Summer Reads
We’ve been enjoying the summer over here at CTP. Since the days are long and light-filled, we’re going to keep this week’s newsletter short. Total read time: 2 mins … then you can go touch grass!
This week’s question: What’s a recent AI thought piece that really struck you? Which one is rattling around in your mind?
New York Magazine’s recent piece on bot farms did its rage bait job. I wanted to throw my laptop through a window after reading about “fabricating genuine virality” (ugh) BUT instead of focusing on a dystopian, blood pressure-spiking read, I’d like to point you to Zeynep Tufekci. She is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton and her recent NYT opinion piece absolutely deserves a spot on your summer beach read list.
“The Unstoppable Force of AI Hype is Meeting One Immovable Fact” asks what a fully automated future would look like. It is a deft articulation of the AI “jobspocalypse” and why we (as humans) have the upper hand. In it, she writes,
“...I’m not listening to the dark predictions of an imminent A.I. jobspocalypse. L.L.M.s can do many things with astounding proficiency, but they can’t do the vast majority of human jobs without skidding into disaster here and there. No upgrades or new model rollouts are going to change that.
The exceptions to that rule are jobs that occupy formal or verifiable domains. Coding is one such job. It relies on a structured, formal language that can be tested in real time. That’s why we’re seeing such impact in the coding jobs market. The same goes for any other kind of work in which output is either verifiably right or wrong, functional or not functional, and can be definitively checked through an automated process.
An overwhelming number of jobs, however, don’t work like that — not surgeon jobs and not customer service jobs and not fourth-grade teacher jobs. Those need the specialized technology of good old-fashioned human intelligence.”
See?! I told you it was good!!!
If you don’t have an NYT subscription and want a gift article to the full piece, please reach out.
Abby Lovett, Founder & AI Visibility Advisor, CTP Visibility Advisors. Author of "Super Human: 8 'SMALL' Ways to Be Super at What You Do…and Human While You Do It."
