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Comment by tarsinge

4 hours ago

I don’t understand the urgency to replace human work with AI. Why is every organization so eager about skipping the AI as an assistant step? Here there are already massive productivity gains in using the AI to create the draft of the report, it makes little economical to make it do the final version compared to the risk, maybe it’s just plain laziness? Same with developers, why is very organization wanting to leapfrog from humans write all the code to they don’t even read the generated code?

Not everyone is in an urgent hurry to replace people with bots; that's a hyperbolic construct.

But to try to answer some of what I think you're trying to ask about: The bot can be useful. It can be better at writing a coherent collection of paragraphs or subroutines than Alice or Bill might be, and it costs a lot less to employ than either of them do.

Meanwhile: The bot never complains to HR because someone looked at them sideways. The bot [almost!] never calls in sick; the bot can work nearly 24/7. The bot never slips and falls in the parking lot. The bot never promises to be on-duty while they vacation out-of-state with a VPN or uses a mouse-jiggler to screw up the metrics while they sleep off last night's bender.

The bot mostly just follows instructions.

There's lots of things the bot doesn't get right. Like, the stuff it produces may be full of hallucinations and false conclusions that need reviewed, corrected, and outright excised.

But there's lots of Bills and Alices in the world who are even worse, and the bot is a lot easier and cheaper to deal with than they are.

That said: When it comes to legal matters that put a real person's life and freedom in jeopardy, then there should be no bot involved.

If a person in a position of power (such as a police officer) can't write a meaningful and coherent report on their own, then I might suggest that this person shouldn't ever have a job where producing written reports are a part of their job. There's probably something else they're good at that they can do instead (the world needs ditchdiggers, too).

Neither the presence nor absence of a bot can save the rest of us from the impact of their illiteracy.

Because the biggest cost at a lot of orgs is staff. Your typical software shop will be comical—the salary costs towering down on all the others like LeBron James gazing down at ants. The moment you go from productivity gains to staff reduction you start making real money. Any amount of money for a machine that can fully replace a human process.