Marginalium

Will AI automate your job? It’s called the time-horizon model, and I found it reassuring:

The key idea where the American worker is concerned is that your job is as automatable as the smallest, fully self-contained task is. For example, call center jobs might be (and are!) very vulnerable to automation, as they consist of a day of 10- to 20-minute or so tasks stacked back-to-back. Ditto for many forms of many types of freelancer services, or paralegals drafting contracts, or journalists rewriting articles.

Compare this to a CEO who, even in a day broken up into similar 30-minute activities—a meeting, a decision, a public appearance—each required years of experiential context that a machine can’t yet simply replicate.

Less good for people just starting out. Experience is still very important for AI, both as above, but also to manage hallucinations. The throughline is how to get to whatever that space is without needing to go through all the stuff AI does better.