As in, OMG, I didn’t realize AI could do that.
If you think you’re having those AIOMG moments more and more frequently, that it is not your imagination. AI is improving and morphing faster than you — or at least, I — would have believed possible.
A month is like a year, stuff that’s two months old is passe. This stuff is improving not at the speed at which software improves, but at the speed of learning.
It’s hard to know where to start.
Join the Borg
After doing my last post, I realized that now I can easily post transcriptions of my own voice recordings. In effect, the written transcription of a one-person podcast. So I'm using my phone like an old-style dictaphone, turning it on and off after I compose my thoughts and come up with a complete sentence. Weirdly, I find that this has much the same effect on my language processing as does using a typewriter. There's a real premium on getting your shit together first and then speaking, and not the other way around.
Dictation is nothing new. Anything voice-activated or with speech-to-text capability already does this. My TV remote does this. Everybody’s phone does this. And so on.
And it’s not as if I haven’t tried this in the past. But the speech-to-text function in (say) 2013 Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired. I tried to integrated it into my business, but it was so error-ridden as to be worse than unusable.
Whereas this current generation of AI-driven speech-to-text produces perfect transcriptions. Or, if not perfect, then about as close as one could possibly hope for.
And it’s a different thing to do it for my own self, for this purpose. I’ve already had somebody knowledgeable tell me to try this, if for no other reason than to offer the consumer a choice of format. But I never thought I might substitute talking this blog, for writing it.
What I’ve done above is a bit different because I did it dicatation-style, not podcast-style. That is, the transcript is meant to be used as-is, with little or no editing, as a written product. This requires taking the time to compose and speak in complete, logical sentences. So I’m not sure how much time this saves, relative to writing it out from the start.
But it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to practice doing that, every once in a while. That is, thinking before you speak. Not in an attempt at censoring myself, but merely in an attempt to speak coherently, instead of the usual logorrhea.
Transcribed podcasts, by contrast, are meant to be interpreted as conversational English. Even when consumed as a written transcript. There, the transcription is not intended to read as if it were … written, if you get the drift. Even if you take out all the uhs and ers, it’ll be as non-linear and piecemeal as conversation is. Even the best off-the-cuff speakers will break many rules of written grammar.
The death of knowledge-worker career paths for middle-class upward mobility.
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a fellow who's deeply involved with AI. And the one thing we agreed upon is that AI is going to kill entry-level positions and mid-level positions in the knowledge worker industries. I think this shuts down a common path to upward mobility for the current middle class. And for sure, it ain't going to do anything good for Vienna, VA property values, because we are in the middle of a knowledge worker area. What this does to the value of an education is anybody's guess, but my guess is that it reduces it on average substantially with all the knock-on that implies for the U.S. education industry.
This is AI replacement theory, in a nutshell, first discussed in:
And the whole operation is now driven by firehoses of money. Those firehoses deriving from the elimination of (forerly) paying, staffed junior positions. The work model moves from Principal and junior staff, to Principal and some AIs. The first person to be able to claim to eliminate or reduce job X, Y, or Z can grab some of the savings from elimination of those (paying, human) jobs.
This, not unlike any other labor-saving invention, ever. It’s just that, in part, it’s labor that I used to do. This time they’re coming after my job. If I still had a job.
Conclusion: This seems like the final shredding of the U.S. middle class.
My brain is having a hard time adjusting to the fact that it is now largely obsolete. I am not alone in this feeling. Just today, my wife commented that many of the jobs she held, earlier in her life, will be all-but-eliminated by AI.
I note, parenthetically, that the rapid, flawless transcripts (in plain text, above) are from TurboScribe, which costs $20 a month ($10 if I’d commit to a year). Practically speaking, unlimited use.
There used to be a profession of “transcriptionist”. I can recall it taking week(s) to get the transcripts back from monthly public meetings. I haven’t checked, but I’d bet that’s a thing of the past.
Intellectually, I get it. I grew up in the pre-calculator era, when arithmetic was done with paper and pencil. Those arcane skills have been essentially useless for decades, and I have not overly mourned their loss of relevance.
Intellectually, I realize that professions wax and wane in their economic importance. E.g., the fraction of the work force engaged in broad categories such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and so on have changed over time.
Of late, I’d say that the urban information worker, broadly defined, was King.
And, AI may not de-throne him, but for sure, it’s going knock down the population employed in that “industry” a peg. Anybody who makes their living doing the grunt-work of knowledge work — the junior attorney, the research assistant, the para-this or para-that — I’d expect that a lot of those jobs are going and they’re not coming back.
By contrast, I draw a sharp distinction with robotics. I’m guessing that anybody who actually (in whole or in part) handles solid objects will be OK. An AI-equipped robot is still a robot. I don’t expect (e.g.) robot electricians any time soon.
As a final Vienna Lemma: Areas that benefit greatly by the presence of many information workers will likely be adversely affected, economically, by the next phase of the AI revolution.
I bet property prices around here are going to take a hit. To some small degree, from the first round of attacks on Federal employment. But more generally, Vienna is like the epicenter of housing for an affluent information-worker-centered workforce.
We’ll see. It takes a lot to rattle the housing market in this area. Even in 2008, when the housing bubble collapsed (and nearly took the U.S. banking system with it), real estate prices in Vienna were merely flat-ish for a few years.
At any rate, a significant decline in real estate prices would be interesting, for at least the reason that it hasn’t happened here (in Vienna, VA) for a long time.
Maybe we’ll finally see the end of the tear-down boom. But I’ve predicted that several times before.
