Fragments: September 8

Christian Catalini says we’re in a situation where we are vastly reducing the cost of generating things, but not the cost of verifying them:. This explains why the first major AI products appeared in chat, image generation, and code assistance. Not because these were the hardest human problems, but because their outputs were relatively easy to inspect. A user can judge the tone of a message, look at an image, or run a test on a piece of code. […] The old automation boundary was routine versus non-routine work. The new boundary is increasingly measurable versus non-measurable work. The issue is then over how well you can measure something. In our profession, we know there’s a big difference between how many lines of code we write and how productive we are, and we’ve seen a regular failure to understand how to measure productivity. Too much of what makes work effective is subject to either slow feedback loops or assessments that require subtle judgment. The danger is that people use lots AI automation while using incomplete measurements of its effectiveness, leading to short-term dashboards going up, but disaster in longer time-scales. He refers to these illusory short-term gains as…

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