personality then it'd be up to him to fix via a character adjustment going forward--but he at least should know it's a problem so he can decide what works best for him.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:34AM

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:34AM (#427339) Journal

    Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

    The guy is an engineer and great at math, actually most of his income comes from structural calculations for large buildings but he just digs IT and thinks he’s great at it and as you can guess, we are both older men but he is quite older.

    So no, I won’t say a word to him as he would probably just berate me about not understanding how great his scheme is, so it is pointless. Matter of fact, both the owner of the engineering firm and I have known him for about as long. As an example, the guy claims he taught me everything I know about computers when in actual fact he has never spent any time teaching me anything! He’s got a degree in Civil Engineering and I do have an engineering degree in Telecommunications and Information Processing, so figure who could teach whom about what.

    Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy to have a beer with and I have had many with him but as a geek, he’s weird in his own way! (As all of us are, that is, if you're a geek.)

    The most pressing question the owner has is trust; he can’t have any someone digging around his projects, I was second on his list until he got fed up with complaints.

    Some other comments have been about AI being an augmentation or support, but my point is, you not only have to know what the shit you’re doing, you have to actually care for your customers and listen to their concerns; something that no machine in the foreseeable future can do, IMHO, and something most humans can't do either right now.

    Yeah, I need the money and that is why I have clients; otherwise I would be fishing in the morning and reading in the evening :-) But a client is not simply a source of income to me, it is a person who needs my help. I have turned down many people because I didn't think I could relate to their way of working or care about their problems, and I do a lot of pro bono work, both for friends and non-profits. You see, money is a means to me, not a goal; I believe your heart needs to be in your work, not only your brain.