May 20, 2023

Better Questions

To the outside observer, it probably looks like I get paid to answer questions.

So when someone learns that I’m having people train an AI that can answer questions on my behalf, they become confused.

They ask questions like, “Why would you do that!? Won’t your AI put you out of business?”

But the reality is that most of the questions I get asked are ones that I’ve answered hundreds (thousands?) of times before.

This is fine, and I don’t mind doing it.

But I can’t answer everyone.

So...

What if I could train a bot to answer everyone for me?

Would the 24/7/365 nature of a “WWJSD” bot have a bigger net-positive impact than me answering only a fraction of the questions due to time constraints?

Or is there something about the resource-constrained nature of a human reply that is required to produce action in the person asking the question?

I don’t know, but I should have some data to validate or invalidate the hypothesis soon. I guess we’ll see.

At any rate... no, I don’t get paid to answer the same questions over and over.

I get paid to find better questions and come up with useful answers to those.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I don’t think AI is out there contemplating what new questions need to be asked.

That’ll probably be the domain of humans for a long time to come.

Yours,

—J