I don’t know if this is an American thing, but we seem to have a trust in technology so deep that it can never really fulfill our fantasies. I thought about this on my trip to Europe when I saw a design for flushing a toilet that allows the person to decide whether they need a big flush or a small one. (I’ll leave it to you to figure when each is appropriate.) And I realized how America solved this same problem–the government limited the number of gallons that could be used for any one flush. And my toilet is always clogged. We could have saved just as much water with the European solution, but that would have required relying on people rather than technology.
Image by exfordy via Flickr
All this was brought to mind when someone asked me why human analysts are needed to augment text analytics for social media listening. [Full disclosure: I serve as Chief Strategist for Converseon, one of the few social media listening comp0anies that uses human analysts.] The answer is quite simple—the software doesn’t yet do the job by itself.
Companies that use completely algorithmic solutions get back a number of errors in their data that they manually go through and correct before they show the charts to upper management. So, the truth is that everyone uses human analysts. Some customers pay companies to provide the human analysis. Others do the human analysis with their own employees. Nobody uses completely software-driven reports as is.
But we all think that “automated” is better than “manual.” We have this deep belief in technology that merely providing the wrong answer does not seem to shake. The burning question is whether it is better to be automated but wrong or manual and correct. You can probably guess where I stand, but I am wondering where you do.
