Early days, but I see potential for this to take some jobs, particularly those involving menial/repetitive work on a computer.
Last I heard, Y Combinator is seeking startups that can automate "Back Office" work.
Last I heard, Y Combinator is seeking startups that can automate "Back Office" work.
Robotic process automation has been on the scene for a number of years doing exactly this, and is quite a bit more mature.
I agree that this kind of tool has the potential to take more jobs, but companies looking to do this kind of thing have had a number of options available for awhile now. New tech like this will accelerate the trend.
I think one of they pieces to do that is actually being able to explain, not just silently watch your screen, and ask questions,make it a dialogue, even once that you might get pinged on later if they hit a snag or a situation changes and they need confirmation of something.
RPA today is really nothing like that.
Some RPA products have improved this using computer vision so they can more reliably click on the right things.
But I agree that the introduction of natural language is new. But I see that as primarily a change in interface, not outcome. i.e. eliminating tasks that involve systematically doing the same things over and over already has options. This new generation of tech just makes it far easier. I’m sure RPA tools will incorporate it.
I’ll also be curious to see how this kind of thing translates to legacy thick clients where access to the DOM can’t be used to “understand” the interface.
Maybe now we can get closer to completely eliminating some jobs? But I think this challenge will still present itself.
I used to be an innovation analyst at a bank and we looked at automating tasks quite frequently and found that many could be automated. But you are right on the money for why it did not happen.
Tasks are straightforward to automate. Entire job roles are not. If you want to save headcount, you need to automate some tasks and then rethink one, if not several, job roles. That is a lot messier to do.
In most cases, we decided not to bother as we didn't think there would be a net savings.
However, the net gains, in my humble opinion, could be phenomenal. Imagine all the time, mental energy and money spent on navigating through the legacy of today's society? From the legacy legal systems that is super complex, to legacy websites, I believe there is much time to be saved so we can dedicate resources to what truly matters, intellectual pursuits or quality time with friends and family
And historically, have always been phenomenal.
If 100 years ago, you told people that only 1.5% of people in USA/Canada would work in agriculture, politicians would have been horrified and in fear of mass unemployment. They would have been similarly horrified if you told them that virtually nobody would work in textile manufacturing in the Western World.
But in reality, the jobs in the former are considered so dismal that they are heavily staffed by desperate people who have no other legal work options and migrant workers from poor countries and jobs in the latter pay so poorly globally that you would be better off running a lemonade stand in a Western country.
We are far better off for the combine harvester freeing us from harvesting wheat by hand. We are far better off for the sewing machine.
Who's "we"? It's not like the people who aren't working with a scythe have moved up to be un-employed computer programmers, they're just picking fruit now.
People who were sewing by hand as a professional don't generally get the afternoon off now to chill with their homies, they just use the sewing machine all damn day.
The only "we" who is better off are consumers and business operators, because they pay less or nothing for that labour. Nobody is talking about the comfy lives of fast fashion makers or the people who assemble our $7000 MacBook pros.
Doesn't seem like a very humble opinion, every time people lose work they need to find income somewhere else or end up working more anyway. Productivity gains equalling more free time has only really ever worked for people who end up or who were already unemployed or self-employed, otherwise it's propaganda spread by people who stand to gain. Even in cases where someone's job became only less manual, it's not like they suddenly got the rest of the day off to spend with their family, they just ended up operating the machine all day anyway, and often getting paid less to do it, to a point where eventually families and friends as a concept started becoming more rare.
I can see the business perspective for sure. But I really don’t think humanity have the luxury to consume even more energy to run billions of GPUs to do what a programmer team could do and in the meantime having an excuse to not fix its legacy.
That sounds like either totally cyberpunk or very late stage capitalism.
We need to reduce global energy consumption and fix the society as much as we can, not going full throttle in the current direction.