Let the robot do the drudgery
At the moment, I’m trying to get a clean OCR of a long and often dry early Victorian history book. Luckily for me, someone else did the scans – but the original OCR was awful. I’m doing it page at a time and it’s scooting along pretty well – except for the dreadful tables.
That’s them in the thumbnails above.
Then I had an idea – I wonder if ChatGPT will do those? Spoiler: yes. I upload the scan, tell it how I want the table formatted (fonts, etc.) and it gives me a link to a docx file I can just drop in.
At one point, I got too clever for my own good – I was giving it the big, raw png files – and I hit my data limit. I’ve never hit my limit as a paying customer! But it reset within a few minutes and I was told that wouldn’t happen if I jpg’ed them all. It even told me how to batch jpg the whole directory.
Some would say beware – before long, it will do the whole job for me. But y’know, I would be totally okay with that.
Posted: March 31st, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: March 31, 2026, 9:22 pm
A thing that can make your job easier can also make it obsolete…some guy said that, maybe it was one of those Demotivator posters.
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: April 1, 2026, 1:08 pm
To: CHATGTP
A.I. is taking over many jobs. Right now the unemployment rate is about 5% in the U.S. Using the best information available, considering jobs A.I. can do, and considering likely improvements in A.I. and robotics, estimate the unemployment rate in 100 years
“Bottom line
• Over 100 years, mass unemployment (>20%) is possible but unlikely under current economic structures
• The most probable outcome is a labor market that still exists, but looks completely different, with unemployment roughly in the 5–12% range
The actual answer is much longer and nuanced but I won’t take up your electrons with it; you can ask for yourself.
The major concerns, summarized, are “skills mismatching”, “inequality”, and “transition shock”.
Back on my own hook here but I think that the ironic thing is that A.I. is best suited to replacing white collar jobs including those whose main function is analysis. Your average short-order cook is much safer than a bookkeeper.
Comment from Mark Matis
Time: April 1, 2026, 5:30 pm
I would posit that MOST blue collar jobs are also safe from AI for MANY years. Unless Skynet arrives…
Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: April 1, 2026, 8:21 pm
AI is having a “surprise” effect in IT. It makes building custom software so much cheaper that the demand is exploding, and with that demand, more employment for programmers who know how to use AI. This effect is known as the Jevons paradox.
In the mid-1800s, improved designs of furnaces and boilers used less coal. With reduced fuel cost, furnace and boiler installations increased dramatically, leading to greater coal consumption.
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