Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Peter Brodsky, CEO of Hyperscience (Part 4)

Peter Brodsky: I think there’s also the empirical fact that up until the pandemic in the US, we had the highest level of automation ever and the lowest level of unemployment. In the history of technology, one in which automation can switch jobs, far fewer of us are farmers compared to before, but it hasn’t destroyed jobs. It’s not surprising. 

Sramana Mitra: I also think that there is a time lag in process automation. What will happen in the post-COVID world remains to be seen because there has been an acceleration of trends.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out after we come back from COVID. The reason that I’m pushing back on your statement that there is no job loss with your technology is that I don’t buy it completely. I would like to see more data.

Maybe that’s what you’ve seen because it’s actually a very short window of time that you are describing in the grand scheme of things. Two and a half years is a short time. There is not enough time for the full workflow and the full impact of a technology to show.

You bring in a technology and you see the impact of that and then you do a massive process change and workflow change. That’s especially true with personnel changes. Two and a half years is not enough to see the full impact.

Peter Brodsky: That’s possible, but I’d like to add something. I think the question is upside down. What matters is the service that is provided. When you think about the job that one person performs, that person impacts hundreds and thousands of people. It’s not abundantly clear that a person’s rights to a job supersedes the people’s rights to good service. 

Sramana Mitra: I don’t think we are discussing a value judgment. I’m just purely collecting data. I think you are defensive because you think of this as a value judgment. I’m not making a value judgment. I’m just trying to understand what is happening to an industry as an impact of AI. 

Peter Brodsky: It’s a question that comes up a lot, but every time I see it, it’s one that frustrates me. I think it’s really upside down. I think the question that should be asked is, “How have we improved people’s lives?” We automate data entry, and it turns out that if you do that better, faster, and cheaper, then we end up saving lives.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t agree. I think the job question is a legitimate question in the context of automation and that’s what needs to be asked. Again, I am not making a value judgment. You are clearly creating efficiency and that is the beauty of AI. I am a big fan of AI. I’m a computer scientist from MIT and I’m a huge fan of AI, but there is an economic impact that we are going into. That economic impact most likely is going to get accelerated in the post-COVID era.

Don’t be defensive. I’m not trying to make a value judgment at all on your workflow or your impact on society. Let’s switch gears. What are some open problems that you see in your world that new entrepreneurs can start companies around?

Peter Brodsky: I think if you look at a lot of the legacy companies that had dominated technology for more than 20 years, a lot of those are probably ripe for disruption. It ties in with what we as a company get at which is process inefficiency.  What you find to be systemically true for large organizations is that the larger and the older they get and the more convoluted their processes become, the harder change management becomes. That leads to all sorts of inefficiencies.

You see an entire class of startups that disrupt large incumbents on that premise. You see it in insurance and in finance. It’s not necessarily that the startups know something about the space that the incumbent doesn’t know, but it’s that they are not saddled with that technical legacy yet and that enables them to push forward.

That is an interesting class of problems to attack. That is very much at the center of what we are trying to do. We are trying to be a fountain of youth for business processes. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Peter Brodsky, CEO of Hyperscience
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