exo : blah

Take the example of container­ized shipping. This is text­book automa­tion, but the picture is not “replacement”, a line of clanking robo-longshoremen carrying bulky cargo from the bellies of ships. Rather, an entirely new task was imagined — moving and stacking enormous, modular containers — and it’s THAT task that was given to machines. It’s hilar­ious, if you think about it: “Ah yes, we auto­mated this onerous human labor … by completely rebuilding the entire phys­ical infrastruc­ture of global shipping, fighting a pitched polit­ical battle along the way!”

Robin Sloan on ChatGPT and why automation is rarely about replicating existing tasks and more about reinventing process to allow machines to do them. It’s at the bottom after the bits about web platform experimentation which are also good.