Machines and Immigrants Are After Your Job; We Bring Them Together in a Bot
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This time last year, I was at crossroads.
My life, my company, my mental wellness depended on my visa situation . Having talked to multiple lawyers and spent significant amounts, I was still at a loss and close to giving up.
I wish I had quality advice that I could afford and I trusted.
Today, after being endorsed by Tech City and getting my visa sorted, I am coming back to solve this for others.
Scapegoats. Our society has been programmed to automatically search for who to blame when things go wrong. When they go terrible wrong, the idea of those to be blamed becomes intrusive and overbearing creating opposition, non-conformity, polarisation and division, and division rules them all. William Tyndale coined the word scapegoat in his 1530 Bible; both before and after humanity indulged in this precious escapes from responsibility.
You can find more on this here: https://www.amazon.com/Scapegoat-History-Blaming-Other-People/dp/1590207165?tag=aolholiday-20
Now, who are the scapegoats of today and how do we get to learn about them through our perfectly polished filters of like-minded friendly strangers who share dinner, movie and political preferences at a common Facebook table?
Well, two of them are pretty much in your face every day of the week, if you know how to read: immigrants and automation. Full disclosure, my feed is massively supportive of both; I am an immigrant and I work in A.I.
Scapegoat 1: Automation
Yes, breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence due to large amounts of data and exponentially increasing computation power are going to bring about changes and make some waves. Yet, this process will be as naturally transformative, as the ones before, and homo sapiens will adapt, as homo sapiens is still in the driving seat, even though the car is automated (not fully yet).
This worry of humanity not being relevant or retiring completely has been with us for a while, at least through media. Today it is perhaps a closer warning than yesterday, but is still a manipulative move against the masses to create false bearers of threat or places to point at when the political and economic back-end is buggy and poorly managed.
The rise of machine intelligence, on the other hand, has become a powerful tool of manipulation and profiling, hence the dialogue on obfuscation, escaping non-stop surveillance from the advertisers and “preserving” democracy should have started yesterday.
Scapegoat 2: Immigration
Repeating what already is repeated more than it is acceptable, “the immigration problem” has won political vote and given voice to some rogue societal emotion that deprives humanity of the very humanity. This is not new either. Today however, with all the bans that need to be banned, the problem has surpassed the norm.
Immigrants creating value and feeding economies and innovation are a historical fact. From Einstein to Zuckerberg and way beyond. (The word immigrant here can be replaced by “women”, “homosexuals” , etc. and make another heated argument rise).
Diversity is key to improvement and survival from species and ecosystems to cultures and economies.
We bring them together:
So what happens, when you take these two “portrayed evils” (keys to progress) and unite them together in a product? We are yet to find out.
At QuartzAi, we are on a mission to solve human-machine dialogue. To do this, we started by powering dialogues that matter, hence democratising expert advice.
This is why we built Harvey. Harvey is your visas and immigration advisor powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Harvey is young, just learning, but motivated to be the best immigration helper out there. Give him some love: (just joking, robots do not feel love …hmm)
P.S. This time last year I wish I had Harvey.
P.S.S. Harvey is not after anyone’s job. Not yet.
