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by johnnyanmac 398 days ago
>Before we point fingers or blame 'technology/automation' shortfalls, let's quantify the concrete bottleneck: skilled human decision-makers are the limiting reagent

All the automation in the world with useless without a human guide to either transform production into a useful product, or useful knowledge to heed. That's why this act of trying to remove human labor is asinine. Even skilled human can't always get the right readings, so expecting a robot to do it all at this stage is just selling snake oil.

1 comments

Actually, I'll go a step further - in the long run, we probably won't need human forecasters at all.

The current human-in-the-loop model exists largely because our technology hasn't been good enough yet, not because there's something inherently special about human judgment in this context. Weather prediction is fundamentally a pattern recognition problem. Pattern analysis at scale is exactly what computers do better than us.

Perhaps someone could apply to YC with this idea. There is one YC startup doing this already: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/atmo

Chaos theory and brownian motion make it a herculesn for anything to predict the weather more than a few days out. There's too many micro factors to track leading to weather that constantly shifts. And The data costs to attempt to try to do so is well past even the most well compensated meteorologist.

I'm not too worried about the human factor being replaced as a whole here. Even with AI, someone needs to interpret the output and make sure the the prediction models actually work.

Yeah, true that.