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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • British advertising executive Rory Sutherland coined the term “doorman fallacy” in his 2019 book Alchemy. Sutherland uses the concept of the humble hotel doorman to illustrate how businesses can misjudge the value a person brings to the role.

    To a business consultant, a doorman appears to simply stand by the entrance. They engage in small talk with those coming and going, and occasionally operate the door.

    If that’s the entirety of the job, a technological solution can easily replace the doorman, reducing costs. However, this strips away the true complexity of what a doorman provides.

    The role is multifaceted, with intangible functions that extend beyond just handling the door. Doormen help guests feel welcome, hail taxis, enhance security, discourage unwelcome behaviour, and offer personalised attention to regulars. Even the mere presence of a doorman elevates the prestige of a hotel or residence, boosting guests’ perception of quality.

    When you ignore all these intangible benefits, it’s easy to argue the role can be automated. This is the doorman fallacy – removing a human role because technology can imitate its simplest function, while ignoring the layers of nuance, service and human presence that give the role its true value.






  • I’m sure there are many jobs AI is not capable of doing but some CEOs probably do a bad enough job that an AI chat bot could probably do better.

    I know we like to dump on CEOs all the time but a good CEO does not seem like one that could be replaced by AI, certainly not by what is currently being hyped. There are just a lot of highly visible companies with CEOs who aren’t actually very good. I suspect the dysfunction of publicly traded companies and the goals of Wall Street investors (or other nations’ equivalents) frequently not aligning with a good long-term health of a company has a strong influence on this.

    And of course these guys will be happy to have AI replace them; they’ve already made boatloads of money and think they’ll be able to keep that going even if they lose their job.




  • jqubed@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldNeedy Programs
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    2 months ago

    The one area I would sorta disagree is on updates, although only inasmuch as they’re needed for security fixes on things connected to the internet. But if it’s not connected? No, no updates needed unless I encounter a bug or they add a new feature I really want.


  • To tag along with this, I remember this becoming an issue 10 or 15 years ago and a lot of the big lyrics websites were forced to reach licensing agreements with the songwriting groups like ASCAP and BMI (they collect and distribute royalties on behalf of the writers). I think a couple sites tried going to court to claim fair use but lost pretty quickly. That’s pretty established law going back to the earliest days of music publishing. Just because they were publishing online instead of printing up songbooks doesn’t mean the laws change.


  • Marrow was interested in “how public institutions decide what’s worth showing, and what happens when something outside that system appears within it”.

    He said using artificial intelligence to create it was “part of the natural evolution of artistic tools”, adding he sketched the image before he used AI.

    “AI is here to stay, to gatekeep its capability would be against the beliefs I hold dear about art,” he said.

    […]

    The artist, who said similar stunts he had carried out at Bristol Museum and Tate Modern were not “approved, sanctioned, or acknowledged”, denied it was vandalism.

    “The work isn’t about disruption. It’s about participation without permission,” he said.

    “I’m not asking permission, but I’m not causing harm either.”

    It’s like the same “logic” AI companies use when they take copyrighted content without permission: claim you’re not causing harm so you don’t need permission. They don’t see the harm, so from their perspective it’s fine, even if the creator doesn’t want them taking their work.

    Railing at the institution as being gatekeepers might reveal the flaw in their logic. People or institutions are entitled to decide what belongs in their collection and what does not. Random outsiders are not entitled to be a part of that collection. They can be invited in if the curators are interested in their work, but the curators are generally not required to add them just because they’ve made something. The artist can create their own collection and invite others to be a part of it, but they’re not entitled to be in anyone’s collection. They also can’t just go and take something from someone else’s collection without permission, and even taking a photo of someone else’s work and placing it in their collection would at the very least be bad form. The other artist is just as entitled to decide where they do or don’t want their work displayed.

    With encryption and encryption backdoors I often use the illustration that I put a lock on the door of my house, not because I have something to hide, but because I have things valuable to me that I want to protect. Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn’t mean I give the police a key to my house or let them add their own lock to my door. I wouldn’t want to come home one day and discover a random policeman had let himself in and was making copies of all my documents and photos just to make sure I wasn’t doing something bad. I’d be even more upset if I came home and discovered a policeman from another country had let himself in because he’d gotten a copy of the same key, or a thief was doing the same because he’d gotten a copy of the key.

    Building off that illustration, I might have a collection of art in my house. This guy is not entitled to come into my house and look at my art, nor is he entitled to come into my house and put a picture on an empty space on my wall just because he thinks it should be there. Railing against gatekeepers keeping his slop out to me seems as ridiculous as him being mad that I won’t open my door and let him put a picture on my wall. He might not be damaging my walls, but just forcing his way in against my wishes is something I would view as harmful.