Monday, December 23, 2013

quote from "Race Against the Machine" regarding the growing intuitive abilities of computers and robots

Where people still win (at least for now).

Although computers are encroaching into territory that used to be occupied by people alone, like advanced pattern recognition and complex communication, for now humans still hold the high ground in each of these areas. Experienced doctors, for example, make diagnoses by comparing the body of medical knowledge they've accumulated against patients' lab results and descriptions of symptoms, and also by employing the advanced subconscious pattern recognition abilities we label "intuition".
(Does this patient seem like they're holding something back? Do they look healthy, or is something off about their skin tone or energy level?) Similarly, the best therapists, managers, and salespeople excel at interacting and communicating with others, and their strategies for gathering behavior can be amazingly complex.

But it's also true, as the examples in this chapter show, that as we move deeper into the second half of the chessboard, computers are rapidly getting better at both of these skills. We're starting to see evidence that this digital progress is affecting the business world. A March 2011 story by Joh Markoff in the New York Times highlighted how heavily computers' pattern recognition abilities are already being exploited by the legal industry where, according to one estimate moving from human to digital labor during the discovery process could let one lawyer do the work of 500.

In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, California, helped analyze 1. 5 milion documents for less than $100,000........"From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out," said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. "People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don't."

The above is a quote from about 31% into "Race Against the machine" a book on the competition for work by humans with increasingly intelligent and intuitive machines. And slowly and methodically in fits and spurts humans without a college education around the world will be more and more out of luck in getting gainful employment they way things are presently going in regard to efficient and progressively more (intuitive and instinctual) machines.

Since I slightly enlarged the print on my Kindle the page numbers of a paper book are no longer valuable other than to say I am between 31% and 32% of my way into the book on my Kindle.

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