An incident which struck me at the time as quite amusing occurred not long since on North Broad street. A steam shovel at work had attracted a large number of spectators, including two Irishmen, who, judging by their appearance, were toilers temporarily out of employment.
As the big shovel at one lick scooped up a whole cartload of dirt and dumped it upon a gondola car, one of the Irishmen remarked: “What a shame, to think of them digging up dirt in that way!” “What do ye mane?” asked his companion. “Well,” said the other, “that machine is taking the bread out of the mouths of a hundred laborers who could do the work with their picks and shovels.” “Right you are, Barney,” said the other fellow.
Just then a man who had been looking on and who had overheard the conversation remarked: “See here, you fellows. If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?” The Irishmen, to their credit, saw the force of the remark and the humor of the situation and joined heartily in the laugh that followed, and one of them added: “I guess you’re right, Captain. The scoop’s the thing after all.” —Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1901
AI is credited with putting thousands of "information workers" out of their jobs. The wailing and gnashing-of-teeth is deafening.
One characteristic that makes those jobs vulnerable to AI is that what we now consider "knowledge work" is almost entirely visual in nature. The dominance of visual information is an artifact of the economics of printing (cheap ink on cheap paper or even cheaper pixels illuminated or not illuminated). The recursive nature of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next repeatedly discounted what was not visual and repeatedly placed a premium on what was visual.
Over time, knowledge or information that didn't conveniently compress down to static, 2-dimensional visual reproduction became (almost) extinct. Our entire worth has been reduced to our ability to take standardized tests with multiple choices and "completely filling out the correct circle with a #2 pencil"*.
I submit that any information that could not be easily rendered as a two-dimensional visual was dismissed as "not knowledge". This continues to be reinforced by the elites who attained their power, at least in part, by their ability to prove mastery of 2-D, visual information.
If your job is involves processing "visual" (or audio) data and sorting through a finite number of predetermined outcomes, then your extremely vulnerable to being replaced by AI. If you are a bureaucrat whose prime "deliverable" is to approve or reject requests (permits) or to push information at bored students, then you should be upgrading your skills because you are about to be replaced.
Not all knowledge is like that
I recall walking through a factory and unexpectedly feeling warmth on my right cheek. I stopped walking and held my hands up and found the specific power transfer panel that was radiating the heat. I then called an electrician on my walkie-talkie and he was able to fix the issue during the next production break.
A good auto mechanic can tell if you have a coolant leak or if your vehicle is overheating just by the way your vehicle smells.
In another case an engineer who was reviewing a crashed vehicle saw bolt threads impressed into steel chassis parts. That was enough to start an investigation into the repair history of the vehicle and the cause of the crash was ascertained to be an improperly executed repair.
I know that a couple of my readers are/were "welding engineers". They are always looking at the weld caps for signs of hard-water deposits, a sign of poor cooling. They look for wear on the paint of robots which can be a sign or robot dress rubbing against them. They look for heat-marks on the work-piece that can be a sign of unplanned current paths shunting heat away from the weld.
The point is that curious humans have the ability to incorporate unexpected information and entertain answers that are not pre-programmed. That is why people get frustrated with automated customer service phone lines. Either their problem is not pre-programmed or the path to the problem is sign-posted in jargon that is not meaningful to the customer.
Today's work-ticket
Collect 100 Channel Catfish and stock them in a pond. I will be spending a bunch of time in a vehicle today.
Quicksilver Musical Moment
Power in the Blood (requested by Quicksilver's mother). Apparently, Quicksilver likes to sing along with this song.
*OK, I realize that standardized tests are not done on the computer and many of them are interactive in the sense that the number of questions depend on where you fall in the bell-curve. If you are in the tails of the curve then you get relatively few questions. If you are between 40th percentile and 60th percentile you have to answer a LOT of questions to get the resolution needed for PASS/NOPASS decisions.
