There’s a lot of buzz about how we’re all going to be replaced in our jobs by artifical intelligence. As a long-time pracitioner in business process automation, it seemed like this might just be another step in the trend of automating work to make it better, faster and cheaper, as we’ve been doing for centuries. From Jacquard looms to Ford’s assembly lines to automated business workflows, it’s a bit more of the same applied to different fields, although increasing more sophisticated. Most people who are in some sort of creative role — writing, graphics, innovation — assume that they’re immune from this type of automation. They may be wrong.
I was listening to a podcast by Tim Harford, who creates the excellent Cautionary Tales series, and in this episode he was talking with Jacob Goldstein, who has recently written a book called Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing. Jacob described uploading a chapter of his book to Google’s Notebook LM and asking it to do an audio summary; Notebook LM generated a two-person converational podcast with entirely AI actors that summarized and discussed his book chapter. Whoa.
I decided to give it a try, and uploaded this paper that I wrote back in 2012 on BPM and application development. It generated this podcast-like audio summary that is, quite frankly, pretty cool.