This is going to be a soapbox article. “Working with AI,” Thomas H. Davenport and Steven M. Miller, is an MIT Press book that has some good points but overall loses out. As the headline states, this book has a nice spread of case studies, but the higher point they try to make is not correct.
Let’s start with the good. As mentioned, the first two-thirds of this book is a series of fairly short case studies that show the breadth of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption across the business world. AI is a very valuable tool and it is increasingly being used in many ways that impact business and citizens day-to-day. For those who want to understand the rapid spread of the technology, this book will help them see how adaptable AI is and how it is transforming knowledge and processes.
It's that last part, however, where the authors miss, and they most likely do it intentionally. The repeated trope that AI won’t destroy jobs is used in a way that academics are providing to management to use in their own corporate messaging. Messaging, not reality. The AI revolution is not an industrial revolution, and economies aren’t where they were in the Eighteenth Century.
The best way to talk about what will happen to jobs is to use one of the case studies and then a part of the polemic later in the book. One case study is about how underwriting has changed. AI is being used for the simplest of underwriting cases, the argument being that will help lower boredom of the experts and let them focus on the complex cases. An expert employee, however, does wonder how they will train the next generation of underwriters, since humans no longer will see the easiest ones, the policies on which people learn in order to prepare for the complex cases. It’s a valid point, but it’s short term.
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidteich/2022/11/15/working-with-ai-read-it-for-the-case-studies/?sh=57c238a43367
Let’s start with the good. As mentioned, the first two-thirds of this book is a series of fairly short case studies that show the breadth of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption across the business world. AI is a very valuable tool and it is increasingly being used in many ways that impact business and citizens day-to-day. For those who want to understand the rapid spread of the technology, this book will help them see how adaptable AI is and how it is transforming knowledge and processes.
It's that last part, however, where the authors miss, and they most likely do it intentionally. The repeated trope that AI won’t destroy jobs is used in a way that academics are providing to management to use in their own corporate messaging. Messaging, not reality. The AI revolution is not an industrial revolution, and economies aren’t where they were in the Eighteenth Century.
The best way to talk about what will happen to jobs is to use one of the case studies and then a part of the polemic later in the book. One case study is about how underwriting has changed. AI is being used for the simplest of underwriting cases, the argument being that will help lower boredom of the experts and let them focus on the complex cases. An expert employee, however, does wonder how they will train the next generation of underwriters, since humans no longer will see the easiest ones, the policies on which people learn in order to prepare for the complex cases. It’s a valid point, but it’s short term.
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidteich/2022/11/15/working-with-ai-read-it-for-the-case-studies/?sh=57c238a43367
