What was the ratio of phone time spent talking to human vs computer receptionists when Pinker published this quote in 2007? For that matter, how much non-phone time was being spent using a website to perform a transaction that would have previously required interaction with a human receptionist?
Pinker understood AI correctly (it’s still way too hard to handle arbitrary interactions with customers), yet he failed to predict the present, much less the future, because he misunderstood the economics. Most interactions with customers are very non-arbitrary. If 10% need human intervention, then you put a human in the loop after the other 90% have been taken care of by much-cheaper software.
If you were to say “a machine can’t do everything a horse can do”, you’d be right, even today, but that isn’t a refutation of the effect of automation on the economic prospects of equine labor.
What was the ratio of phone time spent talking to human vs computer receptionists when Pinker published this quote in 2007? For that matter, how much non-phone time was being spent using a website to perform a transaction that would have previously required interaction with a human receptionist?
Pinker understood AI correctly (it’s still way too hard to handle arbitrary interactions with customers), yet he failed to predict the present, much less the future, because he misunderstood the economics. Most interactions with customers are very non-arbitrary. If 10% need human intervention, then you put a human in the loop after the other 90% have been taken care of by much-cheaper software.
If you were to say “a machine can’t do everything a horse can do”, you’d be right, even today, but that isn’t a refutation of the effect of automation on the economic prospects of equine labor.