What Not to Automate
summary
A practical framework for deciding what to automate versus keep human reads like a checklist: calculate the ROI of automation in minutes to build and hours saved, map who profits and who loses, avoid automating ill‑specified decisions like hiring or case‑by‑case reviews, skip low‑volume or rapidly changing onboarding steps, require human checkpoints for high‑risk operations such as cross‑data‑center failover, and learn from failures like Facebook flagging breastfeeding, stock‑exchange flash crashes, and biased facial‑recognition outcomes.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction and welcome
- 1:24What not to automate thesis
- 2:48Who am I and definitions
- 3:52Why we automate things
- 7:54Costs and trade-offs of automation
- 10:55Ethical considerations in automation
- 16:44Job loss and automation consequences
- 19:17Profit distribution in automation
- 20:46Tasks not worth automating
- 22:12Automation pitfalls to avoid
- 23:19Automation gone wrong examples
- 28:02Takeaways and closing
- 28:44Q&A session
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