Column 2: “Instant Experts: What Robots Are Unnervingly Good At Right Away”
Let me tell you about the worst first day anyone has ever had at a job.
It was yours. And mine. It was everyone’s.
You showed up not knowing where the bathroom was. You asked questions you’d later be embarrassed about. You made small mistakes and bigger ones. You nodded along in meetings while understanding about 40 percent of what was happening. You went home exhausted from the effort of simply trying, and you lay awake wondering if you’d made a terrible mistake taking this job at all.
That’s what it costs humans to start something new. Weeks or months of being worse at the job than the person who left. A slow, stumbling climb toward competence that we’ve come to accept as just how things work.
Now imagine a competitor who skips all of that.
Not someone who gets good fast. Someone who arrives already at the top. No orientation, no learning curve, no bad days. Just full capability, from the first minute, deployed everywhere at once.
That’s what we’re dealing with. And it changes everything about how we think about human work.
Continue reading… “The Last Shift”