Claude Chrome, 'Teach Me': The End of White-Collar Labor has Never Been so Real.

In the past, I have written extensively about various new technologies that have started to transform the workforce as we know it today, promising unprecedented potential for automation and threatening more jobs than we would have anticipated a few years ago.

If you recall the last one to two years or so, here are some of those technologies, with certainly a few more from major tech companies or innovative start-ups.

The Hands

Computer use started almost two years ago and was able to emulate an entire computer autonomously running in a sandbox environment to accomplish any task you would do on your PC. It was mind-boggling at the time (it feels like 10 years ago), but it still had many limitations. Read more in my previous post about this topic.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use

Cowork

Recently, Anthropic introduced Cowork, which offers a new level of autonomy for specific tasks and tools. You can also read about this in various posts on Medium.

https://www.anthropic.com/webinars/future-of-ai-at-work-introducing-cowork

Claude for Chrome:

Claude for Chrome runs in your browser and can accomplish tasks from A to Z with unprecedented precision, making browser automation a reality for the first time, in my opinion. You can read more about this in my previous posts.

The Eyes

Google was also not idle and started quite early with another amazing AI that could watch you while you worked and help you in real time. This real-time vision capability fits very naturally into the way we work, making the creation of step-by-step instructions and screenshots a thing of the past.

https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/model-reference/multimodal-live

All of the above are really great, but one piece is always missing:

• The 'Watch Me' feature in Gemini can see what you do, but it barely controls it.
• The browser control can take control, but barely knows how you work, navigate and think.
• Cowork is amazing, but it requires very precise instructions.
• And so on.