Killing people with drone strikes is worse than clamato, but I’m not sure by how much.
When a drone tosses a bomb at you, you’re usually dead. But when you drink clamato you must live the horror of that experience for the rest of your life.
Day: September 14, 2015, 1:28 PM
Time lag
Your Job Is Safe From the Computers — For Now.
Good piece, but I wouldn’t even be so sure about that “for now” part. These days, even absent true AI, it’s more a matter of cost than of capability.
For instance where I work now, I could pretty easily eliminate 30% of the jobs in the entire company if someone gave me $500,000 and two good coders for a year.
Hell, if someone gave me alone a year of uninterrupted and undivided time just to work on what I know is easily possible, I could probably eliminate 20% of those jobs all by myself with some simple scripts and a few off-the-shelf tools.
This is true most anywhere.
When anything even approaching decent AI (even domain-specific) is out there, the cost proposition will look even better.
Right now if you have a job that is mainly doing the same thing over and over it’s actually shockingly easy to automate, but the bean counters haven’t realized it yet because things are moving fast and they are always 5-7 years behind.
But they will realize it. Oh trust me, they will.
Fanning the flames
Two additions to this list (which is pretty good):
Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina. Her performance is controlled, warm when it needs to be, yet somehow alien, foreign. Her ballet training is as much the star as her acting (which is excellent), but that’s not a bad thing. Ava might be an android, but Vikander makes her breathe.
And Elle Fanning in Super 8. She is the only reason to watch that film — her stark, empathetic and wounded performance just blazes off the screen. In this film she is simply amazing and the movie also has the best example of meta-acting that I’ve ever seen (also from her, of course). She’s the best under-twenty actress out there by a long shot and her character feels like the only real one in Super 8. The movie should’ve by all rights been told from her POV.