YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Roose

lines on the record: 84
first: 2021-03-23
most recent: 2021-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, and in fact, I've heard some stories from companies that did a big RPA implementation, you know, took out a bunch of workers and then had to start hiring people back because the machines were making mistakes and they weren't catching errors and the quality suffered as a result. So I think there's a danger of sort of overselling the benefits of this kind of automation to these companies. I think some of the firms that are doing this, it's a little more snake oil than real innovation. So yeah, I think there is a danger of kind of over automating. But I think the problem is that executives in a lot of companies, and I would say this applies largely outside of tech. This is largely inserted your beverage companies, your hotel chains, your sort of Fortune 500 companies that maybe are running on a little bit of outdated technology. I think the executives at those companies have come to view labor as purely a cost.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I think about a lot is, yeah, a lot of white collar jobs are pretty boring, they're pretty repetitive. It is one of my favorite TikTok paths to go down is Microsoft Excel TikTok. And there's just a lot of people who are bored at work who have come up with a lot of wild ways to use Excel and they make TikToks about it. And it's great. And I highly recommend it to anyone. But their jobs are bored. The reason they have fodder for their TikTok careers is because Excel is boring and they've made it entertaining. Isn't that like those jobs apart from the social element, they are sort of unfulfilling. But at the same time, those are the people who might catch mistakes, might come up with a new way of doing something, might flag a new idea. Is that cost baked into the automation puzzle?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not the good kind of automation that actually does move the economy forward. It's like kind of this crappy patchwork automation that purely like takes out people and doesn't give them anything else to do. And so I think on a macroeconomic level, this kind of automation is like the problem is not actually how advanced it is. It's how simple it is. And if we are worried about the sort of future of the economy and jobs, we should actually want more sophisticated AI, more sophisticated automation that could actually create sort of dynamic new jobs for these people who are displaced to go into.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It carried positive sort of consequences and negative consequences. So the factory machines put some people out of their jobs, but they created many more jobs and they lowered the cost of the factories' goods and they made it more accessible to people. And so people bought more of them. And it sort of had this kind of offsetting effect where you had some workers losing their jobs, but more jobs being created elsewhere in the economy that those people could then go do. And the concern that the economists that I've talked to had was that this kind of RPA, this kind of like replacing people in the back office, like it's not actually that good. It's like, it's not”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And that's the logic that a lot of executives have. And I don't even know that that's the wrong logic. Like, I don't think we should be preserving jobs that can be automated just to preserve jobs. The concern, I think, I and some other folks who watch this industry have is that this type of automation is purely substitutive. So, you know, in the past, we've had automation that came in sort of”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that feels like I could map it to a pretty familiar consumer story, right? You've got a factory, it's got some output. It's almost like a video game, right? You've got a factory, it's got some output, you need to make X, Y, and Z parts in various quantities, and they need to deliver on a certain time. And to some extent, your job is to play Tower Defense and just like fill all the bins at the right time. Or you could just play against the computer and the computer will beat you every time. I mean, that's what that seems like. It seems very obvious that.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One example I talk about in the book is there's a guy I met who was making essentially production planning software. So this would be not replacing the people in the factories who are working on the assembly line. It'd be replacing their bosses who tell them, okay, this part needs to be made in this quantity on this day, on this machine. And then two days later, we're going to switch to making this part, and we need this many units, and they need to go to this part of the warehouse. Like all that used to be done by supervisors. And now that work can be mostly automated too. So it's not purely the kind of entry-level data clerks that are getting automated. It's also their bosses in some cases.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's where the sort of excess is in the economy. I mean, if you go into a factory today, they're very lean. Most of the jobs in factories that could be automated were automated many years ago. And especially if you go to places like China, I mean, there are factories that have very few humans at all. It's mostly robots. So there isn't a lot of kind of excess there to trim. On the other hand, a lot of white-collar workplaces are still brimming with people in the back office who are doing these kind of repetitive tasks. And so that's sort of the strike zone right now is like, if you are doing sort of repetitive tasks in a corporate environment, in a back office somewhere, like your job is not long for this world. But now there's also some more advanced AI that can do kind of more cognitive, repetitive cognitive work. So it's not just, I mean, one.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which are repetitive? What are the steps involved? There are some stories that I've heard of people being sort of asked to train their robot replacements to like kind of walk. Walk the RPA vendor through, you know, or the consultant through the steps of their job so that that can then be programmed into a script. So there's a lot of that, but there's also sort of reimagining processes and like, do you really need people in three separate offices touching this piece of paper or could it be one person and a bot? And so there's a lot of kind of, I think part of what they market as sort of digital transformation is just like going in and asking people like what outdated stuff are you using and how could we modernize that a little bit?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they would come in and they would assess okay, you use Salesforce, you use your old database, you use some other program. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, back office work is people sitting down in front of a Windows PC and using it. So they're like, which of these tasks are repetitive?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I went to a conference for automation anywhere. This was pre-pandemic when conferences were still a thing. And there were executives on stage talking to an audience of corporate executives and telling them that they could save between 20 and 40 percent of their operating costs by automating jobs in their sort of back and middle offices. And so that pitch, you know, some companies might save less than that, some companies might save more than that. But that's the sales pitch is we will, you know, you can be more productive, you can free up workers to focus on higher value tasks. Oh, and also you can shave 20 to 40 percent off your operating budget.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of it is that a lot of it is, you know, this bot will convert between these two file formats or it'll do sort of basic level optical character recognition so that you can scan expense reports and import that data into Excel or something like that. So a lot of it is pretty simple. A lot of AI researchers don't even consider RPA AI because so much of it is just like static, rule-based algorithms. But they are starting to layer on more AI and predictive capability and things like that. So you get some that are, this plugs into your Salesforce and allows it to talk to this other program that maybe is a little bit older. Some of it is converting between one currency and another. But then there are these kind of digital workers like you can hire a making air quotes. You can hire a tax auditor who you just install. It's a robot. And theoretically, that can do the work that”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's in the billions of dollars. I don't know the exact figure, but it's the biggest companies in this are called UiPath and Automation Anywhere. And there are other companies in this space like Blue Prism. But just UiPath alone is valued at something like $35 billion and is expected to IPO later this year. So these are large companies that are doing many billions of dollars in revenue a year. working with most of the Fortune 500 at this point.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really, it's like the worst name drop in the world. But it's like the sort of pitch that they're making. I talked to one consultant and he said that executives were coming up to him and saying, how can I basically get rid of 99% of the people that I employ? Like that was sort of the target was not like, how do we automate a few jobs around the edges? How do we save some money here and here? It was like, can we wipe out basically the entire payroll? And is that plausible and how do we get there as quickly as possible?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not really what they're incentivized to think about. I mean, these consulting firms get brought in to cut costs and cut costs pretty rapidly. And so that's their mandate, and that's what they're doing. And so some of the way that they're doing that is by taking out humans. They're also streamlining.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things in your book that you mentioned, you call this boring bots, and you go into the process by which, yep, you don't show up to work one day and there's a robot sitting at your desk as a company grows in scales. It just stops hiring some of these people. It lets their jobs get smaller and smaller. It doesn't give them pathways up. I see that very clearly, right? Like if their entire job is pasting from one Excel spreadsheet to another Excel spreadsheet all day, they might themselves just write a macro to do it. Why wouldn't you as a company be like, we're just going to automate that? But all that other stuff in an office is the stuff that you're saying is important, right? The social camaraderie, the culture of a company, is that even on the table for these digital transformation companies?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are doing massive amounts of business in RPA or what they sometimes refer to as digital transformation. That's sort of the euphemism. And they were spending millions of dollars and bringing in millions of dollars. And it was like, what is going on here? Like, what are these people actually selling? And it turns out that a lot of what they're selling is, you know, stuff that'll plug into your Oracle database that'll allow it to talk to this other software suite that you use, the kind of human replacement that you're talking about, it's very expensive to rebuild your entire tech stack if you're a old line Fortune 500 company, but it's relatively cheap to plug in an RPA bot that'll take out three to five humans in the billing department.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, my sort of introduction to this world was sort of the same as yours. I was talking to a consultant. I was actually in Davos. This is the only time I hate, that's not my favorite way to start a story. But we'll go with it. And in Davos, it's this big conference. It's, I call it the Coachella of Capitalism. It's just like a week-long festival of rich people and heads of state. And the main drag, the promenade is all like corporate sponsored buildings and tents and corporations rent out restaurants and turn them into sort of branded hangout zones for their people and guests during the week. And by far the biggest displays on the promenade the year that I went were from consulting companies. Consulting companies like Deloitte and Accenture and Cognizant and Infosys and all these companies.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first time anyone told me about RPA, it was a consultant and a big consulting firm. And they're like, our fastest growing line of business is going into like hospitals and insurance companies where they have an old computer system and it is actually cheaper and easier for us to replace the workers who use the old computer system than it is to upgrade the computer system. So we install scripts that automate medical billing and they're basically KVM switches so keyboard monitor mouse switches that use an old computer like they click on the buttons the mouse moves around and clicks on the old computer system and that is faster and easier to replace the people than it is to migrate the data out of the old system into a new system because everyone knows how complicated and expensive that is. And this is our fastest growing line of business. And I thought that was just the most dystopian.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about RPA. I'm very excited. You're the only person who's ever wanted, who's ever volunteered an hour of their life to talk about RPA with me. So RPA is robotic process automation, which is an incredible name, in my opinion, made to sound as dull as possible.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Automation that is designed not just to replace one task or two tasks, but is really designed to replace an entire human's workload. The RPA companies now are selling what they call digital workers. So instead of automating earnings reports, you can automate entry-level corporate journalism or you can automate internal communications. There are various ways that this is appearing in the corporate world. I think there's a gap between what the sort of utopian vision of this is and how it's actually being put into practice.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pieces of steel, but was sort of the camaraderie that built around that and the sort of downtime between big tasks. And so ideally it would be the case that automation only took away the bad and boring and dull parts of people's jobs, but in practice, that's not always how it works. And now with things like RPA, we're seeing”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the argument for automation in the workplace that all the jobs that are automatable are repetitive and boring and people don't want to be doing them anyway. And so that's what you'll hear if you call up a CEO of a company that sells automating software. I mean, RPA software. And that's what I heard over and over again writing this book. But there's also a little simplistic because automation can also take away the fun parts of people's jobs that they enjoy. There's a lot of examples of this through history where a factory automates and the owners of the factory are like, this is great for workers. They hated lugging big pieces of steel. And so now we'll have machines do that and they'll be able to do the fun and creative parts of the job. And then they install the automation and the robots. And it turns out that the workers don't like it because that was part of the job that they enjoyed was not necessarily lugging the people.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things we cover earnings at the Verge, we do it with a very different lens in a business publication, but we pay attention to a lot of companies. We care about their earnings. We cover them. If I could hire the robot to write the first two paragraphs of an earning story for a reporter, I think all of my reporters would be like, great. Like, I don't want to do that part. I want to get to the fun part where Tim Cook on the call said something shocking about the future of the Mac, right? And that's the part of the story that's interesting to us anyway. It seems like a lot of the automation story is doing jobs that are really boring, that people don't necessarily like to do. The tension there is, well, shouldn't we automate the jobs that people don't like to do?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that's not even a very hard form of automation. I mean, that technology existed years ago because it's very much like filling in MadLibs. It's like put the share price here, put the estimate here, put the revenue here. But now what we're seeing with GPT-3 and sort of other large language models that are based on machine learning is that it's not just MadLibs anymore. I mean, these are generated texts are getting much better. They're much more convincing and compelling. They're much more original. They're not just repeating things that they've picked up from other places. So I think we'll see a lot more AI in journalism in the coming years.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the classic model of automation. And still every time there's a story about automation, I hate this. And it's like my personal vendetta against newspaper and magazine editors. Like every time you see a story about automation, there's always a picture of a physical robot. And I get it. Most robots that we think of from sci-fi are physical robots, but most robots that exist in the world today by a vast majority are software. And so what you're seeing today in corporate environments, in journalism, in lots of places, is that automation is showing up as software that does parts of the job that, frankly, I used to do my first job in journalism was writing corporate earnings stories. And that's a job that has been largely automated by these software products now.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you just said we're journalists, it's an industry that employs automation to do parts of our job. I think that gets kind of right to the heart of the matter, which is the definition of automation, right? And sort of in the popular, well, I think when most people think of automation, they think of robots building cars and replacing factory workers in Detroit. You are talking about something much broader than that.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That shows how many jobs could be displaced by automation in the next 10 years, and then the talk ends. Like everyone just goes to lunch, and you know, and it's like, okay, but I'm sitting there like, what do I do? I am a journalist. I work in an industry that, you know, is employing automation to do parts of my job. Like, what should I do to prepare for this? So I wanted to write that because I didn't see that it existed anywhere.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the book is basically divided into two parts. And the first part is basically the diagnosis. It's sort of what is AI and automation doing today in the economy, in our lives, in our homes, in our communities. How is it showing up? Who is it displacing? Who is it risk of sort of losing career opportunities or other things to these machines? What do we sort of think about the arguments that this is all going to turn out fine? What's the evidence for that? And the second half of the book is really the sort of practical advice piece. That's the nine rules that you mentioned. And so it was my attempt to basically say like, you know, what can we do about AI and automation? Because I think, you know, you and I have been to dozens of tech conferences and there's always some talk about AI and automation and jobs and some people are very optimistic, some people are very pessimistic, but at the end there's always like this chart.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Attention to the jobs Kevin talks about as he describes the impact of automation. It is not factory workers and truck drivers. It's accountants and lawyers and even journalists. If you have the kind of job that involves sitting in front of a computer using the same software in the same way every day, automation is coming for you. And it won't be cool or innovative or even work all that well. It'll just be cheaper, faster, less likely to complain. That might sound like a downer, but Kevin's book is all about seeing that as an opportunity. You'll see what. Okay, Kevin Roos, New York Times columnist author, and the only reporter who has ever agreed to talk to me about robotic process automation. Here we go.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But today I have finally found someone who wants to talk about robotic process automation with me. New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roos, who's just written a new book called Future Proof, Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. It features a lengthy discussion of RPA, who's using it, who it will affect, and how to think about it as you design your career.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember, as you sent me like three or four sentences in Slack, and I contemplated them and thought this is not a wild goose that I particularly want to chase because frankly, it just sounded incredibly tedious.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ended up looking into it, and it seemed important but hard to make a compelling story out of and wrote something completely different about automation.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've all been the noisy uni flatmates. Music blar Phones going off in the library, But with long lasting battery life on the lightweight and portable Dell XPS powered by Intel Core Ultra, you can get away from the distractions without needing to find a plug. So you can get back to, well, For those who get things done, the Dell XPS, built for you, Dell.co.uk forward slash learning.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT