NPR ran a piece this morning about Watson, the IBM computer that is now the world's Jeopardy champion, having beaten the top human players on live TV a while ago. Watson has been hired to do legal scutwork, replacing 500 lawyers. (Question: What's 500 lawyers thrown out of work by a computer? Ans: A good start)
The NPR piece ran on speculating that massive unemployment awaits as computers take over from humans in other places.
Funny thing, the piece was all science fiction, things that might happen in the future. They didn't talk about draftsmen, clerk typists and travel agents. All of which have gone away since I started working.
Back when I started in industry, I sketched the needed drawings on squared paper and then went down to drafting. Where a full time draftsman would make beautiful D size drawings in ink on vellum. Or, even more time consuming, "tape out" a printed circuit board, laying each trace out with thin sticky tape. My first real design, a 4 by 8 inch CPU board, took a draftsman four weeks to tape out. Back then companies had more draftsmen than engineers.
Then we engineers got desktop computers with CAD programs. I could produce better drawings, faster, right on my desktop. The last few places I worked, before retiring, had no draftsmen at all. The engineers did all the drawings, using desktop CAD.
Back when I started work, everything written, memo's, proposals, instruction manuals, test procedures, parts lists had to be typed. And companies had clerk typists who took hand written rough copy and typed out fair copy using the legendary IBM Selectric typewriter. Then we got Word for Windows. Pretty soon everyone typed their own stuff on their own desktop computer. Again, the last couple of companies I worked for, didn't even have one clerk typist.
And, back then, to go on a trip, you called the company travel agency and they arranged air tickets, rental cars, and motels. Not any more, everyone makes their own arrangements using Orbitz or Travelocity. The travel agencies are mostly gone by now.
So, fairly humble automation has already replaced a lot of workers. I mean a $600 Windows desktop is peanuts compared to Watson. The cheapy desktops ought to replace a lot of pure paper shuffling jobs. Which isn't all bad, who really wants to shuffle paper for a living?
2 comments:
Our company has been using the technology to expand our capabilities, meaning we're able to do more with the same number of people. I guess that's progress.
Do you remember when 'going paperless' was the big incentive for automating the office? But it seemed we generated even more paper after the change rather than less. But over the past 6 months we've started using new apps that allow us to mark up just about any electronic document, including PDFs, rather than having to print them out and then red-line them. Since then the amount of paper we actually use has plummeted 90%.
Gee, it's only taken us 2 decades to approach something even resembling a paperless office! Ain't progress grand?
I can remember when office automation meant Mr. Coffee.
What is the application that lets you markup a .pdf? Right now I don't have anything that will edit or extract anything from a .pdf file. I assume there are such things out their, I just never looked hard for them.
I used to have to turn all the output from my CAD programs into .pdf files so the guys in production (who didn't have CAD) could get hard copy off the company network or off the floppy disk I handed them. Most things, parts lists, test procedures, schematics, the guy on the bench needed a paper copy to work from.
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