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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Matt Levine has a great piece today (well, you knew that) covering Goodhart’s law in the context of how ineffective it is to track mouse movements as a proxy for white collar productivity.
I think this is tempting thing for management to institute because there is a… suspicion.
That suspicion is not “so-called ‘email jobs’ are actually not productive at all.” This is believed by many people on the Internet. Those people are greatly miscalibrated. The world runs on email. Email causes physical results in the world. Coordination/communication are valuable
The thing which management believes is “I have a rather strong suspicion that, somewhere in my vast workforce of people doing white collar jobs, there are malingerers. Not merely people who are bad at their job. No. Some who are actively abusing me, and laughing about it.”
A memorable moment in new employee training for me was when the trainer said that most people working professionally in our field could not whiteboard out funds and data flow between all entities in a credit card transaction. She asked why I could, given no experience in industry
The answer I gave was that I had credit card processing accounts before and read the documentation and contracts carefully. This was true, but was a bit of a fib.
The real reason was I was curious about how PayPal worked in 2004 and had some time to kill.
You’d be surprised what you can learn by reading more of the Internet than anyone thinks is reasonable.
You’d also be surprised how many people consider themselves cogs in a machine, with a bit of knowledge of what their gears touch and then no real interest beyond that.
Once upon a time I wrote letters on behalf of people to banks. I don’t do that anymore, in general, but I still get asked sometimes. I have been told, but not tried much, that GPT is very good when you tell it to cosplay as me specifically doing this.
So today I got an email.
In “help the correspondent learn to fish” mode, I suggested they use ChatGPT to do this. But, since prompt engineering is a thing, thought I could take 30 seconds to write an example prompt.
This is not verbatim a letter I once ghostwrote on behalf of someone in exactly this situation, and you can see in the transcript that I had one or two thoughts. But otherwise, this is almost exactly what I’d write.
Took 30 seconds, and not the 15 minutes this typically did.
(If one doesn’t like the LLM part of it then sculptors exist, and decoupling their location from the building’s location is ~newly an option.)
(I suspect the guy I like in France who does really nice elves would be happy to use the usual workflow on the usual tools to deliver the usual STL file of a Greek god with the funny non-usual detail being the final print will not be 32mm tall.)
Somewhat self-indulgent because I'm mentioned in the thread, but yeah, this is a concrete example of Google getting convincingly outcompeted in search, *which should surprise me* and no longer does.
I haven't yet replaced my core uses of Google Search with "just ask an LLM already, they have a non-zero chance of getting it right" but I think there are a lot of searches for a lot of people where that is already obviously the optimal play.
One very common genre for me is "tip of the tongue" searches, which for common knowledge questions I've already moved entirely to ChatGPT, but for "can you find a document I read in mid-2000s with the following properties" I still default to considered use of Google.
I think Twitter porn bots are something like a visible test of non-state capacity.
Similar to the old line about McDonalds restrooms’ cleanliness: easy to check, hard to fake, surprisingly difficult to solve at scale, solvable at scale given sufficient capacity.
And when I think of capacity degradation at Twitter under current management the people who expected it to failwhale and then go hard down permanently were clearly wrong and the people who expected no impact to capacity in firing X0% seem to also be wrong.
Guess what will very predictably happen if I click any button here.