Gigaom AI Minute – March 26

Transcript

At Gigaom.com/quiz, there is a ten question test that scores how likely any given job is to be replaced by automation, be it by a computer or a robot. I'm going to spend ten AI Minutes going through the questions one at a time, and why they're on the test.

Question #6: How long does it take to make the hardest decision on the job?

You could score this a 0 if the hardest decision takes five seconds or more. That might be something like a trial lawyer, who has to spend a good deal of time considering strategy and so forth. On the other hand, you could score it a 10, which is more likely to be automated, for jobs that require less than two seconds, and that might be a movie ticket salesperson, or a toll booth operator. And then there are jobs in the middle, something like a house painter, where they have to make decisions about direction or color or which to paint first and all of that, but most of the decisions are reasonably straightforward.

This is generally a good indicator that the harder it is to make a decision for a human, that more is going on, and therefore more will have to be instantiated in the AI. It can, of course, be not as accurate in the sense that there are a lot of things that people can instantly do that we still have a hard time building tools to do for them. But as a general rule, the length of time it takes to make a decision is a pretty good proxy for how likely something is to be automated.