Clive Robinson • June 17, 2025 8:04 AM
@ Bruce,
With regards,
“But it may still be used whenever it has an advantage over humans in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope and sophistication.”
You’ve left out the most important,
“Repeatability”
Especially “reliable repeatability”
Where AI will score is in two basic areas,
1, Drudge / Makework jobs
2, High end reference based professional work.
The first actually occupies depending on who you believe between 1/6th and 2/5ths of the work force.
We’ve seen this eat into jobs involving “guard labour” first with CCTV to “consolidate and centralise” to reduce head count. Then to use automation / AI to replace thus reduce head count even further.
The second is certain types of “professional work” where there are complex rules to be followed, such as accountancy and law.
In essence such proffessions are actually “a game” like chess or go, and can be fairly easily automated away.
The reason it’s not yet happened is the “hallucination issue”. Which actually arises because of “uncurated input” as training data etc. Which is the norm for current AI LLM and ML systems.
Imagine a “chess machine” that only sees game records of all games. Which includes those where people cheat or break the rules.
The ML can not tell if cheating is happening… So will include cheats in it’s “winning suggestions”. Worse it will “fill in” between “facts” as part of the “curve fitting” process. Which due to the way input is “tokenised and made into weights” makes hallucination all to easily possible.
It’s what we’ve seen with those legal persons who have had to work with limited or no access to “legal databases” and has caused Judges to get a little irritable under the collar.
The same applies to accountancy and tax law, but is going to take a while to “hit the courts”.
With correct input curation and secondary refrence checking through authoritive records these sorts of errors will reduce to acceptable levels.
At which point the human professional in effect becomes redundant.
Though care has to be exercised, some apparently “rules based professions” are actually quite different. Because they essentially require “creativity” for “innovation”. So scientists and engineers, architects and similar “designer / creatives” will gain advantage as AI can reduce the legislative / regulatory lookup / checking burden. In a similar way that more advanced CAD/CAM can do the “drudge work” calculations of standard load tolerances and the like.
