most of the hard work improving systems now is handling the long tail of bizarre edge cases in natural language. alternative strat to chop the tail off
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strong value prop in forcing copywriters/PR people/etc to learn a new standardized dialect of "business $NATIVELANG" designed to translate well
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this isn't really a new idea, serves the same utility function as luoyang mandarin or merchant pidgins, just in a new technological context
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most of the time "automation" is really about forcing humans to adapt to technology to eke out incremental productivity gains
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it takes a large disruption of the labor force to overcome the initial investment hurdle required to replace a swath of workers in one swoop
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I thought of the language thing because I was reminded of a poetically depraved anecdote from one of those articles on amazon warehouses
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(if you know what this is from pls link because I want to quote it in something and can never find it)
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the background is amazon warehouses are rather tightly run, people are equipped with headsets that command them exactly what to do at any moment
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and management is made into a "perfect" bureaucracy, zero individual judgement, entirely process-based, you live or die by your pick rate
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so this story on the warehouse floor, someone knocks over a can of paint. the workers, just as robots, trudge through the paint like it isn't even there
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now obviously these people are conscious of what they are doing, whereas a robot might just not be programmed for that contingency. but the behavior is identical
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the reason for this is because of simple incentives structures. if they stopped to clean up the paint, it would trash their metrics
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anyway, there's no reason you can't do that to white collar types presuming you deskill the work enough, this is the logical conclusion of fordism
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An entire language was created for this purpose: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban
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no, lojban and friends are full-fledge languages with their significant learning curves and complexity.
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the key here is deliberate simplicity of a sort that wouldn't work for general-purpose, human-use language.
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Ah, like a programming language.
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more like a deliberately constrained human language. specify a simple grammar and stipulate "stick to this."
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I think there's a sort of uncanny valley between formal languages and natural languages that people naturally don't want to occupy.
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...which is why, despite the possible utility, no one has created a formalized subset of the English language.
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...that people actually speak/write.
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