Paul Welty, PhD WORK, BEING, AND STAYING HUMAN

Polymathic

Essays, notes, and experiments — mostly about work, AI, and how to be a better human in the middle of all of it.

Generative AI's Transformative Power

In a McKinsey Global Institute podcast, business professor Ethan Mollick expresses his concern that the implications of generative AI are not being taken seriously enough, stating that the technology underlying ChatGPT is so transformative that he is betting his career on it. He believes that it will cause a shift in the way people work and interact as significant as anything seen in our lifetimes. The Forward Thinking podcast is focused on looking at the future of business and society. read more >

How Chatbots Are Taking Jobs

The article reports on how many people who worked in customer service jobs have lost their employment due to the rising popularity of chatbots. By interacting with customers over the Internet, chatbots have replaced some roles that were formerly carried out by human staff. Now, many former customer service workers have turned to new professions such as dog-walking or air conditioning repair, which require human skills and are less susceptible to being taken over by automation. read more >

Pushing Content into Hugo

The writer has been experimenting with a proof of concept Hugo site using IFTTT; a recipe tool that feeds information into a Dropbox text file and onto a Hugo content page. He included a links page based on the websites he personally included via the Pocket app. While the implementation works well, there is a problem with Hugo watch updates when the links text file is changed, preventing a live update. Though he works around this problem with cron, he is interested in any suggestions for a better approach. read more >

Redefining Digital Transformation Success

The article “A New Way To Depict Digital Transformation” discusses how successful companies in the digital age are managed differently than their counterparts. With the market capitalization of the top five tech firms now exceeding $9 trillion, other public companies are left wondering why they can’t achieve similar success. The article suggests that digitization is not just about implementing technology, but about creating a new culture and management practices that are focused on customer value. It proposes a new way of visualizing digital transformation as a process of … read more >

The Impact of GPT-4 on Jobs

A recent analysis by OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania estimates that large language models like GPT-4 could heavily affect 19% of jobs, which are mainly higher-income jobs such as writers, web and digital designers, financial quantitative analysts, and blockchain engineers. Unlike earlier waves of automation, generative AI such as GPT-4 can perform tasks that were typically viewed as creative, such as writing and producing graphics. The worry is not large-scale unemployment but rather that relatively well-paying white-collar jobs will be replaced with this new form of automation. … read more >