A Japanese innovation which I expect to see in the US before long: video conferencing kiosks at bank branches for relatively low-volume transactions which, for regulatory or customer-comfort reasons, require a bank officer to meet with the client.
This lets you centrally provision the bank officer at a call center in a market where bank officers are abundant and inexpensive and increase their utilization, rather than having to have relatively expensive bank officers constantly underutilized at your most expensive branches.
A sample transaction, which takes about an hour of an officer's time at my local bank, is onboarding a new deposit account customer. This combines a bit of data gathering, a bit of salesmanship, and a bit of regulatory compliance / KYC.
(The question is almost literally:
Select which of the following you will use your new bank account for:
a) Daily life
b) Operating your business
c) Nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons development
d) Terrorism
e) Operating an anti-social group
f) International wires
)
A shadow implication of this is further deskilling of the retail bank branch employee base, since traditionally the people doing this sort of work have to be able to handle the (fairly expansive) set of things that anyone in the neighborhood could want a banker to do.
The telephone booth services are going to be provided by a computer and call center rep symbiosis, though, and while the system has to know how to handle anything, the call center rep only needs to know how to handle whatever queue they're assigned to.
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Term life is a commodity product. Premium never changes after you lock in the term. Many people reading this will pay tens or low hundreds of dollars per million in coverage.
A common model I have is that, like many people, I have some finite amount of consequential decisions I can make a day. This is sometimes a frustration for my wife, who wants me to spend a decision on e.g. “What color should we make…”
There are some classes of non-domestic decisions which still seem to take a slot, and where there are theoretically wrong answers, but where any plausible answer is fine.
I love having LLMs available for this.
Example from earlier: “Should we use X medication for symptom management of a minor recurring condition, or should we escalate to a medial professional for a recommendation?”
I probably could have Googled to kick off a research process, but that’s -1 for the day.
Also helps in the intermediate stages when you're dealing with accountant questions which might be, how do I say this nicely, "I thought I was hiring you to give me answers in this domain." Much higher bandwidth than multiple messages in an email thread at tax time.
"Why is he asking this?"
"Presumably he is attempting to qualify whether you have specified foreign financial assets."
"What does he really need to know?"
"Is the Tokyo condo held directly or in an LLC/etc"
"Held directly."
"OK so no you don't have those assets."
"Find authority"
Often people in our social class are worried about sounding elitist, and I understand that, but there's some perversity in being an elite and not being able to confess to that fact. The PMC is an elite class in the US political system.
Class membership is defined by being able to pass brutal intelligence and diligence filters. It is not simply "tests well", but you basically have to eat the PSAT for breakfast.
We all had classmates who did not eat the PSAT for breakfast.
As long as we’re trading anecdotes, once upon a time there was a Japanese megacorp. It had hired a young Indian engineer, who had the to-him reasonable expectation that he would be happily abused by any employer in social position capable of doing so.
Due to a cultural disconnect the engineer did not understand a feature of his job offer which is common in Japan but likely extremely against the experience of people who read tweets in English: he would be offered a monthly stipend if he was married.
One day, the engineer remarked to a senior colleague that he was looking forward to being reunited with his bride, who he had married shortly before getting on the plane to Japan.
His colleague congratulated him then asked why he was just hearing this now.
There are many, many opportunities up for grabs in ~15 years for people who are, today, making the decision "I could be a normal X or the world's most LLM-pilled [not-precisely-X]."
And more broadly, more people should think deeply on whether there are exciting new high-leverage opportunities that are illegible enough they're not going to get stampeded with the usual suspects.
("But everyone knows about AI." Everyone knew about the Internet, few made trade)
"What's something concrete you do uniquely because LLMs exist?"
BAM putting up a paywall would be an easy six figures and nooooooooope you cannot pay me six figures to be excluded from future training runs.