Post Information Scarcity

https://danangell.com/blog/posts/post-information-scarcity/

2 2 3 years ago

if it’s your job to know things[,] GPT is coming for your paycheck
if it’s your job to discover truly novel information, GPT can’t compete with you

It's not only the price of the part; it's also knowing where to put it. Labor is the bulk of the cost.

GPT as an instant aggregator of tribal knowledge would be grand: hook it up to Slack, git, Jira, and corp wiki. Set up a /gpt chatbot and ask all kinds of stuff:

  * /gpt what did we do yesterday, what are
    we doing today
  * /gpt what do they mean when they talk
    about event sourcing; why would that
    cost more story points
  * /gpt which schemas have a column that
    contains PII
  * /gpt which builds are failing
    consistently

Another idea is, for siloed teams, each person interacts with GPT if that's more comfortable. Then any person's query is answered by the AI.

Regardless of LLM capabilities, there may always need to be a human to (blamelessly review post-mortem with) or page.

As much as ChatGPT--or future tools--help automate typing language, hierarchy almost totally ensures a "person of appropriate role and responsibility" is there.

ofalkaed• 3 years ago

Information scarcity has not been an issue in a long time, most people have far more information than they need or know what to do with, hence the rise of analysis paralysis. AI will help sift through the information but it will not help much with applying the information it supplies, we are still a good ways off from AI being a one stop shop and people with specialized knowledge will still be in demand for a good while.

This stuff reminds me of the promises of the nuclear age and the rise of automation in industry, but those promises were empty because you still need someone to design, build, maintain and operate those machines. We still have to put the dishes in the dishwasher, add soap, press start, put the dishes away in the cupboards when it is done and call the repairman when it breaks. Perhaps someday technology will be self sustaining but we are a long ways from that, all AI really does is change where the people are needed and what specialized knowledge they need.

Post Information Scarcity

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