Comment by Al-Khwarizmi
6 days ago
my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do.
Is it really true for most people that they are using their core advanced skills 90% of the time? I'm curious about how people feel about this.
I'm a professor, which is supposed to be an intellectually demanding job. I do research in NLP/AI, and I don't think AI will replace my core intellectual tasks in the near future, but I don't think my core intellectual tasks represent even 10% of my time. Most of the time is taken by various things like writing bureaucratic reports, writing and polishing grant applications, grading exams and exercises, designing a poster, planning a course's calendar for a given year, creating a figure for slides, writing assignments and exams, attending teaching coordination meetings... which definitely are or should be automatable. Probably even teaching the same lesson for the umpteenth time also is from an objective point of view, we'll probably be kept doing it due to the human factors driving motivation but not because a lecture given by a human is intellectually superior.
> "Most of the time is taken by..."
This reminds me of an exchange I had (this would have been 2018 or so) with a colleague I was visiting when I worked for a large retailer. She had a ton on her plate, and was in charge of running an important department. She lamented privately to me that the company had specifically banned the hiring of anyone as an "assistant." She was spending hours of her highly-paid time doing tasks similar to what you listed here, which didn't require any of her important skills, things like filling out expense reports or scheduling meetings. I could see how we were getting a lot less productivity from her because of this dogmatic idea that was no doubt done more for optics than anything else.
It seems like that company's policy is pretty much pervasive - outside the C-suite, no one has an assistant no matter how well paid they are, but we give them a ton of silly busywork to waste their time on.
To bring this back to the subject at hand, I do hope that "AI" can crack the literal "assistant" duties. If it did, it really could be a net good for society and business, given that it wouldn't even be displacing human assistants, since they just fell out of fashion in 1995 or whatever.