I think that gets to the essence of where we are.
I don’t have numbers, so I’ll use silly numbers:
How many farmers do we need in the US? Let’s say 100.
How many government bureaucrats do we need to oversee the farmers? Let’s say 300.
Now consider every industry to go in that direction: Insurance, banking, stock market, infrastructure.
This becomes like the meme of the road construction worker in a hole digging with a shovel while 10 supervisors stand around the hole and watch him work.
That may be where we’re going, but it’s not a final destination. It’s stupid. So it won’t last. At some point it will be “Atlas Shrugged” and the small number of real workers will not tolerate the vast number of government bureaucrats who desire to regulate and manage things they don’t understand.
Society has been moving in this direction for a long time. I don’t think they can continue in this direction forever. Something is going to explode and I think AI is the match.
Years ago at work, we suffered through the Deming Total Quality Process mania. What a waste of time and capital. Just about put Florida Power out of business. Right up there with DEI.
The *ONLY* thing useful out of all of it, to me, was the logic of one phrase: quality comes through prevention, not inspection. Meaning, for example, check and confirm the quality of the car on the assembly line at every point, NOT just at the end. Mercedes v Toyota was the best case study on this.
APPLICABLE POINT: What AI (really just more intelligent inspection tools) can do to eliminate the 300 overseers-for-every-100-workers scenario is to automate prevention of errors/ i.e. point by point inspection. THAT way ya know it’s done right because every step was done right. Theory anyways. We could reduce the number of inspectors by an order of magnitude.
1. Ensuring company or entity is staying in compliance with government regulations and dictates.
2. Ensuring company or entity is staying in compliance with self imposed policies and dictates.