I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the “real employees” how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really “tricky” macros on the side (he’d upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a “white collar worker” without any “algoracy” (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to “blue collar work” and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there’s this thing called the singularity… but if you’re here reading and commenting on this site you’re probably already something like an expert in the “far mode” theory of the singularity :-P
The implications of the singularity to things like politics and job skill acquisition are the “near mode” applications that are still being worked out by basically everyone… but I suspect the importance of algoracy is one of the obvious practical implications.
I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the “real employees” how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really “tricky” macros on the side (he’d upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a “white collar worker” without any “algoracy” (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to “blue collar work” and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there’s this thing called the singularity… but if you’re here reading and commenting on this site you’re probably already something like an expert in the “far mode” theory of the singularity :-P
The implications of the singularity to things like politics and job skill acquisition are the “near mode” applications that are still being worked out by basically everyone… but I suspect the importance of algoracy is one of the obvious practical implications.