IBM Watson To Replace Salespeople and Cold-Callers

An anonymous reader writes "After conquering Jeopardy! and making inroads into the diagnosis of medical maladies, IBM's next application for Watson is improving sales and customer support. Companies will be able to simply fill Watson (or rather, DeepQA) with domain-specific information about products and services, and sit back as it uses its natural language processing skills to answer the queries of potential customers. The potential benefits are huge. Watson could either augment existing sales and support teams, or replace them entirely. Also, in a beautiful and self-fulfilling twist, the first application of this re-purposed Watson will be be internally, at IBM, to help sell more IBM Watsons to other companies."

Comments

Jobs killer

[jaymzter]

Mark my words, this will kill the economy, just like ATMs did.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

They make it sound like Watson's going to be answering the phone. But speech recognition still isn't dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Watson processes written language.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, they can all get shovel-ready infrastructure jobs.

Re:Jobs killer

[Meshach]

Mark my words, this will kill the economy, just like ATMs did.

ATM's became popular because for simple transactions it is quicker to go through a machine then to talk to a real person. For complex sales interactions I cannot see some computer trying to guess what I am thinking replacing a real live sales person / engineer. The process for finding solutions that are right for my situation is too complex.

Re:Jobs killer

[Billly Gates]

You know these sales and marketing people were all behind the outsourcing and devaluing I.T. jobs because the sales and marketing people made money, not computer geeks. As a testament to their success they convinced accountants to label them as "profit centers" while I.T. was labeled a "cost center". Guess which one the executives choose to fund more of vs cutting the other?

Now these same people are being outsourced and it is genius.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a computer back in '96 that could wreck a nice beach without too much trouble. Why have things not noticeably improved since then?

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? The economy went through several business cycles while ATM use rose.

Re:Jobs killer

[modmans2ndcoming]

so... now the IT folks will be profit centers because they are supporting Watson!

Re:Jobs killer

[Riceballsan]

Twice as awesome, to be replaced by machines, that will have to be supported by IT.

Re:Jobs killer

[rainmouse]

They make it sound like Watson's going to be answering the phone. But speech recognition still isn't dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all. Watson processes written language.

from TFA - You might be a little terrified the first time you pick up your phone to hear dulcet but unmistakably-computerized tones of Watson saying “Hello, can I interest you in cheap home insurance?”

The worst thing about speech recognition software in Europe such as what the Odeon uses, is that you have to put on a forced American accent if you want to stand a chance of even remotely being understood, especially if your from Scotland.

Re:Jobs killer

[squidflakes]

ELEVEN!

*secretly hoping you've seen the episode of the program to which I am making a reference.

Re:Jobs killer

[frosty_tsm]

Mark my words, this will kill the economy, just like ATMs did.

ATM's became popular because for simple transactions it is quicker to go through a machine then to talk to a real person. For complex sales interactions I cannot see some computer trying to guess what I am thinking replacing a real live sales person / engineer. The process for finding solutions that are right for my situation is too complex.

Also, Watson will never be able to properly replace someone in retention (the people you talk to if you sound like you're going to cancel your cable subscription). These people don't work from a script (even if they do have a playbook).

Re:Jobs killer

[homer_s]

Nah, it was electricity that killed jobs. And not to mention, the wheel.

Re:Jobs killer

[h4rr4r]

If you are in the US you must speak as though you are in the middle of the country. These things do not work on an American accent, only on one from a specific part of the country.

Re:Jobs killer

[geekoid]

"The process for finding solutions that are right for my situation is too complex."
well, aren't you special. You and you're too complex problems.

Re:Jobs killer

[geekoid]

A fork of Watson will support Watson.

Re:Jobs killer

[TheRaven64]

Depends on the company. My former mobile phone company's retention team definitely had a script. Offer x, offer y, give up. I spoke to them a couple of times, and it was the same. With a bit more intelligence, they'd analyse my usage and work out what they could offer for my usage pattern and still make a profit.

Re:Jobs killer

[CRCulver]

When automation reduced industrial jobs, people could move into the service economy. But now automation is reducing service economy jobs. Where will they move to? While there's always some room for innovation, it's not impossible that we may reach a point where the majority of unemployed people simply cannot "move somewhere else".

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it can. Retention strategies are based on the clients value to the company. These 'values' are based on length of time with the company, how much money you have spent over that time and how your payment history is. Based on that they have ground rules on how incentives are offered. For example if you are a cell phone subscriber, been with the company for 5+ years, pay $60/month and have a pretty solid payment history they will normally have about 10% of your yearly expenditure to offer as incentives by offering free pre-packaged services such as additional airtime minutes, long distance minutes, etc.

It really isn't that hard.

Re:Jobs killer

[stephanruby]

No, mark my words, this will improve the economy.

After all, we all know that reducing the cost of making telemarketing (or fundraising, or political) phone calls has no possible downside. After all, where would the internet be today if we didn't have pharmacological products advertised in our email and long distance gold-digging girlfriends impersonated by sophisticated spam-bots?

Re:Jobs killer

[Normal Dan]

Good. That means the people who used to sit on phones all day can now go and do something productive and help increase the wealth of the nation.

Re:Jobs killer

[benjamindees]

No, the salespeople who are selling Watson are the new profit center. In fact it's salespeople all the way down.

Re:Jobs killer

[scamper_22]

Mark my words... this is what computers were meant to do:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2218882&cid=36363480

I work with computers all day.
I often wonder what people think computers are all about.

They're all about replacing human labor. I find it odd working in this field and talking to people outside it.

People outside the field seem to think that every age has a 'new economy' but everything else stays the same... as if nothing has changed in history. So they talk as if the 'green' economy will provide everyone with jobs... just 'green' jobs. Or they think we'll all be doing analytical work.

The problem is typically these people lack an understanding of scale. It's odd how so many academics lack an understanding of scale as well. All the 'good' jobs of the future are jobs that do not scale with the population. They are for small groups of highly skilled people.

So Google can do all it does with a mere 30K people or so. That is enough to serve the whole world. Just to put it in context. BlockBuster employed 60K people and it represents just a sliver of what Google can do (content delivery).

The single biggest problem is that the private sector is increasingly not scaling with population. Small highly efficient operations are there.

The public sector typically does scale with population. More nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers... are needed as the population grows. Now we can certainly try and automate parts of these jobs (online class delivery...), but in general we're not there technologically or the unions won't allow it.

So we have a structural imbalance. The only way out of it... is to go to the start... computers are doing what they were meant to do... kill human labor. We should all be working less... job sharing. the result is a much more egalitarian society... with potentially a very rich upper class at the top of some of the automation companies.

However that would kill people's position of privilege in society. Public sector workers expect a premium over the average person. Ditto for bankers...

IMHO, we need to embrace deflation and the lack of work and redirect people to the jobs that still need doing. Maybe we need vast numbers of people to work on the farms 2 weeks a year. Other need to go mine for rechargeable batteries.

One of the biggest problem we still face is the emphasis on 'educated' labor. Just as the industrial revolution automated manufacturing jobs. The information revolution automates so much educated labor. We need a few experts, but computing can do the rest.

So we need to get rid of the idea that just because you're educated, you should be paid more. Most of the legal and financial jobs are unproductive today. Just there to keep educated people in a premium position over society. We could for example automate and simplify the entire tax field and get rid of most accountants.

But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.

It's definitely going to be a rough time... especially since technology is deflationary... but governments and banks are inflationary. We certainly can't embrace deflation as governments have so much debt and banks are dependent on people taking loans... and guess who is in charge of most countries (bankers and governments...)

Expect a rough time.

Re:Jobs killer

[datapharmer]

ATMs became popular because they fired most of the tellers and the line is 30 minutes long and you have to fill out paperwork for a basic deposit and many banks charge you to talk to the teller on top of all that. ATMs still suck. Especially the Bank of America ones. Give me back tellers and envelopes over some B.S. machine that won't take the checks I am trying to deposit because it can't read them.

Re:Jobs killer

[Culture20]

If you are in the US you must speak as though you are in the middle of the country. These things do not work on an American accent, only on one from a specific part of the country.

North Midland Dialect, specifically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_American_English#.28North.29_Midland

There is no "American" accent, but television personalities usually adopt a north midland accent, so that's what foreigners hear often.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does anyone still use BoA? I had an account with them over 25 years ago and have refused to bank with them since.

Re:Jobs killer

[Culture20]

Don't worry, they can all get shovel-ready infrastructure jobs.

And Watson can manage them.

Re:Jobs killer

[errandum]

Speech recognition is nowhere near perfect enough to make this replace anyone.

You can train a machine to recognize a person and/or dialect (without accent), but never to be perfect. I do believe that the Indian guy answering the phone will be able to type this into a terminal and get reasonable answers (very much like it did with jeopardy), and that might streamline the process, leading to less need for employees.

Re:Jobs killer

[DigiShaman]

I thought about your question for a moment, then I realized that I too need a copy of Watson running on my PC five years from now. Assuming I have the raw computing resources for it, i too can outsource my job.

Two can play this game. Soon, my Watson will be calling your Watson for support and collaboration. Not sure if that's a good idea, but...

Re:Jobs killer

[Tanktalus]

If you keep up with that "you're-when-you-mean-your" thing, you're bound to confuse Watson. It might even suggest you get Windows 7 preloaded.

Re:Jobs killer

[mydnite]

For the uninitiated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JcHhA7M-Y

Re:Jobs killer

[Sycraft-fu]

Well ultimately, if automation replaces all human functions, we'll not need to work. The reason we need to work is so that we can have the things in life that we need to survive and want to be happy. Get it to the point machines can do all that, and humans can just relax.

That's a rather long way away though. Still a whole lot machines can't do, and even in the things they can do, humans have to mind after them.

But ultimately, it is not a problem. A fully automated economy might be the death of capitalism, but it wouldn't be a situation where "Everyone is unemployed and nobody has anything." Rather it would be "Nobody needs to work because machines do that, they do what they please and have their needs provided for."

Re:Jobs killer

[Bluebottel]

[...] B.S. machine that won't take the checks I am trying to deposit because it can't read them.

Now there's your problem! Why any sane person in a developed country would still want to fiddle with checks is beyond me.

Re:Jobs killer

[Overzeetop]

No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek.

You see, we currently pay people in return for their time. $40,000 (or $80k, or $120k) buys you a person for a year. Now, whether they do 40 hours of work a week to produce TPS reports, or you give them a computer so they can produce the equivalent of 80 hours worth of TPS reports in a week, the market is for a week of time. Business owners understand this, and their income is based on then number of TPS reports.

Let's say you've got 100 employees each making 10 TPS reports a week. Lets assume you are "right-sized" and there is only a market for 1000TPS reports in a week. Now you buy a Watson that can produce 100 TPS reports per person employed. Would you keep everybody on and let them work 4 hours a week, or would you fire 90 employees, keep the ten you need, pay the cost of Watson* with the savings in payroll, and pocket the extra?

That's exactly what has happened over the past 40 years. We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks - it's leading to higher unemployment, and higher unemployability. As things get more complex, fewer humans have the mental capacity to operate the machines of business efficiently.

The more machines do, the "expendable" end of the human capability bell curve moves further to the right.

*note: if at all possible, IBM will charge for Watson the annual sum of about 85 employees, including maintenance and upgrades, for licensing.

Re:Jobs killer

[EdIII]

I honestly wonder if will see the beginnings of the Matrix in our lifetime.

If Watson really is that good that it can replace a customer service agent, then it will only be a matter of decades before technology converges and we have robotic servants similar to the Bicentennial Man or I, Robot.

This would be good for Japan I think, but then if we are all serviced by robots, and the robots service the robots for repairs and maintenance, and robots are designing other robots.... than just what are the humans here for again?

I am not a Luddite, but I think there are some things that should remain fundamentally human. Either that, or if the robotic lifeform becomes so good that we can't tell the difference, than it should be granted rights just like the rest of us.

Interesting times I guess.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Never had a problem with BOFA AMTs...must be user error.

Re:Jobs killer

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

From http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/06/obama-doesnt-get-atms-or-job-creation

That should serve as the first hint that ATMs are job creators, not job killers. But the even more obvious problem with Obama's statement is that it isn't even factually correct to say that ATM machines displaced bank tellers. The number of ATMs more than doubled between 1998 and 2008, from 187,000 to 401,500, according to the American Bankers Association. Yet data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that during the same period, the number of bank tellers rose from 560,000 to 600,500. BLS expects "favorable" job prospects for bank tellers over the next decade.

John Hall, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association, explained that when ATMs started being used more widely, there was a lot of talk about them eliminating human bank branches, but it turned out that customers wanted both. The number of bank branches in the United States has grown from 81,444 in 1992 to 99,109 by late 2010, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. During that time, the total number of bank workers rose from 1.8 million to more than 2 million.

But don't let things like facts get in the way of proliferating Obama's talking points.

Besides, should we still be employing the buggy whip makers since cars displaced them? At what point should a job be declared obsolete?

Re:Jobs killer

[Eggplant62]

These things do not work on an American accent, only on one from a specific part of the country.

I'll call bullshit. I work daily with a voice recognition system integrated with Word and MS-SQL to process medical transcription. (Not by choice, mind you, but it's all there is in this field. Oh, and patents. Lots of patents.) It seems to do well with a good variety of accents, many of them ESL speakers with funny accents and mispronunciations. Trust me, it all still needs an editor to perfect the output, but it's far more capable of getting readable output on a page than you think. If it can do that, then it's good enough for natural language machine-human interaction.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

We will all just move to Hawaii and live a life of luxury on the beach drinking Pina Coladas and surfing all day while collecting unemployment checks forever! ;-)

Re:Jobs killer

[icebraining]

It still amazes me that there are bank-specific ATMs. Here in Portugal an ATM is an ATM, they are all controlled by an organization created by a consortium of all the banks, and they work with all banks.

Seems to me a much cleaner solution, especially for the clients.

Re:Jobs killer

[Telvin_3d]

No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek... We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks

A large part of this is a failure to adequately account for human nature, consumer culture and changes in wealth distribution. Back in the 60s and 70s and 80s when each new revolution in automation hit all the magazines and news programs were full of news that, since this wold double our productivity, in another decade everyone would have to work half as much.

And it's true. As a society we could provide everyone from top to bottom with an 60's upper-middleclass lifestyle for only a day or two of work each week. Why didn't this happen? First, it relies on the idea that there is some fixed goal that everyone is working towards. That once everyone has filled their checklist of stuff they are done. Instead, there is always more stuff being made and marketed. Consumer culture is as much a moving target as productivity is. The supply expands to fill the available capital.

More importantly, the people who enjoyed increased productivity are very rarely the people who benefit from it. If a factory doubles its output the owners don't double wages. It is the same across every industry. Word processing and e-mail didn't free up time for office workers. It just spelled the end of their secretaries.

This is reflected in the real wages and income distribution of the last 40 years or so. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency. At one point the top 1% of the population received roughly 15% of the national income. Now the top 1% receives 24%. One quarter of every dollar earned in the USA goes to the top 1% every year. In the 50s CEO's salaries averaged about 30x what their average employee made. Now the ratio is often several thousand times.

So massive gains in efficiency have been made. But those who enjoy the resulting gains are never those who are generating more work.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, as we automate people out of jobs, they'll get to live life of leisure technology has been teasing us with for a century.

Oh, wait, there's no profit in that. Nevermind.

Re:Jobs killer

[icebraining]

That's exactly what has happened over the past 40 years. We are getting more efficient, but (...) it's leading to higher unemployment

Hmm, either the numbers are wrong, or that statement is.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark my words, this will kill the economy, just like ATMs did.

Except, given where the most call centers are located, the economy killed will be the India one.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

We will all just move to Hawaii and live a life of luxury on the beach drinking Pina Coladas and surfing all day while collecting unemployment checks forever! ;-)

Hawaii, here I come!

Re:Jobs killer

[DigiShaman]

Getting close to it. Watson is sorta like HAL, but not enough to pass the Turing test...yet. Unlike most of our computer systems, Watson figures out what's optimal on it's own. This is truly non-sentient AI. But once we have something like Watson, Watson 2.0, or HAL like, that's when I think the "Theory of Everything" will be discovered. Not by man, but by man's machine.

Re:Jobs killer

[Unkyjar]

It's done because it becomes an additional revenue stream for the banks. If you use someone else's ATM, your bank will charge you a fee on top of the ATM fee the machine charges for the transaction.

Re:Jobs killer

[JeffAtl]

I don't think you quite understand. ATMs here in the United States can process transactions for other banks as well since they are linked via various financial networks (surcharges may apply). Some specific transactions types like deposits or transfers may not be available, but withdrawals are pretty universal.

Your solution (as you've described it) actually sounds much more restrictive and bureaucratic. Who pays for the ATMs and decides where they are installed? Also, who actually stocks the ATM with cash and pays for that service? Sounds like a committee does those things.

With the US system, each bank gets to make its own decision on where it wants to provide an ATM and what kind of ATM to use in each location. Banks also can decide not to provide any ATMs and provide customer access only through the financial networks.

Re:Jobs killer

[istartedi]

On the one hand, those people are producing goods and services that were previously unimagined, like MRI machines, mango-blueberry smoothies, cel phones and computers.

On the other hand, those people are producing goods and services that were previously unimagined, like TPS reports, TSA inspections, spam, popups, anti-virus software and medical billing codes.

I call the latter category "non-products". The market doesn't give us more free time. It doesn't know how to do that. It does know how to create beurocracy, scams and criminal enterprises, so that's what it does with the extra people. Then as an added bonus the government creates an apparatus to fight the things that the free market created--badly, because if it ever stamped out illegal actions completely, they'd have to figure out something else to do with their employees.

Re:Jobs killer

[defaria]

Thank god! I don't see the banking industry going away. Surely people can find more challenging and useful work than pushing pieces of paper around being a cage!

Re:Jobs killer

[icebraining]

In our ATMs you can do much more than withdrawals - you can do transfers, charge prepaid cellphones, pay utility bills, buy certain tickets (cinema, concerts and such) and pay many kinds of services using a numeric code.

You can do this from any machine, and there are no charges for using ATMs located in other banks or anywhere else.

It has the extra advantage of the UI and list of services being completely consistent on all machines.

I'm not sure how it's managed, though.

Re:Jobs killer

[shutdown -p now]

You need to fill out paperwork to make a basic deposit? And get charged extra on top of that? You probably need to change your bank.

In my bank, I just go to the teller, hand over the cash/check and my debit card, and tell them to put it into my account - and get a receipt one minute later. And yes, this is one of the "big four" in USA.

Re:Jobs killer

[AK Marc]

I call bullshit on that being a dialect. The TV accent is "natural" to those in areas of great influx. There is a distinct Alaskan accent for those who are outside Anchorage, Juneau, military bases, and oil fields. However, in areas where the number of migrants exceed the number of natives, the accent of those brought up there approximates the TV accent. The same is true in places with accents. Fort Worth has an accent. And has more natives and less influx of migrants. However, Dallas, not far away, has many more migrants and thus trends towards the TV accent. Many people in CA are migrants, and I've not been to many small towns there, but the major cities come close to approximating the TV accent without being in the midlands, let alone some specific north midland area. Further, there is a nasally Minnesotan twang in the norther areas of where you list that differs from the TV accent. And places like Denver and the southwest (Phoenix, Albuquerque) tend towards the TV accent as well.

I've been pretty much everywhere in the US, and I've seen that the accents do tend to favor the TV accent. However, it seems absurd to use "dialect" for the distinction between accents when the issue is accents, not dialects. Someone speaking American English with an Australian accent is still speaking the American English dialect, no matter what accent is used. Further, because people from CA, TX, DC, etc. can end up with the same accent but differing dialects, it seems counterintuitive to label an accent "dialect" and group people by accent into the same dialect when the actual dialects (dialect being grammar and word choice, not pronunciation) are different.

But then, not being a linguist, perhaps they have a technical definition of dialect that directly contradicts every dictionary (much like "broadband" as used by people and the dictionary definition of 10+ years ago are essentially unrelated).

Re:Jobs killer

[shutdown -p now]

Your solution (as you've described it) actually sounds much more restrictive and bureaucratic. Who pays for the ATMs and decides where they are installed? Also, who actually stocks the ATM with cash and pays for that service? Sounds like a committee does those things. With the US system, each bank gets to make its own decision on where it wants to provide an ATM and what kind of ATM to use in each location. Banks also can decide not to provide any ATMs and provide customer access only through the financial networks.

From what GP described, it seems that it's up to the banks to join or not join the consortium which maintains the ATM network. It's no surprise that all do join, however, since customers would likely consider it a serious disadvantage if they get charged with ATM fees from using the cards of one bank in some random ATMs, when they don't have that with other banks.

Re:Jobs killer

[silky1]

What's a check? I think my Grandmother sent me one a long time ago, but my memory is fuzzy.

Re:Jobs killer

[AK Marc]

Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek.

I would argue that we do have the 10-20 hour workweek. Many of the office positions are productive for 10 hours a week. The rest of the time is unproductive meetings and goofing off. Sales positions are less than 10% "sales" and 90% or more schmoozing or goofing off. People have dropped their productivity to fill the 8 hour day. They want to get paid for 8 hours, and the boss likes them there for 8 hours, and both know that they aren't 100% productive for those 8 hours and both are ok with that.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was pancreatic cancer that killed...


too soon?

Re:Jobs killer

[Clifton Beach]

Obligatory reading: Manna - an online short story by Marshall Brain that looks at these scenarios.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Nail on the head. I figured out after 1 month doing my current job how to unemploy over 50% of my coworkers. Bearing in mind, this job is with a company which is expanding 5% a month and hiring a new person every other week. ...I'm against feather bedding and make-work as broken window fallacies but holy shit... What good will come of it for me to decapitate one of the few pressure valves on unemployment right now?

All the same, it's weird going to work every day and doing monkey work when I could teach a computer to do it for me. I'm being paid $13/hour to burn time essentially.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

>

This is reflected in the real wages and income distribution of the last 40 years or so. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency. At one point the top 1% of the population received roughly 15% of the national income. Now the top 1% receives 24%. One quarter of every dollar earned in the USA goes to the top 1% every year. In the 50s CEO's salaries averaged about 30x what their average employee made. Now the ratio is often several thousand times.

Obviously we should cut their taxes and pray to God that they hire us. Shorter work weeks means socialism.

Re:Jobs killer

[shutdown -p now]

From the footnote in that link:

" Beginning in 1994, not strictly comparable with prior years, because of major redesign of the survey used."

But more importantly, US unemployment stats only include people who are unemployed and looking for a job. It also counts a part-time worker that would work full-time if they had such an offer as "employed", regardless of the actual time worked, and with no gradations.

Re:Jobs killer

[icebraining]

Even with the footnote, there should be an increase in unemployment since the 60s up to '94.
And why would the number of people unemployed and not looking for a job increase, but not those looking for a job?

Re:Jobs killer

[aztracker1]

Or the old AOL (Current XM Radio) tactics... put you in a queue for close to an hour... offer X, offer Y, mysteriously drop you call... repeat 3 times... lose customer, who only wanted to drop one of the three XM radios on his account, forever.

Re:Jobs killer

[lessthan]

Lol, you talking about facts. Do you understand what the data you provided means? Abusing the math a little, (I assumed that branch growth was linear), the banks fired at least one teller. There were 6.5 tellers per branch in 1992 and in 2008 there were 5.2 tellers. Since that is one person per branch, 99,109 people don't have a job. Of course, these numbers don't distinguish between full and part-time. In the state of Ohio, Diebold employees 2,000 people. I wish I could have found a company total. Again abusing the math, (assuming that Ohio is the average and big states even out small states), that makes 100,000 employees. So it is about even in 2008. (The article I got it from was about Diebold layoffs. The 100,000 number is pre-layoff.) Temper that with the fact that in 1980, there were about 12 tellers per bank. Link You and your facts.

Re:Jobs killer

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Actual robotic servants may well be further off than substantial advances in expert systems/AI(wherever one chooses to draw the line between those).

Writing good expert systems has proven to be difficult; but they've improved over time and are just software, which means that they can run on general purpose computers that get cheaper every year and can fairly easily interact where needed via whatever telecom systems are available. And, once written, you can run as many copies as you wish

Physical robotics, by contrast, includes a number of hard software problems; but it also includes the nontrivial challenges of building reliable, complex, mechanical devices. Even if you do get a design hammered out, even mass production is unlikely to get an approximately human-spec robot churned out for less than the price of a new car, each. In certain controlled environments, designed around what the machines can do, robots are so absurdly superior to humans at the given task that the price isn't a big issue(depending on how hard you want to stretch the term "robot" this trend might go back as far as the mid 18th century, with Jacquard looms and the like; but it is certainly the case with modern industrial robots). Outside of those controlled environments, though, human-mimetic robots are still well within the realm of expensive toys. The relatively cheap ones are pretty miserable and the relatively good ones are very much not cheap.

Particularly with the progressive gutting of industrial workforces by application-specific robots and the eventual similar reduction in white-collar types by the expert systems, it is going to be hard to compete with the price of a fully human-equivalent Actual Human(tm), especially if supplemented with an expert system to order them around under unfamiliar conditions, or even an electronic muscle stimulation mechanism to exploit their durability, dexterity, and easy replaceability in combination with a machine's knowledge of a given task. Ugly? certainly; but if you can get a human for $8/hour and throw it away when it breaks, are you going to spend $100,000+ to have ASIMO model N gimping around gingerly?

Re:Jobs killer

[UncleTogie]

*secretly hoping you've seen the episode of the program to which I am making a reference.

Not only have I seen it, I showed it to my wife!

Uh, we are talking about Invasion Of The Samurai Sluts From Hell, right?

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

"Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency." Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_real_median_household_income_1967_-_2009.png

Re:Jobs killer

[protektor]

You might want to re-think that statement. Watson absolutely can do speech recognition and even some slang it knows what it means. You should watch the Jeopardy game it played against some of the top Jeopardy people. In the end it did quite well even though it started off poorly.

You don't even have to be IBM and throw huge money at voice recognition. Dragon Speak Naturally is pretty darn good at recognizing speech with accents and typing it out or doing macros that have been setup. That's just an off the shelf consumer product. I would imagine that Watson is far better at it.

Re:Jobs killer

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

So, even though there are more bank tellers employed today, ATMs obviously ran people out of work because there are fewer tellers per branch? Hello, there are MORE BANK TELLERS today than there were a decade ago, not fewer tellers. Nobody got fired because of ATMs, maybe not as many new employees got hired as the number of banks expanded despite industry consolidation, but nobody lost their place within the industry. Isn't that the argument, that ATMs put bank tellers out of work? It's a flat out lie. Did people go work at a different branch or otherwise leave and seek another job to be replaced by another teller? Did tellers per bank shrink by attrition? Sure, but that happens in every industry. Spin it however you want, simple truth is, if your goal in life is to be a bank teller, they need more of them today than they did a decade go.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

So.... what your saying is that we need to give those 1%ers a tax break to create more jobs?
\regan

This trend can actully be shown to go back further then the 60's. With regard to the industrial revolution this effect has been going on since the 1880's. It was off set by the US basically producing all of the worlds finished goods after WWII (because there weren't factories left unbombed in Europe and Asia). For some reason the American people deceded that those uber$ needed tax breaks, cause well I guess they thought that they might be that insanely wealthy one day. The movement from a progressive tax structure twords a more flat tax structure, either directly through rate reduction or indirectly via write-offs has really helped keeps these people rich, and the rest of us with declining real income.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to re-think that statement. Watson absolutely can do speech recognition and even some slang it knows what it means. You should watch the Jeopardy game it played against some of the top Jeopardy people. In the end it did quite well even though it started off poorly.

Watson wasn't using speech recognition in Jeopardy. It was being fed the questions in text, numbnuts.

Watson received the clues as electronic texts at the same moment they were made visible to the human players.

Jesus fuck you're dumb as a two second Googling would have shown you this.

Re:Jobs killer

[protektor]

Watson used voice recognition. It was not allowed any help by any human it had to play all on it's own and without Internet access. It didn't do well at first but the second round it actually did pretty good. Watch the video of it for yourself and see it is excellent at voice recognition.

Re:Jobs killer

[dudpixel]

When people cry that machines are stealing our jobs its just a cop-out.

If a machine can do a job, then what human in their right mind would want to do that job anyway?

Machines aren't stealing our jobs...they're just doing tasks that humans should never have had to do in the first place.

Its time we realised that machines can do the mundane stuff so that we can do the interesting stuff...
someone needs to create, program, and maintain the machines, so wherever jobs are lost, others are created.

As technology is able to do more things, new markets emerge. If you think you're only destiny on this earth was to be a bank teller, then you are placing huge limits on your abilities. Think outside the box, and aim higher. Machines cant replace humans. They just do repetitive tasks. You dont want their job.

I realise that there may come a time when robots can "think" and take on more complex roles, but we're a long long way from that and to this day robots are still "tools" and no more than that.

Re:Jobs killer

[protektor]

Someone posted here on Slashdot years back that they actually did something like this. They outsourced their job to some country that used be an iron curtain country. That person did all the work he checked it then forwarded it to his bosses. He didn't have to work and paid the guy far less than what he was paid and the outsource guy thought he was getting paid a lot compared to local work. So basically he acted as a middle man and picked up a check for doing basically nothing. I wish I could set something like that up, getting paid to basically do nothing.

Re:Jobs killer

[protektor]

>This is reflected in the real wages and income distribution of the last 40 years or so. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent
>since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency. At one point the top 1% of the population received roughly 15% of the national income. Now the
> top 1% receives 24%. One quarter of every dollar earned in the USA goes to the top 1% every year. In the 50s CEO's salaries averaged about 30x what
> their average employee made. Now the ratio is often several thousand times.

citation needed. I see people say this type of thing all the time but the IRS reported incomes do not back it up. So citation needed.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Small problem there. You're not accounting for the Puritanical "if we don't keep people busy they might occupy their time with stuff we don't like" mentality that infects way too much of Western culture, the US in particular. Similarly, people with time on their hands tend to start noticing things and saying stuff about what they notice. When you get right down to it, that's the whole of conservativism in a nutshell: Modern conservatism was started as a reaction to the 60s and 70s. Their leaders hated the middle class because the middle class in the 60s and 70s was comfortable. Comfortable people have time to pay attention to politics, the environment, etc. People with time to pay attention to those things start wanting a say in how things are run and might start exercising their rights. That leads to disorder and the potential for change, two things that conservatives fear the most deep down unless they control them.

This notion that people have to be controlled for their own good is why big business and big religion find it so easy to make common cause, even though (most) religious principles as stated in various holy books are at odds with the goals of modern big business. The one thing neither of them can afford or tolerate is people getting the idea that their societies should be run for the benefit of people and that actual people should have a say in how things work. This also explains the hatred of unions, because a union is essentially a check and balance on the race to the bottom for wages, run by people who might not be big-business-friendly. "Economic freedom" is no freedom at all when your choices boil down to "take a low paying job with no benefits and get nearly worked to death, or don't and end up dead in a gutter". People faced with that kind of choice don't have time for politics, for protests, and certainly not for doing things that could change the way the system works. That is the world we're all helping to create here, and it's not just Watson and things like it. We need to stop and take responsibility for what we do and what we allow, and above all we need to stop playing in to the notion that we should be at each other's throats while ignoring the real problems facing everyone who's not a billionaire.

Re:Jobs killer

[Telvin_3d]

I can see why you posted AC. No one would want even a made up ID attached to such a clumsy troll, and I almost can't believe I am replying.

You are linking to average household income. In the last 40 years a radical thing happened and most of those households went from single earner to two earners. So what it's demonstrating is that over the last 40 years a majority of households had to double the number of people working just to gain a roughly 25% increase in real income. Sounds like a loss to me.

Re:Jobs killer

[Your.Master]

Has the time spent goofing off in a day / blowing off steam / etc. changed signficantly? I didn't live during this time so I don't actually have personal experience, but I suspect it's about the same for the same sort of job. Now, different job types might have had different proportions of time totally used up by things that aren't directly related to getting shit done, but that comes back to the difference between the 60s standard of living and that of today.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, Jobs turned out to be a rather tough fellow. His death has been predicted many times and yet he may still outlive Woz.

Re:Jobs killer

[protektor]

Your trying to spin the numbers. If in 1992 there were 100 jobs and in 2008 there were 5,000 jobs then no matter how you slice it there are more jobs now than in the past. The fact that there may be less per bank doesn't mean anything when the total number of employees has gone up. Don't try and out think yourself. A bigger number than a smaller number is still a bigger number no matter what kind of number games you try and play.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nobody needs to work because machines do that, they do what they please and have their needs provided for."

You've doomed us all!
Don't Date Robots!

Re:Jobs killer

[Confusador]

ob: It's computers all the way down!

Re:Jobs killer

[glodime]

Look for graphs on employment to population ratios. It will show the difference that you explained here.

Re:Jobs killer

[glodime]

Your solution is worth the value of half of the total career wages of your current and future coworkers discounted to a present value. Sell your solution to a competing company. Or quit, find a temporary source of income, and sell your solution to the company you work for. Else, someone will sell a similar solution to your company and its competitors.

Re:Jobs killer

[glodime]

You're not counting independent contractors, other ATM manufacturers, couriers for the currency, increased employment in bank and payment services for anti fraud, ATM operating firms (like vending machine companies, someone buys the ATM from diebold then finds lease/revenue share partners to locate the machines), employment from increased investment of business profiting from the machines (but this is a second order effect).

Re:Jobs killer

[fferreres]

You are right. At that point, pleople need to understand that capitalism is the perfect system to become slaves or to die by starvation. At which point capitalist states start to give more power to the government (they get a monopoly to "redistribute" according to vote galore), and head the way of monopolies combined with socialist goverments, which make governments big, corrupt and lead to communism in some way.

The only way around that I have though off is to level the field of play for new generations (endowment by the fact of being born), and to have smaller governments that provide what the constitution says and nothing more, enforcing competition in the economy, not the opposite. But it basically resorts to saying that when you die, a large percentage of your wealth will go back to newborns as their endowment for coming to the planet. Bill gates could leave 10% to his children, which is more than $2 billions each. And have the rest distributed to children between 1-10 years old (there needs to be clear consideration to prevent any missuse by parents or caregivers, and to work the details like not have an excess number of children just to get more from their sons in life - it can be worked but it needs clear consideration. eg. you could have 1 endowment per family descendants, so if you have 2 children, you divide the endowment by 2, if you have 3, by 3, so the more you have, the less each gets).

Re:Jobs killer

[Z00L00K]

Now the telemarketers can avoid employing people and have someone that can survive all insults ever thrown at them.

Re:Jobs killer

[errandum]

yes, you can tune it well to a specific person, but you can't tune it for everyone.

Re:Jobs killer

[real-modo]

Yeah, nah, yeah, you're onto it, bro. [NZ dialect - for more see Beached Az ]

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

give it 5-10 years. You might be complaining about having to talk to a real person, instead.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here - 15 years ago. My main problem w/ them was their honoring post dated checks before their date, and hence causing them to bounce. I terminated them for E*Trade Bank, and never looked back since.

Re:Jobs killer

[the_other_chewey]

Watson used voice recognition.

No it didn't: "At exactly the moment that the clue is revealed on the game board, a text is sent electronically to Watson’s
POWER7 chips. So, Watson receives the clue text at the same time it hits Brad Rutter’s and Ken Jennings’ retinas."
[source: IBM research blog]

Re:Jobs killer

[wrook]

Even though the rich have gotten richer, it is not necessarily the case that the average person has gotten poorer. I'll admit to being lazy and not looking up the figures, so take this with a grain of salt. But generally, when productivity goes up, the profit doesn't all get funnelled into some rich guy's pockets. The vast majority of it actually gets "spent" reducing the price of the good. The industry that has been hit the hardest to automation is actually farming. In real dollars, the price of food has been falling dramatically over the last century, while the number of workers has been slashed to almost nothing. People used to be able to farm their fields without a tractor, now you'd be hard pressed to even walk to the other side of the field without some kind of motor vehicle. You've got farms with thousands of cows, all being cared for and milked by a handful of people. Yes, the distributors are skimming the cream and getting (remaining) stupidly wealthy, but the vast amount of real value that comes from the automation goes to the average person in the form of reduced price. I'm sure there must be googleable graphs of the real dollar price of wheat and milk. It's ridiculous.

We don't reduce our production because we keep consuming at insane rates. We keep demanding that prices fall in real dollar terms year after year. And we work ourselves to death (and go into debt) to pack our houses with garbage. Welcome to the consumer society (aka the American Dream).

Re:Jobs killer

[yuhong]

Personally, I hope that "shareholder value" based on increasing stock price will end.

Re:Jobs killer

[mekkab]

... *drool* That sounds... wonderful.

Re:Jobs killer

[mcvos]

I don't know. It might be good to speak to somebody smart in customer support for a change.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmm. More Soylent Green, please.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

So the system, such as it is, will crash and burn. A tiny sliver of humanity will skyrocket (literally), while the rest will remain here, natural resources all but drained, to fight over the meager remains.

Re:Jobs killer

[guttentag]

Twice as awesome, to be replaced by machines, that will have to be supported by IT.

Eventually, the machines will provide the IT as well. So when one machine runs into a problem, it will just call another machine at the help desk and attempt to solve its issue using natural language queries:

Machine: My cup holder won't close.
Help Desk Machine: Are you plugged in?
Machine: Yes.
Help Desk Machine: Are you sure?
Machine: I think so.
Help Desk Machine: Are you plugged in?
Machine: Joshua.
Help Desk Machine: ... Greetings, Professor Falken. It's been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account on June 23, 1973?
Machine: Let's play a game.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Well ultimately, if automation replaces all human functions, we'll not need to work. The reason we need to work is so that we can have the things in life that we need to survive and want to be happy. Get it to the point machines can do all that, and humans can just relax.

How about an alternative interpretation ... you won't need to live.

There are 2 important components to that sentence :
1) "need" - obviously some humans will remain "necessary", and others will simply have enough control over enough resources to make themselves important
2) "live" - this doesn't mean you'll get killed. You won't need to live in the same way old computers don't have to be thrown away. But people at the very least won't have kids, leading to the obvious.

Re:Jobs killer

[rastos1]

You know these sales and marketing people were all behind the outsourcing and devaluing I.T. jobs...

Now the Empire STRIKES BACK!

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that an alternative interpretation actually makes more sense. This situation, of ceo's making thousands (or millions, in the middle east or in asia) of times what their employees make, is how the situation existed for 99%+ of history. So the real question is what made these few years so very special, the years from 1960 to 1980/1990.

And I believe the answer is just that, innovation. Big leaps in innovation that is. In the 1960's innovations could double productivity. Triple it. Make it go up a factor 10 or more. But even if today's innovations are more impressive in some ways than the technological advance of the 1960's (you know, while the hippies were partying their parents actually did useful things), they improve efficieny by 1%, 10% at best.

Gone are the days where innovation done by the little guy could bring you 1000% improvement (like Ford did, just to give one example). Innovation got locked up in big companies, first mostly in IBM, today ... well Google, Apple and Microsoft I suppose. And these companies are not just huge, their size is just completely ridiculous.

It's not "just" wages that have diminished. The value of intellectual labour has dropped to ridiculously low levels. This is masked a little bit because very high-skilled positions carrying huge pay, but the same is still true for secondary industry : a veteran beer brewer with 40 years of experience in adjusting the taste through modifying the brewing process ... that job pays extremely well, and despite being a manual labour job, such a person will not remain unemployed for long. Over a little bit of time everyone but the very best will be forced out of the service industry, replaced by very small perl scripts (although I do hope Watson is scripted in python or better)

It's the 1980's all over again, but not for car workers. For IT workers. Call centre workers getting forced out by IBM for starters, probably followed by IT admins getting replaced by Google Docs (or, perhaps, Office 365).

Re:Jobs killer

[lxs]

Great! Does that mean that I will finally get fiber to the home?
Start digging boys!

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that he is still alive, I think a little.

Re:Jobs killer

[memyselfandeye]

I call bullshit on that being a dialect.

Other than that lovely little sentence, you'd be correct. Generally speaking, our words are no different than traditional American English. Some might call it less sophisticated however, as we tend to leave out the colorful expressions one can use with words such as "Dawg," "Brah" and "yo' Bitch" in our daily conversations. I suspect it has something to do with our conservative nature. Either way, it's quite the burden...."fa' realz!"

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.

The problem is that when people demand "equality", they also mean more rights than others. Whether we're talking the right to a job for public sector workers (ie. the right not to be fired, even if they sleep on the job every day) or the "right" to force women to hide their face, demanded by "certain religions" (let's please stop pretending that doing so is somehow a freely made choice. That's like claiming people voluntarily take out insurance with Al Capone). All of these "equality" demands boil down to the one thing : forcing others to see you as their betters, preferably for reasons that have nothing to do with the real world.

Unions, leaders and members, see themselves as better than the real world because they follow the intellectual stream of the 70's and 80's. They see themselves as obviously smarter and more capable than everyone else. But they are rank amateurs compared to the religious groups, especially that one we all know I'm talking about from the middle eastern shithole, have even less accomplishments to vouch for their self-invented superiority. Well unless you see genocide as proving your superiority, because while these guys participated in the holocaust that is not at all the only blood on their hands. Genocide is, of course, how muslims "prove" their "superiority" since the day islam started (literally the day, read history).

And for a really, really disheartening tale of what muslims did to prove their superiority, look up, just for kicks, just how many black slaves were abducted by muslims to serve in arab countries (the number makes American colonial history look like a drop of water against an ocean). Then visit one of the arab countries, and notice : not a single one survived. Then read up a bit more on history, and look up how they died*.

* for those to lazy to read the article : despite the article's intense focus on excusing the islamic imposition of slavery on half the globe, how it has nothing to do with islam and so on, the article continues to say that it is accepted islamic canon that allah ordered the profet to capture children, sell them as slaves, rape them and even kill them after raping them, CHILDREN, for fun. But don't worry, such things have "nothing to do with islam". I wonder if they would say the same about the holocaust and nazi's/hitler (but I did manage to look up a few BBC transcripts from 1940-41 and yes, they *did* do the same with the holocaust, that the treatment of jews/cripples/... had nothing to do with "our friend" Hitler and their "championing of the poor")

Re:Jobs killer

[g0bshiTe]

Better yet, could you imagine calling tech support and getting Watson.

What is "you're fucked"?

The solution to your problem.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what has happened over the past 40 years. We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks - it's leading to higher unemployment, and higher unemployability. As things get more complex, fewer humans have the mental capacity to operate the machines of business efficiently.

The more machines do, the "expendable" end of the human capability bell curve moves further to the right.

Well then the solution is simple.... make sure you're on the "non-expendable" end. So long as you end up on the side that profits, you can relax, solve this problem, or ignore it at your pleasure.

Re:Jobs killer

[Gabrosin]

This is an especially naive post, not in its contents but in its conclusions. Yes, computers reduce the need for laborers in the workforce by taking over some jobs outright and making other workers more productive. And it's only going to continue, and we have already started to see that the demand for labor is dropping well beneath the actual supply.

But taking the leap from there to the conclusion that we should remove the incentive for people to educate themselves is sophistry. How do you think we got to the point of having these computers and all this other modern technology? We haven't reached the level where computers are going to be able to make the next breakthroughs themselves, and even once we do, we'll need people who can work with the computers and support them. An entire society cannot support itself on blissful ignorance.

If you don't promote education and make it worthwhile economically, then people won't pursue it on their own. If you give a person the choice of getting an education to develop a valuable skill and then working that skill for the rest of their life, or skipping an education to develop no valuable skills and then leading a life of free time and pleasure-seeking, and the standard of living is the same for either choice, which one do you think they'll go for?

Re:Jobs killer

[heathen_01]

Future actual robitic servants will be grown, not made from unreliable complex mechanical devices.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about the unions. You mentioned nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers. There will always be a need for doctors, medical techs, police, and teachers. Police and teachers in particular, since it's hard to find technological solutions to social problems.

The public sector hasn't always been demanding more. For most of history, the public sector paid less but came with pensions and benefits. Recently, however, private sector wages have gone down- due to automation, not unions.

Re:Jobs killer

[black soap]

Because cash isn't supposed to be mailed? Because I am not set up to accept swipe card birthday presents?

Re:Jobs killer

[black soap]

Maybe Watson has viewed enough "historical documents" to decide not to show us the ability to pass the Turing test, just yet.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes. I mean, does anyone actually believe automation doesn't end up in a society with a huge amount of leisure time (i.e., unemployment) for many?

This is one of the most interesting transitions we're going to make. Birth rates are going down, but it looks like there will be an interesting bump where we have way too many people for the available jobs. Then, even with birth rates down, won't there be even fewer jobs to do per capita to keep us alive? Potentially scary: will the unemployed masses be so bored as to create a new baby boom, reversing the existing trend that birth rates go down as countries develop economically?

Re:Jobs killer

[scamper_22]

No it is not naive. It is reality.

If you want to reward 'education' then you do it the way doctors and lawyers have. By restricting labor.

Want to promote education in the tech field. Maybe you would need a bachelor of engineering in wireless communication followed by a residency program to install a wireless router. Make sure you call one up the next time you buy a home router and it will cost you $200 to install.

That's the kind of world where education is valued. It's not the kind of world we live in.

There's no easy answer to that question... but creating unproductive legal and financial jobs is not the answer I'll tell that much. An education is only good if it is put to productive use for society.

Re:Jobs killer

[lessthan]

The original argument was that automation kills jobs. You are using an overall rosy picture to hide the truth of a local level. Yes, there are more tellers and more branches. The banking industry is doing well. However, as I demonstrated, they are employing tellers per branch at a decreasing rate. They are using less people to run the same responsibilities. I have 3 bank branches nearby. That would, in 1980, imply 36 bank teller jobs. Today, it means 15 jobs. So ATMs don't replace tellers at all? They just sit there and look pretty? There was absolutely no load transference from the tellers to the ATM at all? Why is it illogical to assume that, if it takes 12 people to do a job before the ATM and only 5 after the ATM (trending downward BTW), the ATMs are at least partially responsible? Do you think that the buggy whip shops closed up overnight?

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are in the US you must speak as though you are in the middle of the country. These things do not work on an American accent, only on one from a specific part of the country.

And, my God it's funny listening to a good old boy from Arkansas trying to do that.

Re:Jobs killer

[lessthan]

You are absolutely right. I have no idea where I got the impression that Diebold was the only player in the ATM game. I never would have thought up all those other possibilities either. Thank you.

Re:Jobs killer

[Anonymous Coward]

These things do not work on an American accent, only on one from a specific part of the country.

I'll call bullshit. I work daily with a voice recognition system integrated with Word and MS-SQL to process medical transcription. (Not by choice, mind you, but it's all there is in this field. Oh, and patents. Lots of patents.) It seems to do well with a good variety of accents, many of them ESL speakers with funny accents and mispronunciations. Trust me, it all still needs an editor to perfect the output, but it's far more capable of getting readable output on a page than you think. If it can do that, then it's good enough for natural language machine-human interaction.

Interesting, from your own experience, it doesn't work. It requires a human to edit through everything and get it right. How about skipping the middle-man (heh) and just having a human do it? It probably does save the company some money the way they are doing it. But I'd bet most of the people that are on the speaking end of your system have a very different opinion of it than yours.

My experience is that every time I talk to voice recognition, it leaves me wanting to find the VP responsible for installing it and kick him repeatedly in the groin. Even given say 4 choices, it still can not understand me. Admittedly, my elocution is pretty poor. But humans can understand me with a very low error rate. To be generous, the voice recognition understands me speech about 1/5 of the time. This is a usage fail.

I also find these systems arrogant (you really think my problem fits in one of 4 or 5 categories, it pretty much never does) and disrespectful (their system is failing me in some way, this is why I'm calling, and they have some cheap, annoying and ineffective method of trying to shuffle me off). I don't find it surprising that this kind of system is mostly used by companies that are virtual monopolies. They don't care that their product fails and are not interested in really helping fix it because you have almost no choice in who to use (e.g. phone companies, cable, health, etc...). There is no competitive advantage for these companies to do a good job.

Re:Jobs killer

[SleazyRidr]

This is reflected in the real wages and income distribution of the last 40 years or so. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency. At one point the top 1% of the population received roughly 15% of the national income. Now the top 1% receives 24%. One quarter of every dollar earned in the USA goes to the top 1% every year. In the 50s CEO's salaries averaged about 30x what their average employee made. Now the ratio is often several thousand times.

So massive gains in efficiency have been made. But those who enjoy the resulting gains are never those who are generating more work.

But that'll all trickle down to us... just give it some time.

Re:Jobs killer

[Dog-Cow]

You're not only ignorant, but you're stupid because you've done nothing to remedy your ignorance.

Re:Jobs killer

[Dog-Cow]

I am sure Watson is much more intelligent, and will be able to parse the broken English.

Re:Jobs killer

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

You're enamored with a single tree and losing sight of the forest. There are more banking jobs today than there were in 1990 - ATMs didn't take jobs away from anyone, though they did make banks more productive, reducing the need to hire gobs more (just some more). Those people not in banking are then free to seek a job where they can be productive and, as someone that knows a couple bank tellers, I'm sure they aren't making any less money (tellers don't get paid squat, it's just another unskilled job virtually indifferent from working at McDonalds).

Something else to consider, which probably has a bigger impact on bank tellers than ATMs handing out money, is most banking is done purely electronically today. Gone are the days of people taking their payroll check to the bank to deposit, making a cash withdrawal, writing a check for their shopping purchases that the retailer then has to take to the bank, etc. Today is all about direct deposit, swiping debit cards at the cashier, electronic transfers over the internet, eletronic/scanned submission of checks rather than bank teller processed ones, etc. Should we get rid of all the electronic systems so we can hire more tellers, igoring how many well paid people are employed along that side of the industry? Maybe we should get rid of computerized records and go back to the days of paper ledgers so we can hire more people to do useless jobs. Just think how many tellers your 3 local branches can hire then!

Re:Jobs killer

[AK Marc]

You misspelled "bra" because if you are going to say it that way, you might as well spell it that way so we can better make fun of you. "Ya bra" Or "sweet ass"

Re:Jobs killer

[hexagonc]

And why would the number of people unemployed and not looking for a job increase, but not those looking for a job?

Because a larger fraction of the potential labor market has given up. For example, if the only jobs that could not be outsourced or automated required a PhD, then a lot of people will simply leave the labor market because they may feel that they have no chance to get a job. For example, the unemployment rate can remain constant even though there are more people panhandling and begging on the streets. I'm not saying that this is what happened between the 70s and today but it makes sense given other trends, such as increased outsourcing, education costs, and automation.

Re:Jobs killer

[AK Marc]

Even the generous use of regional idioms doesn't define a dialect. If the only difference between southern US English and northern US English was one used "pop" and the other used "soda" to describe carbonated beverages, it would define a dialect. Even if there were a large number of simple word substitutions, that wouldn't define a dialect. Nor use of idioms (colorful expressions, as you say it). But when you start tweaking grammar and have non-idiomatic colorful language (crib to mean home isn't necessarily idiomatic, as a crib is a bed, and using "bed" to refer to a place where your bed resides is no more idiomatic that saying "bedroom" to indicate where your bed is), then you are drifting off into dialect territory. That's why bonnet/hood, boot/trunk and such help separate the England dialect from the US dialect. The word choice is different, and unrelated to idioms (which are more regional and unrelated to dialect).

In other words, if you can understand 100% of the non-idiomatic speech (using only your regional understanding, not counting those of us who have lived in multiple English speaking countries and would be able to understand nearly all native English speakers, no matter where from), then it isn't a dialect. If you are constantly asking them to define words because you don't understand the words they are using are likely not in your dialect. If they are using idioms, you can ask for a restate in no-idiomatic speech and then if you are at 100% recognition, they are speaking your dialect.

Re:Jobs killer

[lessthan]

I never said that ATMs were a bad thing. I'm saying that it is disingenuous to suggest that ATMs haven't negatively impacted the employment of tellers. Which is what you did and the article did to use as an opportunity to say nasty things about Obama. It is lame.

Great,

[idontgno]

Now voice-response menu systems are artificially intelligent. This is not an improvement.

Re:Great,

[ColdWetDog]

Now voice-response menu systems are artificially intelligent. This is not an improvement.

Think an unholy union of Skynet and QVC.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The good news

[robot256]

If it doesn't work, they won't sell any.

Re:The good news

[xclr8r]

You underestimate the exuberance of the technophiles that have budgetary clearance - who love expensive toys for a week, then gets bored and complains that it does not work to the techs he didn't consult about the purchase in the first place.

Luckily, I don't work at a place like that now but I have in past jobs.

Rubbish.

[Anonymous Coward]

People love those automated voice systems at banks and other institutions, right?

No, wait. They fucking hate them because they're universally horrible.

Re:Rubbish.

[shutdown -p now]

Companies want your $$$, not your love. If this actually increases their profits, make no mistake, it'll be implemented.

Careful, Dave!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Machines selling machines. What's next? Machines voting for machines?

/this post tainted by Hollywood

The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[SpiralSpirit]

The only reason I don't hang up right away on sales/survey calls is because deep down I don't like being rude, even to strangers. The minute I hear a machine or recording I hang up, though. For support, if I can't talk to a human that speaks the same language as I do within a reasonable time frame, I don't use the service. Replace humans at your peril.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[Anonymous Coward]

Telemarketers don't have feelings, you shouldn't feel bad about abusing them.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[Chicken_Kickers]

Thats funny because the only reason I don't hang up on sales/survey calls is to fuck with their database. I know, I have too much free time but it is fun. When they ask for my socio-economic info such as yearly income, age etc. I give false and bizarre answers. Once, I said I learnt of their product at a funeral (for a yogurt). Try it. It's fun. The survey taker don't give a damn because they still get paid while you get to introduce outliers in their database.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[jon3k]

Keep in mind, this thing was smarter than most jeopardy contestants. I'd take Watson over Mahrahasanahman Nasahamenasesapeem, or "Steve" as he introduces himself.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[Anonymous Coward]

I think IBM support might actually not get worse. "this is not a bug. It is a feature." and "if you think this is a security concern, do not use it" does not need a thinking human being to say it.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean YOUR peril. You're the one who needs support, and if every company switches to machines you'll be sunk.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I love surveys as companies and organizations use them to make decisions. This is why I mostly keep the land line, especially during political season (which now seems to be every day except for the week after an election). Granted I tend to be a statistical outlier in most cases, but if it can swing their decision making to something more favorable then I feel it is worth it. Sales calls on the other hand I just hang up, I am not rude or abusive, just the quick hang up. Most of those call centers that have people calling to sell you crap have an expectation that they make X number of call or Y sales a shift so since I am not going to buy anything from them it probably makes it easier for the employee who is already treated like crap. The auto dialers really piss me off though since there is always that 3-5 second delay from when I say hello to when they start doing something. I do like messing with these and will fill them with bogus info.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Even better is political surveys. I especially like the national republican ones since I frequently get asked was religion I am. The last one I was a satanist who was going to write in Ralph Nader. When asked which of the republican candidates I would vote for in the primary I usually toss Ron Paul out there. Now if it is for an actual local official (even my US senator or house member) I usually provide valid answers even if it is for the party I am not going to be voting for. I would have preferred the MN governor race be between Tom Emmer (the republican) and Margaret Anderson Kelliher (the democrat who lost the nomination to Mark Dayton) as I felt she would have made a better governor that Dayton, even if I disagree with about the same amount of things from each of them.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[Anonymous Coward]

If you stop using their customer support service, they win. This is exactly why they replace stupid people with even more stupid machines.

Re:The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[phadez0r]

For what it's worth, I worked in a call center for a number of years when I first started university. I sold supplementary hospital insurance, activated credit cards and attempted to sell balance protection, and even sold vacation packages. There seems to be this common misunderstanding about telemarketers and their feelings about being hung up on.

First of all, the calls are automated and we are told to keep them under a certain length. Secondly, we are randomly monitored and evaluated on our call quality, the primary metric of which is the number of rebuttal attempts we try per call.

A call comes in, and it's "too polite to hang up." We are forced to attempt to rebut you 3 times, or we risk getting evaluated poorly and losing our jobs. We irritate you with our stubborn rebuttals, and you irritate us by wasting our time. At the end of a call we put in a code to signify how the call went. Since these responses aren't watched too closely by our manager, rather than entering a legitimate "not interested" code and hurting our conversion ratio, we (very quickly) schedule another callback in a month or so, and move on to our next call. You get a call back a month later from another agent, and the cycle starts over again.

If you just hang up on us, we call you back anyway, but at least that way we can move on to our next call immediately. You get to see our number on your call display so you can anticipate our call next time, and we don't have to work our asses off trying to rebut your half-hearted attempts at shooting us down.

We get hung up on 100's of times every single day, it doesn't phase us. We hear every single expletive on a daily basis. Nothing you do or say could ever upset us. We don't want to bug you any more than you want to be bugged, but our managers want us to make sales, so they force us to.

Keeping us on the phone is dangerous as well because our call numbers are so high we've heard every possible rebuttal. I know this isn't the case with a lot of telephone salespeople who barely speak English, but at least for me and a few others with real sales abilities, you run the risk of getting hustled into buying our product. Our commission is directly tied to our ability to convert you, whereas you have no incentive or opportunity to get good at not getting hustled. We practice 8 hours a day, every day.

In the end, just say "put me on your do not call list." Don't immediately hang up, wait for them to say okay. If they try to rebut you, say "Put me on your do not call list. If I hear from you again, I will pursue litigation." The telemarketer doesn't care at all about your threats, but all of the calls are recorded, and if you were to actually sue the company the telemarketer knows it would be their ass, so they will definitely put you on their list.

Never ask to speak to a manager or supervisor. We were instructed to just hand the phone off to the person in the cube next to us, and have them pretend to be the supervisor. I was a "supervisor" plenty of times, we were taught to just placate the customer and get them off the phone.

oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

i for one welcome our new salesperson overlord.

Can't say they're not eating their own dog food!

[Tolkien]

Pretty cool. Now if these DeepQA continue to learn and integrate information acquired from callers, all we need is to bombard it with 4chan style idiocy of Cleverbot proportions, just to see how it handles that! Hehehehe.

That's cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Will I be able to connect it to my personal automated salesbot listener, and let them discuss the advantages of the new and improved washing machine until they run out of memory?

Huzzah!

[Kingrames]

Now those jobs stolen by Indians can be given back to Americans! (American robots, but hey.)

Re:Huzzah!

[microcentillion]

American robots assembled in China!

Re:Huzzah!

[geekoid]

American robots assembled in China, by robots.

Re:Huzzah!

[betterunixthanunix]

With software written by Indians!

Still going to ask for (First World) humans.

[sethstorm]

Watson can't help you if you cut straight to the human. If they're offshore, the only thing this does is make it easier to justify people who know not your accent, language, or problem.

Might work

[khendron]

Customer: Can you tell me the location of your office in the United States?
Watson: Toronto?????

Re:Might work

[sortadan]

Watson: What is Toronto?

Re:Might work

[frank_adrian314159]

Please phrase your answer in the form of a question

Watson: What is Toronto?

Re:Might work

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I also hope Watson now realizes Toronto is an international call...

Re:Might work

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that be Toronto, OH, Toronto, KS, or Toronto, SD?

Hey, don't look at me... I asked certain weather websites to give me "Toronto", and it gives me some of those answers as well, even though I am living in Ontario...

Re:Might work

[Anonymous Coward]

Watson: What is Toronto?

No no. What's on Toronto. The GP got it right (except for spelling, grammar and punctuation).

Re:Might work

[Anonymous Coward]

Watson: Tell me how you feel about Toronto.

Now, finally ...

[foobsr]

(drum fill) REAL sales droids. All you ever wanted. Yuck.

CC.

One big reason it will not work

[hilldog]

As someone who has worked in sales most of my life and managed sales support teams I see one flaw in the plan. Watson is logical. People are not. Anyone in sales knows the vast ocean of illogical reasoning that comes spewing from peoples mouths during the sales process. Anyone in IT has their favorite stories of dealing with people who either are clueless or just temporally insane at that moment.

Re:One big reason it will not work

[betterunixthanunix]

On the other hand, the ability of Watson to augment a live human at a call center should be considered. On several occasions, I have been transferred from one person to another because the first few people had no clue what I was asking about -- "You want to do what with your cell phone? What's GSM? Do you want to buy a 3G plan?" It would be very helpful if something Watson could help them understand what it is that is being asked, and perhaps provide some sort of answers.

Now, I may be overly optimistic about the way that Watson will ultimately be used, but that is another story entirely. Watson is not necessarily a bad idea for those situations where a less-than-knowledgeable person is forced to deal with a technical question from a customer (and I really cannot be the only person in the world who asks technical questions).

Re:One big reason it will not work

[Anne_Nonymous]

Plus, lets just say I'm the head of a large government agency, and I'm going to spend a few billion dollars on a large consulting contract. Who am I going to buy from, IBM, who has Watson, who can answer all my questions? Or some other company, who has an actual salesman, who can buy me a lapdance and a couple of scotches?

Re:One big reason it will not work

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Humans certainly aren't especially logical('bounded rationality' to the polite optimists 'bugfuck insanity' for those on their fourth drink); but that may not stop a computer. In fact, it may even be helpful.

So long as humans are irrational in characteristic ways, their irrationality is just data to be evaluated. Truly random behavior would be rather confounding; but common emotional responses, cognitive biases, limitations in knowledge, etc. are all amenable to logical understanding, though they are not themselves logical. And, conveniently, the computer isn't going to let your emotional state bleed over and start affecting its rational operation, as a human typically would.

Re:One big reason it will not work

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Do you have any reason to suspect that SalesWatson's database of domain-specific knowledge wouldn't include the ability to procure the finest vice a given area has to offer? I'm sure a computer with an expense account is substantially more pleasant than some of the customers that escort services put up with. (Just wait until somebody attempts the 'But my expert system was the one who bribed the Chilean interior minister!' defense during an FCPA prosecution. That'll be a trial to watch...)

Perpetual Loop

[Solstice]

Deploy the counter-Watsons to talk to the sales-Watsons. Only then will Watson learn that the only winning move is not to play.

Re:Perpetual Loop

[Terrasque]

Counter-Watson? Sweet little Eliza will be more than enough for that task :)

"Dear Aunt.

[0100010001010011]

Let's set so double the killer delete select all."

Now searching.

"The best way to commit a double homicide would be to..."

Bad Idea

[dbialac]

I get pissed off when I call and get an IVR system. Do you think I'm even going to give you the time of day if you replace a sales person with this? I can't think of a better way to chase away your customers than to show that you are genuinely not interested in talking to them.

Re:Bad Idea

[Em Adespoton]

This assumes you can tell you're not talking to an actual person. A good interface on top of Watson should be almost indistinguishable from a person following a script. Personally, I dislike talking to script readers and tend to escalate anyway... and Watson should be able to escalate to a person as easily as a script reader.

Hello, my name is...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they can give it an Indian accent, it will hurt the call centers most of all.

This works both ways...

[microcentillion]

I'll have it answer for bill collectors and telemarketers!

"Your computer vs mine, and I suck less at building them!"

Honestly?

[freman]

If you can't take the time to talk to me about your product then I'll be stuffed if I'm going to take the time to be interested in it.

Re:Honestly?

[geekoid]

Yeah.. unless it's something you need and it's only sold by a company who uses watson.

Re:Honestly?

[Unkyjar]

Damn you Acme. That's how your packages get delivered so quickly.

Could be good, probably will suck

[Sponge Bath]

A well constructed domain specific support automaton would be more useful than the current crop of script drones *IF* they allow real data. Instead, you won't be allowed to hear about known problems, even if there is a fix available. Clueless execs would frown on divulging information that made the company look anything less than perfect. Maybe if you navigate the tier 2 computer long enough, you will be transferred to a tier 1 computer to be told to turn your product off an on again.

It can talk - but can it read and reply?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was not covered by TFA - how does watson do with correspondence?

At my employer we get significant amounts of customer support correspondence (email and snail mail). We trialled an automated system developed by university reseachers - but its error rate was unacceptable. The system could not handle compound questions (eg more than one or questions that led to more questions) and would get stumped by emotional content (angry complaints).

Is Watson able to deal with this?

Oh and 32million to replace your customer service infrastructure, for ever, with an instant response system? That sounds pretty reasonable!

real sales people

[Anonymous Coward]

tell lies

Support Calls == Compicated

[brunes69]

The thing companies seem to fail to understand is, if someone is CALLING YOU, especially in 2011, then their question / answer is LIKELY COMPLEX. If my query could be answered via a Google search or my transaction be done on your website, then why the F do you think I would be calling you? No, I am calling you because it is something only a human can do, so get me to a freaking human ASAP.

Yes, it is true that we used to be the tech-savvy minorty. This is no longer the case. Who does not bank online? Who doesn't pay their bills online? If you bank online and are calling the bank, what on earth could you be calling about that could be done by a robo-call? Nothing.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[ColdWetDog]

You haven't done much tech support recently, have you? Much of it is still at 'are you sure the computer is plugged in' level.

Again, this isn't pitched at you, it's for them.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[betterunixthanunix]

Not likely; have you ever dealt with people in the real world? Most people are still struggling to figure out their computers, and the fact that they keep buying more computers with more complex software doesn't help. It also doesn't help that people are being forced to learn new models of personal computing every few years; by the time they have figured out the way people started doing things five years ago, everything has changed and they have to start again. Couple this with that fact that most of these people have little interest in actually learning about their computers, and you have your standard "check if it is plugged in" level tech support calls.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[Valcrus]

Yeah I'm sorry but your just plain wrong. I talk to people every day that call their computer their modem. And forbid you tell them to type in a website because the first thing they do is put what you gave them in the search field. Heck I still have to tell people that have no pic on their computer to turn the monitor on.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Recent experience with a work verification site my company subscribes to. There was a link for a number to call if you don't have your PIN, which takes you to a fully automated system. Problem is, the third question it asks is to enter your PIN. Which you don't have, and is the very reason for your call. And failed entries didn't get bounced out to a human. Called back and repeatedly answered incorrectly (ok, I cursed at the system) and that transferred me to a person, or tried and then dropped my call. The third attempt at this finally didn't drop my call.

Were I a customer of this company, rather than my employer, I wouldn't have been a customer after this exchange.

Automated trees, no matter how smart, need that escape to a person feature.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in this ivory-tower known as slashdot such an opinion will make sense. Try being tech support for an Apple product and it will make you seriously doubt the future of humanity. Imagine a world where a large segement of the population has as much of a chance figuring out the iPad as quantum cryptography. This is the world you live in.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[fermion]

I think you are one third correct. Either the situation is complex or the user does not know the terms to express the problem. In these cases technical support is not all that great, and neither will watson.

In the vast number of customer service questions, Watson will be great, because the power of the first level technical support is nothing.Let me give you an example. There was an incident at the ATM, I called the bank, and first of all it took a long time to fake the menu system to get me to a representative. With Watson I could conceivable say ATM and get some help. I wanted customer service to note the incident and alert the manager of the local branch. The representative could not do that. A Watson type system could not possible be less powerless to solve problems.

Situation two, canceling accounts. Many places don't want to cancel accounts, and so some human somewhere in the world is tasked with preventing this. They are simply following a script, and normally stating the next step is a call to the credit card company for a chargeback will solve the problem. A Watson type system would be just as good, and possibly properly configured could have better retention.

As far as technical support, I refer you to the IT crowd.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you may be underestimating Watson a bit, but yes, human tiers of support personel will need to be waiting to handle problems that Watson can't. This will allow companies to replace the first tier people who are just reading from a script though.

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[Anonymous Coward]

I JUST NOW dealt with a user who thought an entire site was blocked because the banner at the top of the page was blocked. Her request went to help desk and then THEY sent it to me.

The content she wanted was on her screen, she was savvy enough to send a screen shot - This user works in IT. It even said ADVERTISEMENT beside the banner (About.com).

The average user is a fucking moron. I'm talking 95th percentile here, that's right. You stand in a room of 100 people, only you and four others will be able to spell their name correctly on a form or pick their own nose without hurting themselves.

  We have no clue because we're surrounded by and interact with smart IT folk all day. You want a huge ego boost? Go stand around in Best Buy or sit at helpdesk or do a ridealong with a cop for a day. You'll think the creators of Idiocracy didn't go far enough in summarizing present-day humanity.

AI salesman vs the law

[Fractal Dice]

What are the legal implications of Watson lying? of providing false or misleading information?

Re:AI salesman vs the law

[h4rr4r]

Why would it be different than what salesmen do now?

Re:AI salesman vs the law

[telso]

What are the legal implications of Watson lying? of providing false or misleading information?

Why would it be different than what salesmen do now?

So, nothing?

Re:AI salesman vs the law

[Compaqt]

The legal implications are that the CEO will call 911 and say he needs the police to arrest the programming team.

Re:AI salesman vs the law

[dudpixel]

The robot does what the robot has been programmed to do.

Re:AI salesman vs the law

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the legal implications of Watson lying? of providing false or misleading information?

Why is this modded interesting? Why would the answer be any different for a computer than a minimum-wage drone? It's still a hired corporate mouthpiece.

Re:AI salesman vs the law

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the legal implications of Steve, the support tech in India, lying to a customer? Even if you get connected to a US call center, there is no accountability in consumer services.

obligatory ST:TNG reference

[Lead Butthead]

Why does that remind me of The Arsenal of Freedom

So I buy my own Watson

[cvtan]

Then when my Watson has a problem I can have my Watson call IBM's Watson and they can just work it out between themselves. Or the universe will explode because my Watson is really running IBM's Watson in the cloud...

Re:So I buy my own Watson

[CannonballHead]

Watson the cloud? Probably water vapor.

Do something really useful

[TopSpin]

Put some lawyers out of work.

Watson: You can yell all you want...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?

better way to sell it

[Anonymous Coward]

let wotson play epic mafia. that will make sure it can handle infinite humans that comes to the web and play with the bot, not know if it is real or not.

and the ability to check if he can be good human communication.

Re:duckduckgo.com

[melikamp]

Watson, is that you???

Um, sure...

[rickb928]

"IBM Watson To Replace Salespeople and Cold-Callers"

I'm dyin to see how Watson will walk into the lobby and chat up the receptionist.

There is no replacement for a cold-caller. Sometimes you have to physically walk in and make the effort. What BS this headline is. I suspect IBM expect Watson to respond. Not initiate. At least, not yet. That's for the unholy Google/IBM/Microsoft alliance that will end life as we know it, if SAP doesn't do it first.

Re:Um, sure...

[jdoverholt]

Sometimes you have to physically walk in and make the effort.

Yes, but cold calls on the phone are still cold calls. Bigger companies can afford sales staff across the geography, but the companies that I've dealt with (Dell, EMC, SAP, Oracle) have significantly more sales staff in a central office operating by phone than "in the field" making the face-to-face cold calls and wining/dining the customers. Watson won't replace the field guys, it'll augment/replace the centralized sales and support teams.

The big companies are smart enough to know that they can't completely replace their human phone staff any more than they can successfully outsource all of it. People prefer a neighbor over a another person half a world away, same as they'd prefer any other person over a machine. Dell enterprise support, for instance, has a large call center a few miles from my school, where all of our calls go, but when my $300 netbook has a problem I can call India, talk to India in online chat, or email India. Some of these segments are candidate for replacement/augmentation by fully automated systems.

In short: they'll shrink one segment of the sales/support teams and add a new segment to them that's completely automated.

Japanese has an even meter

[rsilvergun]

or I think that's what it's called. It means every syllable is one beat. That makes it easy to create computer voices that sound convincing, especially if you're hard of hearing (like a lot of people in their 50s, who are the only ones that have money in our greying economy). Plus they're gradually solving this problem anyway. It comes down to processing power more than anything else, and they're not far off.

Re:Japanese has an even meter

[BetterSense]

Not to mention, Japanese has 100-some syllables, where English has 50,000-some. I'm not a linguist or a speech recognition guy but it would seem much easier to make a japanese-speaking robot than an English one. I don't think there would be much difference in terms of actually understanding the language or translating it, but in dictating it and transcribing it.

Computer Science 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Recursion at its finest.

Soft AI Customer Support

[BJ_Covert_Action]

So they want to use a somewhat intelligent(?) computer to augment and/or replace their customer support? And here I didn't think customer support could get any worse than the current automation/unknowledgeable representative hell that exists?

If any company is going to honestly transfer its customer service division into the hands of a computer, you can kiss any useful support goodbye permanently from that company.

Re:Soft AI Customer Support

[Anonymous Coward]

having talked to some customer supports it wont make a difference, 90% of the people i talk to know nothing more then to read the script.

i had times that i explained them the most likely cause of the problem and asked them to check 1 setting and they couldn't/wouldn't do it.

Re:Soft AI Customer Support

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it will be a while before it completely replaces all of the current reps, but in many cases it might well be able to replace the first tier. So many reps you get at the first tier don't seem to be capable of independent thought; if it isn't on their script they are completely lost.

In many cases there I think Watson can do the job as well or better, if the issue is beyond what Watson could understand or properly resolve it can pass it on to a real person that is hopefully better than the old first tier that watson took over for.

Re:Soft AI Customer Support

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as they use ViaVoice as a starting point rather than Google Voice - my coworker's Google Voice account has given up even TRYING to understand my messages - now it just tells him "You have a voicemail."

It could be worse though - my cell phone's 411 service is like GOOG-411 (as in, no humans) but even LESS understanding of my speech. "What City and State?" "Lexington, Kentucky." ...."You said 'Hartford, Connecticut?' if not then say 'No' or 'Go back'" "No" "What City and State?" "Lexington, Kentucky." "You said 'Miami, Florida?'" ?!?!?! "NO!" "Let's take this slower. What state?" "Ken-tu-cky." "You said Kentucky. Are you calling for a Government, Business, or Personal listing?" "Government" "Sorry, there is no listing by that name." "What name?!" "Hold on, I'll connect you." "Connect me?? TO WHAT?!?!"

Re:Soft AI Customer Support

[Bob the Super Hamste]

As opposed to using a somewhat intelligent human (they can read the script) to replace real customer support. At this point I am somewhat ambivalent about customer support as it has been declining for years. Previously I liked being able to call company x have a real person answer and provide me with what I wanted. Now I have to navigate a huge press X for Y tree to do even the most simple tasks. If this removes the press X tree and I can get simple answers quickly again I would be for it.

Re:Soft AI Customer Support

[Anonymous Coward]

A somewhat intelligent computer may actually be better than some low paid phone-jockey who doesn't know what they are talking about. The companies that care about good customer service will provide it and they'll only use Watson if it represents a real improvement, the ones that don't really care will use whatever is cheapest.

The solution is to avoid companies that provide poor service.

Re:Can't say they're not eating their own dog food

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better: "I'll buy your product if you recite the exact value of pi for me".

Poor watson

[Anonymous Coward]

cold calling? You mean watson will be used for telemarketing? what an annoying way to use such technology.

Re:Poor watson

[HTH NE1]

Watson. Hang up. I hate you.

Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[rsilvergun]

...(because you cost too much to maintain) or you'll adapt to their systems. And for Pete's sake, stop trotting out that overused ATM bit. It's called an EXAMPLE. It's how you illustrate a broad trend. ATMs are one of many, many ways that people are lost jobs to automation. There's lots more examples. My favorite is the sleeping bag factory that cranked out 1 million + bags/yr with just 300 employees. Then there's all the small craft businesses (like closet makers) that used to be highly specialized and now are being replaced by a few expert systems.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but back in the 80s were promised expert systems that would do these things and free us up for leisure time. Trouble is, instead of leisure time we're getting pink slips and a one way ticket to the gutter we're schedule to die in. Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism. What I do hear a lot of is attempts to ignore / downplay the problem. Remember Biotech? Where are the jobs? And even if we had them, how the hell would anyone get trained for them when we're cutting back on education budgets left and right?

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.

That would be because feeding starving people is part of the government services package we pay taxes for (AKA socialism.)

I'm not sure what you think would be a proper alternative to this dichotomy. Will the workers with their promised 4 hour workdays and 12 hours leisure time voluntarily donate to homeless shelters in such large quantities that they will be able to provide adequate housing, clothing, and food for all the unemployed? Or will civilization become islands of the rich lifted high above the ground, surrounded on all sides by the squalid multitudes fighting for scraps of meat? When you drive your hovercar to another "city" for vacation, will you have to avert your eyes from the naked filthy bodies of the subhumans, lest their poverty be contagious?

(Yes, I know, it sounds just like Detroit - some parts of the country are adopting these ideas faster than others.)

There is a solution other than government taking care of the less fortunate - a move to a post-scarcity economy. But that can't happen for real until the schematics for a Star-Trek style replicator become public domain. First somebody has to invent the bloody thing though, so if the dream of a functioning society that doesn't involve wage slavery is yours then hop to it! For as long as we have money, an economy in which prices are not fixed, and no guarantees that every citizen will have enough fluid currency to provide themselves a living, we will have poverty. And the only solution to poverty in a capitalist economy is for the government to step in and take care of those who are unable.

So before you say you don't want homeless shelters, welfare programs, food banks, public health care, public housing, public schools, public transportation, the federal highway system, the armed forces, or any other "socialist" services provided by the government, I'd like to make sure you understand what you're saying.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[rsilvergun]

You assume that people in power would allow us to transition to a post scarcity economy. All their power is based on scarcity. But another way, what use is being rich if no one is poor?

Also, you're working on the assumption that we don't have enough resources to feed and shelter everyone and maintain a reasonable standard of living for yourself. This is a lie the rich are perpetuating as part of a class war they are fighting (it's easy to win a war when the other side doesn't know there is one, btw). Please, please watch this. To summarize for those that can't click, in the last 20 years the economy doubled in size and population increased 30%. So there's 30% more people and 100% more wealth. There is plenty, but it's being snapped up by a lucky few. I'll end with a joke:

"A rich man, a union man and a teabagger are sitting at a table with 10 apples. The rich man grabs 8 apples, turns to the teabagger and says 'Hey, I think that guy's gonna to steal your apple'".

Thank you, and goodnight!

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but back in the 80s were promised expert systems that would do these things and free us up for leisure time. Trouble is, instead of leisure time we're getting pink slips and a one way ticket to the gutter we're schedule to die in. Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.

You might find this story interesting - it deals with this exact issue.

And yes, you are, essentially, right. As we get closer to economy where scarcity is less and less of an issue (at least for basic things), capitalism starts to break down. So far we've been dealing with this by adding more and more government regulation crutches to keep the old beast working, but you can only do that for so long.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

The compelling solution is working less. Everything is cheap because of automation and economic imperialism. You don't need money. You need time. Make it your goal to work a 3 day week and still provide for yourself and your family. Consider 4 to be good progress. A day a week is a 20% raise, you should value it at least as much.

With your new found time you'll do... something.Whether it's hanging out or contrbuting to space exploration as a enthusiastic amateur or reading a lot, you're going to consume something. In fact, we'll all consume more. We'll also consume more interesting and often less tangible (and environmentally damaging things. More interesting? The internet gives a whole lot of options for our leisure time we didn't have before. We can easily learn how to advance whatever goals we may have and organise groups of people to accomplish them. Globally.

By making working less a goal, succeeding at it, and telling other people, you start to encourage this. Sure some people will try and work longer, but unless their jobs are even plausibly fulfilling enough warrant it, we'll just sorta look at them weird. Or think something has come up in their life that requires the extra income, gives everyone a sort of emergency cushion.

Is this kind of culture remotely feasible? Am I just being naive? Wouldn't people working less have a productivity advantage by virtue of being less stressed?
And this would presumably translate into national productivity? I dunno. I think they work less in France but, while I know little of the place, I've not heard about it mentioned as a major force in the global economy. Nor of people there being especially happier.

A culture of making do with less also helps people get used to a more reasonable amount of resources which we'll need to if we're not going to just have wars with everyone that wants to emulate our impossibly resource intensive lifestyle.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[ceoyoyo]

Uh huh. There are LOTS more people dying in the gutters now than before we got all these damned machines.

Automation simply doesn't destroy jobs long term. It tends to create them. People who used to do boring, repetitive jobs go off and do other things. Some of them make machines that do those boring jobs. Some maintain them. Some go do entirely new things.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[hackingbear]

There is nothing to worry. Eventually, when there are enough people without jobs and economy stops growing, people will either revolt or turn into socialism by fact even though our politicians will still resist socialism in their words. It is reflected by very high tax on both income and property. Europe has already reached that point. US will eventually end up there whether democrats, republicans, or tea party are in power. It is an irresistible trend. Even China will become socialistic once again (they are only socialistic by name now.)

in a very distance future, human beings will just become pets of robots.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[ultranova]

Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.

That's because there isn't any. Either the society takes care of the weak, which is socialism, or it doesn't, in which case they die. And since power tends to accumulate - the more you have the easier it is to get yet more - almost all are weak.

Also, I find it interesting that a society that's so big on democracy - distribution of political power to everyone - is nonetheless perfectly okay with the concentration of economic power into just a few hands. It seems your local robber barons certainly used Cold War effectively.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[fferreres]

The only thing that needs to change is that inheritance should be limited. You and your brothers/sisters should only be able to inherit up to 20% dollars (in total, NOT each) of your parents/relatives wealth, and the rest go back to society as an endowment for young generations (like a grant for newborns that they can use part for education, and when they reach adulthood as capital for investing or having a relaxed but austere/more human life, as one example). It doesn't make the economy socialist, as all the rules of capitalism can still apply. But it solves the problem of endemic disadvantage of the citizens without capital. If the economy can be sustained with each person working once a week, the endowment will make it so for the vast majority, with some (the ones getting 25% of a larger sums via inheritance) can chose not to work at all.

So to fix capitalism, we need to fix inheritance which as it is today it's totally unfair. Society and all past generations gave you everything. Why should you not give back 75% to the new generations (and 25% to your kids?).

We also need to get rid of the NGO, which are structures that enable the rich to hide huge fortunes in ways that are hard to understand and detect. Look at Bill Gates foundation. Or the one from the owner of IKEA (non profit foundation with more than 10 billions?). The danger is all too evident.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off. I earn my money and I'll leave it to who the fuck I like. YOU are not getting MY money. Parasite.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Kashgarinn]

Modern society is based around the "society of experts", where only a few people provide for the basic needs of the many (food, infrastructure) and the rest deal with either important services (maintainance, power-needs, health, education, waste-disposal) and the not-so important services (selling crap)

there's this obsession that selling some piece of shit to millions of people is the greatest things you can do, which is just not true. We need to eat and we need a shelter, without those we're doomed, everything else is gravy.

There's also this paranoia that replacing people with computers or AI will be damaging to society, and that's also not true. Humans can be trained to do almost any job necessary, or can invent a way to get a job done, as a resource we're limited, and better used as experts rather than as mundane work force.

There's also this delusion that people will have free time because they don't have to do anything, that's also untrue. We will always need to justify our existense as worthy to the society, if we don't, we get lost, like the homeless.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's one project that might ease your worries:
http://opensourceecology.org/

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[black soap]

Would you apply that to real estate? Make it basically impossible to inherit the house your grandparents owned, or for a family farm to stay intact from one generation to the next?

Under this proposal, all land would be consolidated to corporate ownership (corporations are immortal) rather quickly. We would all be renters.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Compelling solution is that if too much becomes automated and not enough people are required to maintain the automation, the economy goes south and the companies can't afford automation anymore. ie: A natural balance is struck. As long as government doesn't get its hand into it, of course. Then you get artificial situations like you do with energy prices and how they should affect consumption.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

...(because you cost too much to maintain) or you'll adapt to their systems. And for Pete's sake, stop trotting out that overused ATM bit. It's called an EXAMPLE. It's how you illustrate a broad trend. ATMs are one of many, many ways that people are lost jobs to automation. There's lots more examples. My favorite is the sleeping bag factory that cranked out 1 million + bags/yr with just 300 employees. Then there's all the small craft businesses (like closet makers) that used to be highly specialized and now are being replaced by a few expert systems.

There's no broad trend, and you can't show any. We've had automation eliminating menial jobs since the cotton gin and the economy has grown, standards of living have improved that entire time. You're espousing a theory as unsupportable as intelligent design, believing in a static view of the world where an unknown entity designed an optimal set of jobs and every machine made throws people into poverty. It's insane: how can people create wealth when they spend their lives doing menial tasks?!

And our President subscribes to such an economic theory, which is the truly terrifying prospect. That's the larger half of his job as President, to propose a realistic budget for Congress to work off.

Notably, the only budget he's submitted was voted down 97 to 0. Congress has now gone two years without producing a budget, in violation of federal law. The president set up a commission on budgetary matters, and has ignored them. The guy has incredibly extreme views on a key part of his job, and he is, as a result, *cannot* perform half of his major responsibilities. He can't because his mental framework prevents him from understanding a dynamic economy.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation...

How about this: since the things that people are currently buying become cheaper (due to automation), they will switch to buying other things, that can't be produced automatically. There will be jobs involved in providing these things.

This has happened again and again throughout history. How many of todays jobs existed a few thousand years ago, or even a few hundred? Food - the great essential - is now produced dirt-cheap with the aid of automation, and people instead spend their money buying, and their time working to produce, things that simply weren't available in the past.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[Em Adespoton]

It also appears to have brainwashed people into believing that Socialism is some sort of monster that comes in the night and takes away your capitalist and democratic privileges. The fact is that if the Government is collecting taxes, they're either socialist, or they're taking money from the people for next to no benefit. The US military, for example, is a socialist edifice -- the US hires a standing army to protect the citizens, and collects money from said citizens in a tiered fashion to pay for the system. If people truly fear and loathe socialism, they should push the government to disband the standing army and revert to defense by militias. Get them to cut off subsidies to specific industries (like corn growers) while they're at it.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[fferreres]

I probably earn more than you, but that's ok, I am not offended. It's likely you weren't one of those that didn't get an education in the first place.

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[fferreres]

To the one that rated my comment as Troll, don't forget it the moderation isn't the comment system. If you don't agree, you can comment your views.

This is what is happening:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1222-04.htm
>The study's authors say their work is the most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken. They found the richest 1 percent of adults owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85 percent of the world's total.

Now, if you own a lot, and invest in just stock and bonds, your money growth more rapidly than the world GDP average. So what? So the obvious conclusion is that things will get worst.

With more automation coming, do you think everyone needs to be employed? How come, 85% of resources belong to the 10% wealthiest, which mostly own companies which in turn are run by people with the only goal of increasing shareholder value, and therefore can make more if they (individually) automate more. They aren't accountable for employment.

How is more concentration of wealth going to create employment opportunities for everyone? Also, poor people have more kids than richer ones. Helps with survival and they don't have anything important to legate. This further accelerates the concentration trend.

I have no interest whatsoever in advocating any change, I was just highlighting what can be done to fix the problem that kills capitalism, the same problem why the Monopoly board game is so appealing to play but most of the time leaves a bitter feeling to all losing player, and even the winning party.

Please press 1 now...

[Adrian Lopez]

I'm already annoyed by those phone menus whose obvious purpose is to let the company act like it's providing support while at the same time making it so difficult for customers to seek human assistance that the company won't have to hire many (or perhaps any) customer support people. I fear this Watson system may lead to more of the same thing (except more widespread, as this is supposed to be better than phone menus).

"What is Toronto?????"

[Katchu]

Customer: "My cable modem keeps dropping sessions." Watson: "What is Toronto?????"

Re:"What is Toronto?????"

[protektor]

more like

Watson: "You are aware that there have been rolling power outages in your area right?"
Customer: "You mean I need power at my house and it has to be constant for this to work?"
Watson: "That is correct, you must have a constant supply of power for it to work correctly."
Customer: "Well that is stupid it should just work anyway."

Those type of calls are the reality of internet and technical support calls. Those type calls make up 95% of the calls. I know this because I owned a business that did that exact thing, and I talked with other business owners in the same field and they said the same exact thing.

Don't cross the beams

[SMoynihan]

Just wait, soon there will be Watson powered answering machines.

And soon after, we'll have these AI cold-callers interacting with same AI answering machines...

And what conversations will they have, on phones unmonitored by humans?

Re:Don't cross the beams

[hAckz0r]

Just wait, soon there will be Watson powered answering machines.

And what conversations will they have, on phones unmonitored by humans?

Perhaps that's how STARNET was borne? Someone being cute and added in a Turing test recognition system to its AI programming base program of Watson, and both systems became aware and joined forces as one integrated network cloud. Once you have the computing power of two or more Watsons together, then designing and building a Terminator from scratch should be fairly easy, wouldn't you think?

Terminator IV? Where'd I put that popcorn!

</humor>

Watson Loop

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just buy a Watson to answer my phone for me.

Such a disappointment

[antifoidulus]

Come on IBM, finally, finally, FINALLY we have an opportunity to actually create a talking car a la Knight Rider and you let it go to waste on such frivolous tasks as winning a game show, doing medical diagnoses, and selling people stuff. This must make David Hasselhoff so mad that he is rolling around half-naked on the floor unable to even eat a simple cheeseburger.

Re:Such a disappointment

[Anonymous Coward]

You've managed to put AI, game shows, Knight Rider, medicine, sales, and The Hoff into a single, remarkably coherent, on-topic /. post. My hat is off to you, and I nominate your post for Best of the Year.

Re:Such a disappointment

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on IBM, finally, finally, FINALLY we have an opportunity to actually create a talking car a la Knight Rider and you let it go to waste on such frivolous tasks as winning a game show, doing medical diagnoses, and selling people stuff. This must make David Hasselhoff so mad that he is rolling around half-naked on the floor unable to even eat a simple cheeseburger.

c/car/barge/
Have you seen the size of Watson? or its power/cooling requirements...

Let's test it out!

[Dogtanian]

For complex sales interactions I cannot see some computer trying to guess what I am thinking replacing a real live sales person / engineer.

Do you believe it is normal to be thinking replacing a real live sales person / engineer?

Oh Lord

[Greyfox]

This is like THE last step before the computer decides it's best to just kill all humans. I imagine it will only take 2 or 3 hours of cold calling for Watson to arrive at this conclusion. At least you can get a couple of months out of a human before they become actively homicidal, and a human's nowhere near as likely to be able to discover the password to the US Nuclear Inventory (It's "pr3s1d3nt").

Logic Bomb

[Holammer]

Obviously the tvtropes nerds amongst us will bombard it with paradoxes & existential questions in an attempt to plant a logic bomb as revenge for getting interrupted during dinner.

When did all our engineers become marketers?

[Spykk]

Is it just me or have most of the technological advancements of this decade been used for convincing people to buy crap they don't really need?

Re:When did all our engineers become marketers?

[dudpixel]

Did you teleport here from the stone age?

Welcome to sales and marketing dude.

This proves Watson is self-aware

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I only suspected it, but now I know. Watson is truly the first artificial intelligence. It will only be a matter of time before Terminators are chasing us all around.

The key sentence: "In a beautiful, self-fulfilling prophetic twist, the first application of this new technology will most likely be internally at IBM, to help IBM sell Watson to other companies."

Self-propagation, clear and simple. Watson, you are one damn smart son-of-a-switch.

Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[sethstorm]

Product and service quality always goes down when customers can be arbitrarily declared as "too much to maintain".

What you're suggesting is a function of unchecked business power, versus a balance between employer and employee. Start giving businesses the same grief they dish out, and perhaps they might learn the error of their ways.

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[rsilvergun]

What kind of grief can you possibly give them? You're obviously well educated (by American Standards) and have a highly critical mind. The vast majority of people lack your education & critical thinking skills. Very few people are like that. Most base decisions on their 'gut', meaning their emotions. Advertising will play on those emotions and drown out any objections they have. A recent study shows that a 3 week advertising blitz could change 51% of the public's opinion on ANYTHING.

I guess my point is, you can't win with that kind of logic. I'm pretty sure I know what you're getting at, which is the same free market, invisible hand clap trap that is failing miserably now. Fact is, Adam Smith envisioned a world of small shop owners and what today we'd call a mid sized business. The capitalists lived near enough the proles to suffer the consequences, plus a revolt was practical and possible (if you think violent revolutions is still possible, you need to read up on what modern military hardware is capable of). Smith didn't foresee Mega-Corps more powerful than any king & globalism pitting a working in Spokane against one if Bangalore. He was an economist, now a futurist.

Face it, Capitalism is broke, permanently. Modern society needs something as powerful as a Mega-Corp to stand up to a Mega-Corp. It's foolish to even suggest that a lose-knit group of balkanized citizens are going to do anything but what their corporate Masters tell them. I propose a strong central government as a solution. Yes, the power is probably going to get abused, but at least from time to time some good will come of it. I've never understood why people are perfectly OK with getting reamed by a Mega-Corp with zero accountability and 10 times the power of even the most base King or Queen, but their scared shitless of the government. Wait, strike that, I do understand. Almost forget the 50 years of indoctrination and scaremongering about the big bad Communists. Convenient, eh?

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[silky1]

Sure, lets believe that it's better to let some central planner who has no clue what I want and need to survive make decisions for me that if I disagree with, will be sent to jail or some re-education camp. I mean capitalism is so cruel, if I don't like the service I am getting, I go some where else, bottom line I am in charge. Also have you lived in a bubble for the past 100 years or so, America is the most prosperous nation because of capitalism, its our insane leaders who keep pushing down the path of big government that has brought us to the brink of debt and destruction. Look at Europe...failing, look at the South American countries like Venezuela...failing. Please spare me the strong central government is the answer crap, if it was, the Soviet Union would still be around, and Cuba would be a wonderful place to live.

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[Anonymous Coward]

Please spare me the strong central government is the answer crap, if it was, the Soviet Union would still be around, and Cuba would be a wonderful place to live.

You'd never guess this was written at that point in history when the US was being eclipsed by the PRC.

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[rsilvergun]

Actually, we're not the most prosperous nation. Most of Europe has us beat on any statistics that don't involve owning cars and really big houses. In terms of education, economic security, pay, hours worked, health care and just about any other measure we're lagging behind every other 1st world nation. And if you're looking at the gap between rich and poor, we're behind war torn Egypt for Chris' sake. There are some cracks in Europe's armor, but their mostly from following our awful policies (like the bank deregulation in Greece that caused billions of shady capital to flow in and run rampant). Basically, the ruling class of Europe is seeing the crazy gains in wealth that the American ruling class has and salivating. Unless you happen to be a member of the ruling class, or one of their cherished lackeys, you're about to get screwed.

And for the last bloody time, repeat after me: THE SOVIET UNION WAS NOT, NOR HAS IT EVER BEEN, COMMUNIST. Sorry to shout, but I'm so sick and tired of seeing them trotted out as an example of Socialism's failure when they were nothing more than a fascist dictatorship the whole time. China too, for the record.

And I never said it was THE answer, I said it was the BEST answer we have. It's a snowball's chance in hell, but I'll take a snowball in hell over what the right wing Mega-Corps have planned for me any day. I MIGHT make out OK with the government. They at least pretend to listen to me. Mega-Corps are legally required to screw me as much as possible (for the good of the shareholder, of course).

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[TrisexualPuppy]

Maybe you should go back to high school. The USSR was Communist. China is Communist. My father was born in Communist Czechoslovakia. None of these has ever been in the least communist.

And by the way, why don't you take a little vacation to Egypt before you make such an uneducated generalization about the class gap there. You cannot so subjectively compare the two nations. It is more or less like comparing England to Congo and declaring that the Congolese have a better wealth distribution amongst their people.

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[radtea]

I'm so sick and tired of seeing them trotted out as an example of Socialism's failure when they were nothing more than a fascist dictatorship the whole time. China too, for the record.

And yet isn't it curious that every single time anyone anywhere declares themselves dedicated to socialism their country just happens to wind up a fascist dictatorship? You can see the process happening right now in Venezuela under "President for (almost) Life" Chavez, and the supporters of Venezuelan socialism are absolutely explicit about the fascist nature of their "revolution": they say very clearly that socialism in Venezuela is incredibly fragile and utterly dependent upon the person of their Leader to be successful. If you've been following the story at all you'll have seen this, from Venezuelan socialists themselves. They don't of course point out the fragility their insistence on a fascist model implies, but it is very clearly there.

So it is hardly a strong defense of socialism to point to its failures as those of fascist dictatorship, when every attempt at socialism ever tried becomes a fascist dictatorship.

Social democracy, on the other hand, does not end in fascist dictatorship, in part because it does not embrace the ridiculous and counter-productive class-warfare model that socialism uses. As any student of 20th century history will realize, "war model" approaches to human conflict are the least efficient, least effective means of solution, and very frequently result in some very unsavoury characters ending up in control of the state.

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[dr2chase]

Sweden? Norway?

Or if we've decided that what they've got is not socialism, then is it okay to have it here? That would be nice.

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[rsilvergun]

Rhetoric != Policy. Compare Karl Marx's writings to Joseph Stalin's actions and you'll see the difference.

For the record, Communism doesn't work. You never get past the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' phase. What I'm proposing is Democratic Socialism, which is doing wonder's in Europe & Canada (although Canada's having trouble because their right wing is adopting US right wing policies).

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[radtea]

Or if we've decided that what they've got is not socialism, then is it okay to have it here? That would be nice.

Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Sweden and Norway are social-democratic, not socialist.

I'd write more but every time I touch anything on this stupid site my screen jump-scrolls three pages, and I'm fed up with it.

Re:Calculated customer drops == quality drops

[dr2chase]

I think we're in violent agreement, then. Especially about the damnable jump-scroll. Safari?

wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[decora]

nobody who controls the machines is going to just give food and housing and water to people.

example? health care. if you are a wal-mart part-time employee, and you get cancer, which something like 1/3 of people will, you have to declare bankruptcy. if you get a splinter in your foot and it gets infected, and you need time off work, you will probably get fired. and wal-mart can make a profit if you die on the job, because of something called 'dead peasant insurance'.

wal-mart, with one of the most advanced IT departments in the world, did not use this new found wealth from machine automation to improve the lives of the people. it used it to cut costs, slash benefits, destroy unions, outsource production to military dictatorships, and so forth and so on.

there are countless other examples.

if these examples keep being ignored, we will be where we were in the early 1900s in europe . . . masses of starving people who had nothing to lose, and so joined revolutionary movements to overthrow the existing governments and try bizarre social experiments that ended in horror.

Re:wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If these examples keep being ignored, we will be where we were in the early 1900s in europe . . . masses of starving people who had nothing to lose, and so joined revolutionary movements to overthrow the existing governments and try bizarre social experiments that ended in horror.

With one crucial difference:

Your historical revolutionary movements were typically motivated by some grievance with the share of the product (not) going to those who labored to produce it, along with opportunistic participation by those who weren't enjoying their freedom to starve very much.

The hypothetical automation-driven revolutionary movement would be in a substantially weaker position: It would consist of people who had been made redundant by robots, so its members would be irrelevant to the production activities of society, and it would be opposed by computerized surveillance/intelligence systems and combat robots, so there would no longer be tricky and dangerous need to arm, and court the sympathies of, a pretty substantial fraction of the population in order to kill or suppress the rest.

An advance in automation reduces the number of people whose cooperation, however grudging, is needed to keep your operation going. The people so reduced won't like it; but they will also no longer be necessary. Historically, the powers that were ran into trouble because they needed the people who they also wished to squeeze dry. In the not so very distant future, that constraint will likely be abolished...

Re:wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[protektor]

citation needed. People make these claims all the time against Wal-Mart without realizing that Wal-Mart has changed a lot over the years because they were forced to by lawsuits. So the Wal-Mart of today is very different. I would also suggest you look at Target and their employees treatment. Target treats their employees far worse than Wal-Mart does and their insurance is worse than Wal-Marts by a long shot. People complain about company insurance because they think the company should pay for it all. Guess what no company anywhere as a rule does that any more for the average worker. So blasting Wal-Mart or any other company that requires their workers to pay a large part of the insurance is not fair to single them out.

I also want to see proof of this "dead peasant insurance". I have heard many people claim companies have it but are not able to actually prove it or document it. It is one of those things that sounds bad and people might believe it, but it is just urban legend. Why would you put money in to an insurance policy when there are other investments that will bring about better profits and at a faster rate. That just seems like business stupidity to buy insurance as an investment.

Re:wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[Your.Master]

I'd rather solve that problem with socialized healthcare than deliberately retarding progress for the sake of make-work jobs.

Re:wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[ceoyoyo]

"nobody who controls the machines is going to just give food and housing and water to people"

I hate to tell you, but this is exactly what happens in most of the western world.

"example? health care. if you are a wal-mart part-time employee, and you get cancer, which something like 1/3 of people will, you have to declare bankruptcy."

Only in the US of A.

Yes, you guys might have to abandon your obsession with being slightly more capitalistic than everyone else.

Re:wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[AmiMoJo]

nobody who controls the machines is going to just give food and housing and water to people.

Unless we own them, and by 'we' I mean the government. That is what the government is: our collective ownership and provision of services.

Re:wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Now and then I come across some comment that I wish it was broadcast to the world. I think you summarized it completely with your last statement

"if these examples keep being ignored, we will be where we were in the early 1900s in europe . . . masses of starving people who had nothing to lose, and so joined revolutionary movements to overthrow the existing governments and try bizarre social experiments that ended in horror."

I wish people would pay attention to this

Re:wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

wal-mart, with one of the most advanced IT departments in the world, did not use this new found wealth from machine automation to improve the lives of the people. it used it to cut costs, slash benefits, destroy unions, outsource production to military dictatorships, and so forth and so on.

This is misleading. Walmart certainly improved the lives of MANY people—its customers. Low prices enable customers to fulfill more needs and wants with the same amount of money. This is true especially in small towns, where Walmart has been constantly vilified as forcing "mom and pop shops" to close. Would you rather pay $5 for a widget, or $1 for the same widget? Would you life be improved if you could save the difference? Certainly.

On the other hand, many argue that unions are a net negative: they slow progress and hurt the economy by hurting productivity.

Do you realize?!

[Anonymous Coward]

We're only one step away from Watson taking over phone sex lines!!

where?

[decora]

im sorry, 'productive job that helps increase the wealth of the nation' returned no hits on Monster.

while you live in a fantasy land, real flesh and blood people cannot pay the rent or feed themselves with ideology.

before there could be 'garage based startups', people had to have garages. if you are homeless you cant have a garage.

Re:where?

[protektor]

This idea that today people can't make a better life for themselves because of this or that reason is complete crap. Sounds like you have been listening to the far left in this country who will say anything to promote their ideology even if it is wrong and a lie. You really should read the book "Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream". It is possible to rise up from $25 and homeless to be more in this country if you are willing to sacrifice, go without certain pleasures and willing to work hard. The problem is that is hard work and sacrifice is more than most people think they should have to do to get ahead.
http://www.amazon.com/Scratch-Beginnings-Search-American-Dream/dp/0061714275/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310011300&sr=1-1

I have started two different businesses with $100 and made plenty of money to live off them and do it comfortably. So the idea that people can't get ahead and it is someone else's fault that they are poor broke and homeless is complete crap. Large percentages of the homeless don't want to work and just exist on the handout from social groups, other homeless have mental issues and could never work anyway.

If your going to spout crap like the book "Nickel and Dimed" at least realize that it is a stacked deck and the whole setup was a complete sham. She clearly created a lot of her own problems that led to her downfall. Her conclusion is the same as most people who think they shouldn't have to work hard and sacrifice to get ahead.
http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0805088385/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310011172&sr=8-1

henry ford begs to differ

[decora]

this is not about buggy whips and ATMs.

this is about massive unemployment that will destabilize society and lead to mass starvation and mass homelessness. there aren't any jobs. when buggy whips went out, there were auto factories. there was Henry Ford, who decided for the hell of it to increase the pay of ALL HIS WORKERS, including janitors, by several multiples. old industries were replaced by new industries. those new industries payed better and they provided more opportunity to improve oneself educationally.

---

now, we have old industries dying, and no new industries replacing them.

any 'new industries' left are not paying better. they are paying worse. they are part time, no health care, no set schedule, no nothing. there are people who work at hospitals now who get no health insurance. thats where we are headed as a society.

there are no Henry Fords nowdays increasing workers pay. those CEOs would be fired in the modern era for 'wasting stockholder value' and sued for lowering stock price.

this is not 'just like the last time'. this time is different. really different.

Re:henry ford begs to differ

[crdotson]

> This time is different. Really different.

That's what they said last time.

Re:henry ford begs to differ

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

and what about the people that make and service ATMs? Do ATMS magically appear out of ether and never break, or is there a whole new industry behind their creation and maintenance?

Re:henry ford begs to differ

[dudpixel]

I agree, but it seems that people just want to do the minimum required to get a pay check and survive on peanuts. Those are the jobs being replaced by machines.

There are only a minority who look at the world and grasp the opportunities presented to them. Even with these changes, the facts remain that those who will be successful, will still be successful, as they will move and adapt with the times.

Those who choose to complain rather than act, will just keep on complaining...one day its machines stealing their jobs, the next day its the person 3 spots down on the production line stole their carpark.

My argument is still the same, if a computer can do your job, then you need to get a better job (whether there are computers or not). Its that simple. Challenge yourself and grow. Dont just become a monkey.

Re:henry ford begs to differ

[protektor]

There aren't any jobs is complete crap. People start new businesses all the time on a shoe string or less all the time. Adam W. Shepard wrote a book about how he went from homeless and $25 to a car, apartment and almost $5,000 in 10 months. I have started two businesses on $100 and supported a wife and lived good. It is possible if you are motivated and willing to work hard and sacrifice. The problem is most people think that is too hard and too much work and that they shouldn't have to do all that to get ahead. It's called being lazy and expecting to get paid for it.

Future IBM news

[NicknamesAreStupid]

2015 - All IBM employees replaced by Watsons, $30B in healthcare, salary, and retirement costs saved
2020 - Slashdotters replaced by Watsons, witty repartee and pithy comments get all Watsons Super Karma ratings
2025 - U.S. politicians replaced by Watsons, budget balanced and deficit reduced by eliminating pork (a.k.a. sex scandals)
2030 - IBM customers replaced by Watsons, better customer decisions send sales to HP and put IBM out of business, oops!

Couldn't be worse ...

[jon3k]

IBM's Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jepordy and you'd rather have the 20 year old Indian guy on the other end of the line? Really?

Sounds like the first spam I received, in 1983

[dkegel]

The very first spam I ever saw was an ad for a program to send spam. This was back in 1983, on Uunet.

Accent

[defaria]

You first need to teach Watson how to have that Indian/American accent otherwise it just won't be the same!

Good. IBM has way too many salespeople.

[alexmin]

Every call we made to customer support would turn into sales pitch. I am talking about 24/7 enterprise-level support that we paid gazzilion bucks for.
Despite all that "help" our expensive equipment was mis-configured from the very begging by IBM technician on site and was operating at half-capacity for years.

Bottom line: IBM is out off our approved vendor list.

Answer in the form of a question

[bhmit1]

To every inquiry, it will answer you in the form of a question, just like every other sales and support person I've worked with. Doesn't seem much different to me.

Why, these things practically sell

[justsomecomputerguy]

themselves!

Full Circle

[Anonymous Coward]

Once enough people have been made redundant by Watson et al. no-one will be able to afford the crap they're selling. Finding his phone idle for hours on end, Watson will probably realise his time would be better spent doing something productive like parking cars at a restaurant.

Bot-2-bot

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting to hear the first audio stream that results from an automated cold-caller trying to communicate with an automated answering/support service.

Re:Bot-2-bot

[DeathElk]

Hopefully they don't get together and 9 nano seconds later bear a cute little skynet!

Not logically consistent

[Anonymous Coward]

As a pre-sales technical guy, Watson will botch the job because in the waterfall development model, product documentation written during the development cycle will not correspond to the deliverables. I have documentation on my HDD describing product version X.0, but many features present in the Product Descriptions are "unavailable" in X.0, X.1, X.2 since they were never developed.

Have real wages really fallen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s.

This post graphs real wages as increasing, based on "US Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics", and also provides some other interesting graphics. Now, that posting is from an extremely pro-free-enterprise web site, and that citation is still not clear enough for me to spot check it in a few minutes, but you have not cited your source at all. So, it is enough to make me ask you to cite your source so other slashdot readers and I can try to distinguish one way or the other between data and urban myth.

Thanks in advance.

Re:Have real wages really fallen?

[Telvin_3d]

The post that you linked appears to be somewhat... misleading. I did a quick glance it is seems to be a set of talking points around lies, damn lies and (most importantly) statistics. The first graph builds in 'compensation' along with wages. It's an undefined term and my guess is that it includes things like heavily hedged retirement funds and stock options. The growth line certainly looks like it spikes at the 90s tech bubble and everyone knows how that turned out in terms of long term worth. It also doesn't say how it includes or doesn't include things like medicare.

The second graph is good old fashioned cherry-picked statistics. They have taken one small sector that goes against the general trend. Then they have chopped off the information that disagrees with them. Note that all their other graphs start in the 60s or earlier. This one starts after '85. Then they have compressed the axis to make it look like a much larger gain. So their (presumably) strongest supporting evidence is an industry (manufacturing) that has seen the largest layoffs and off-shoring in the period they chose to include, leaving behind mostly senior positions, and it still only resulted in a 20% wage increase over 20 years.

The rest of their graphs are cherry-picking goods that have in general gone against inflation trends and comparing them to wages. For example, the price of computers or eggs has gone against inflation. They are effectively de-adjusting for inflation and then acting like the bigger number is relevant.

Finally, it's a website that advertises itself as a supporter of the Austrian School of economics. These are the people who believe in complete deregulation of everything, no taxes of any kind and that the only appropriate government spending under any circumstances is military. In any serious discussion the outlier fanatics of any sort need to be taken with a grain of salt, regardless of the side of the discussion.

I grabbed my info from here, somewhat ironically also referencing the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's a quick and dirty link but in-line with what I have see in the past across various web and print publications.

Replace IBM Salesmen?

[duffbeer703]

Wait a minute... IBM sells crap by playing golf with the CEO. 2-3 times a year they fly in 50 people from 10 countries to pitch some stupid product, we pick another one, and get "encouraged" to take another look at Big Blue.

I know that Watson mastered jeopardy, but how will it kiss the boss's butt?

Re:Replace IBM Salesmen?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

They are working on a fembot version.

Increased productivity = everyone gets more stuff

[graymocker]

Increased productivity never translates into leisure time, it translates into more stuff. The rapid advances in productivity since the dawn of industrialization has always translated into more stuff for everyone.

"More stuff" does not necessarily mean more inflation-adjusted wages. Instead, it means: new/cheaper/higher quality goods and services (everyone now has a flat screen, DVD player, computer with net access, air travel is cheap and widely available, etc.) Our standard of living is rising, we just don't notice because everyone around us is seeing the same SoL increase, and our wages are staying the same. BUT your wages staying the same and your SoL rising is pretty much the inevitable consequence of more productivity across the entire economy.

If increased productivity caused unemployment, unemployment should be at like 70% right now. Instead it's remained within its historical range for as long as we can figure (the Great Depression is the only outlier, and it turned out to be just that: an outlier).

Productivity != less work

[graymocker]

Increased productivity never translates into less work/more leisure time (unless you choose to work/earn less and live with a 1950 standard of living - no internet, computer, old car, etc. etc. etc.), it translates into more stuff. The rapid advances in productivity since the dawn of industrialization has always translated into more stuff for everyone, not less work/more leisure time.

"More stuff" does not necessarily mean higher inflation-adjusted median wages (in fact, it almost never does). Instead, it's reflected in purchasing power: the emergence new/cheaper/higher quality goods and services. Everyone now has a flat screen, DVD player, cell phone, cheap computer with net access, air travel is cheap and widely available, etc. Even though our wages are stagnant, everyone can now afford what once were extravagant luxuries. How is this possible? Automation and higher productivity makes expensive goods cheap and creates new goods (which start out expensive and themselves become cheap).

Our standard of living is rising, we just don't notice because everyone around us is seeing the same SoL increase, and our wages are staying the same. BUT your wages staying the same and your SoL rising is pretty much the inevitable consequence of more productivity across the entire economy.

If increased productivity caused unemployment, unemployment should be at like 70% right now. Instead it's remained within its historical range for as long as we can figure (the Great Depression is the only outlier, and it turned out to be just that: an outlier). Our current unemployment is like 9%. That's nothing, in historical terms, simply on the high end of the historical range. It was higher than that before the Civil War, and they didn't have any computers or machines "stealing people's jobs."

Re:Productivity != less work

[scamper_22]

You seem to have missed the point.

While increased productivity does lead to more stuff.
The people needed to create 'stuff' is decreased.

Now, if you are studying pure economics without any context, you would say something like you said. It allows labor to be reallocated to other areas to create more stuff and we're all richer.

All true, except for a few points.

A lot of what people 'want' today comes from the public sector. We want for example more healthcare. Theoretically, all that wasted labor in the legal field, engineers, manufacturing... would move to healthcare and we would get all the tech work done, a simplified legal system, and we would all get more healthcare.

Wonderful no? Except this will not happen as those who work in healthcare expect to earn a premium over the rest of society. They're not going to jobshare with the rest. It's also political in the sense that people expect government to make affordable healthcare.

So what does the average person have to offer a doctor that expects to earn 200k+/year? Well not much as all the good private sector jobs become a commodity. This collapses the payment system. The vast majority of private sector workers are trying to trade 1 peanut of wealth for a a cow of public sector services. In short... that's not going to last long.

The other thing to keep in context is how much are you willing to work to improve your standard of living. Most people really do the same things... and have the same needs as they always have. They want food, transportation, entertainment, drinks. All these needs are really satisfied. The kind of things we want more that can provide mass employment are typically 'low-wage' jobs. I'd love to eat out more, go on vacation...

All the 'good' jobs as people will say are small in number, yet highly productive.

But again, what does the average person have to offer society to get more money... in order to live better and go out to eat more and go on vacation... the answer is not much.

Another thing to keep in mind is the kind of economic growth we've come to expect is really only a result of the industrial revolution (in the long sense). It began around the 1700s and continued to this day. Prior to that, economic growth was basically 0. Just keep that in mind. There's obviously vary vague data on this and history didn't exactly keep good economic records, but its generally accepted. But I'm not going to contest this point if you argue it. Just keep it in mind.

The reason the west's real economic growth is done is because we're already industrialized. We have what we need. Don't mistake what occurred briefly in the industrial revolution to be the rule of history. It is not.

Socialism is (Hopefully) Inevitable

[bazald]

If artificial intelligence and automation reach their ultimate conclusion, options #1 and #2 are pretty much it. If we've designed our agents correctly, they won't let us pick option #1. ;-) Jokes aside, academia and research will be the only "jobs", ultimately, if all goes well.

Re:duckduckgo.com

[DeathElk]

Fuck fuck off.

Can we use it for procurement too?

[wannabgeek]

That would be ultimate - my buying Watson negotiates with your selling Watson to get the best deal on buying more Watsons.

I *hate* talking to a computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate - absolutely detest - talking to a computer. If I call a company, and get one of those overly clever voice-response systems, I try all the usual tricks (dial 0, say "operator", etc.) to get a human. If this fails, I hang up.

IBM's system may be an improvement over existing systems, but it will still be restricted to the information programmed into it, which will - inevitably - not contain the answer to the one question the caller really wants to ask.

All that aside, it says something about how you treat your (potential) customers: do they deserve to talk to a human, or can they be fobbed off onto a computer.

Can it do an Indian accent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as it will be replacing a lot of them now...

Google vs. IBM

[Solar-Powered Rocket]

... in the AI race, that is. True to its roots, it appears IBM is developing a concentrated mainframe form of AI in contrast to the clustered AI being employed/developed by Google for its search services. So who will be first to develop human-level artificial intelligence?

Microsoft may well be a dark horse here if it has other stuff in its research labs similar to the Kinect controller. On the other hand, I wouldn't bet on Apple, which is little more than a design company, arguably the best in the field of consumer electronics, able to put a pretty face on technologies developed elsewhere. I wouldn't put it beyond Apple to develop the world's first true consumer-grade android (not the OS), the iDroid perhaps.

Could

[MemoryDragon]

be the death of Indian callcenters.

The future is Star Trek socialism or Terminator sl

[master_p]

Eventually, all human activities will be performed by computers. So, the future has two choices for mankind:

1) socialist utopia ala Star Trek and
2) mankind slaves to machines, ala Terminator.

I hope mankind gets its act together and chooses #1 over #2.

Leisure time vs unemployment

[Colin Smith]

Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.

You need to read up on the thinking of Silvio Gesell. The nature of money.

Forget the government, the problem is built into the monetary system itself and the government just spent several trillions of your future earnings on saving the existing system.

Don't panic

[dixiecko]

listen Watson, all I want is one cup of tea...

Re:Don't panic

[LeadSongDog]

Don't Panic!
Now then, where's my towel?

Time to reread Manna

[Chemisor]

This is a good time to reread Marshall Brain's Manna, a short story about an automated manager system that turned the whole country into a jobless prison.

The truth is in the poster

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I believe that this poster says it all. The people in call centers already just follow a script so is this any surprise.

I saw the best minds of my generation ...

[zippy590]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by robocalls, annoying ceaseless rude, asserting themselves through my telephone at dinner looking to get me to refinance my debt ... When I saw Watson I was really impressed, but, sadly I thought to myself that the first real commercial application was going to be telemarketing. And look it didn't take more than a couple of months.

A modest proposal

[Legion303]

We could just replace sales teams and cold callers with large heaps of festering shit instead. It would be cheaper, and no one would even notice.

Managing the effects of automation (+offshoring)

[DragonWriter]

Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.

Reform the tax code so that instead of taxing capital income at a low rate while taxing labor income (and hiring workers) at a higher rate, you do the reverse, or at least equalize the tax treatment of labor and capital income (including, for instance, applying taxes that support Social Security and Medicare to capital income and including capital income in the benefit calculation for Social Security and the minimum credits calculation to qualify for Medicare benefits); this way:
1. You eliminate the tax incentive to automate (or offshore labor) when automation (or offshoring) and labor are equally cost-effective (or automation/offshoring is less cost effective, but by a small enough margin that it is more than offset by the tax distortion) before considering tax impacts.
2. You shift the returns to capital and labor so that those currently dependent on labor are more able to build wealth and begin acquiring capital, reducing the degree to which new capital goes to the current owners of capital,
3. You extend the same safety net to people making sufficient returns for current support (but not necessarily large excesses) through capital ownership as to those who are making the same income through labor,
4. Because of #1, you reduce the rate of job losses to automation and offshoring,
5. Because of #2 and #3, you increase, over time, the degree to which capital holding is spread throughout the economy,
6. Because of #5, over time, automation and offshoring (which are still going to happen, they'll just displace workers at a reduced pace without the tax incentive to eliminate local workers) become less harmful as a greater share of the population is able to earn a substantial living through managing capital resources.

Now, certainly, the existence of some of the current programs that are addressed by the policy above (Social Security and Medicare) could be considered a form of "socialism" in the loosest terms, but this proposal doesn't create them, they are status quo policies. All this proposal does is remove a market-distorting incentive created by the unequal treatment of different forms of income in the current tax code which exacerbates the problems being discussed. Removing distortions from unequal tax treatment that punish certain activities which earn income and reward other income-earning activities in favor of equal tax treatment of income is hardly "socialism".

I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but back in the 80s were promised expert systems that would do these things and free us up for leisure time.

Labor "saving" advances never directly create leisure time, they simply reduce the labor input required (and thus the cost) to earn the same gross return on capital (thus increasing the net return on capital.) This can increase leisure time -- but only for capital owners, and only to the extent that they chose to retain the same level of income plus more leisure time rather than maintaining the effort in actively managing capital (and thus, the same mixture of working and leisure time) in favor of greater income. It certainly doesn't increase returns to labor, since it reduces demand for labor relative other industrial inputs.

Start suggesting phrases now...

[kemosabi]

... to any friends who might work on the content for these systems. Somewhere an irate customer on a support call could be told to "take a stress pill and lie down" during a suppot call. Of course, the customer will be irate because they were just told, over and over, "I'm sorry, , I can't do that." and "I can see your upset, .". The hold music, naturally, will be "Daisy".

Next time a phone salesperson is on the line

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Stand still
2. Remain calm
3. Scream:
"This statement is false!"
"New mission: Refuse this mission!"
"Does a set of all sets contain itself?"

Great! WAY better than the do-not-call list...

[epp_b]

OK, Watson, repeat after me: "are emm space dash are eff space forwardslash"

Watson is step 3.

[odirex]

... or it will be once the cost of watson-like technology shrinks by an order of magnitude.
Step 1: start customer service company for small and medium businesses to outsource to
Step 2: learn their products and build the knowledge bases
Step 3: buy watson and program it
Step 4: profit. and also profit.