Workers In China, India, USA Believe AI and Robots Will Replace Them (qz.com)

An anonymous reader cites a Quartz article: Chinese workers have seen the future, and it involves artificial intelligence, robots, and other forms of automation replacing them, at least for repetitive tasks. That's how workers responded to interviews about the future of work conducted in 13 countries by the ADP Research Institute, part of the payroll systems company ADP. In contrast to China, a minority of workers in Germany think machines will take over repetitive tasks in the future. Workers in Chile, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and France among other countries agree. But American workers and those in India are inclined to see things the Chinese way; nearly two-thirds of those polled said they thought the machines were coming for repetitive work.

Comments

Simple answer is YES

[aisnota]

Humanity is in a system with an only bias, to fit the economic model.

Robots are going to replace and AI for services will slice huge swaths of the labor force into oblivion.

My optimistic assumption, even financial planners are even more doomed in 2016/2017 than programmers FYI.

Re: Simple answer is YES

[avatar avatar]

I've already written a fairly sophisticated AI to replace the vast majority of financial planners. The code is pasted below: echo Probably just buy an index fund.

The cash grab is basically complete

[Anonymous Coward]

The global elite have already transferred most of the assets upwards. The next step is automation and separation, and they will simply leave the rest of us to rot.

Re:The cash grab is basically complete

[mikael]

We are manufacturing fabrics and textiles so cheaply now using automated print looms (requiring 1 technician for 15 multi-color looms) that there is a surplus of clothing on the planet. All the native skills in Africa and India are disappearing.

Still some time away

[DaMattster]

I don't think the danger is immediate but it definitely is on the horizon. Soon, human beings will be the first living organism to cause self-obsolescence. Human beings will make themselves redundant.

Re:Still some time away

[WheezyJoe]

It's inevitable. Kinda what makes us human is our desire to make life easier. We've gone from doing everything ourselves, to using tools, to using animals, to using other humans... and very very recently, using machines. And that's generally been a really good thing. Ask your wife (or your mom, whatever) if she'd like to give up the washing machine and the dishwasher and start doing all that shit by hand. Faced with giving up one afternoon reading a magazine with hard labor every fucking day, she'll happily sell you to the traffickers before she gives up her machines.

For everything that people think is drudgery, some mutant smarty-pants will develop a machine to do the work. There'll probably be robots wiping our asses in the nursing homes of the future IF WE'RE LUCKY, because the robot nurses won't get tired, frustrated, short-tempered, forgetful, offended, or grossed-out at the mess we just made of ourselves. They'll listen to us tell the same fucking story about our grandkids over and over and always act (convincingly) like it's the first fucking time.

What will all the humans do that are displaced from these jobs? Fuck knows, seriously. Maybe the robots will lead to everything being so cheap and abundant, we have no reason not to embrace socialism with free food and board for everybody, entertaining ourselves all day like the survivors on the Axiom in Wall-E. or maybe we put our spare time to work and educated everybody and put together some kind of utopian Star Trek future and put all our idle hands into exploring the stars. or maybe we'll go all ISIS, Boko Haram ape-shit crazy and start a real big war, and then the robots will finally figure out that the the planet's better off without us.

This just in:

[rmdingler]

A recently released poll of earthlings indicates those living in China, The Netherlands, India, and America have a firmer fundamental grasp of the obvious than the Germans and Chileans.

Um... they're right

[rsilvergun]

Seriously. It's already happening. It's well documented that Foxconn is only keeping their employees under pressure from the Chinese gov't to avoid causing social unrest. The 1% don't need us to buy their stuff when they've got robots to make it, Robots to defend it and then a very, very, very small class of servant to attend to their health needs and entertain them. The other 95% (98?) of the population is utterly superfluous. You can do just fine selling 100 computers for $2000 each instead of 1000 for $200. Apple's doing it, and they're the most profitable company in human history.

Oh, and before everybody starts going on about "There'll be all these new jobs in the Server Sector" no, there won't. If nobody has any money nobody will be able to hire people. That doesn't phase the 1%. Henry Ford only thought about this crap because there were limits to his global reach and ability to automate and obtain the wealth he wanted. That's not true anymore.

And as for the Industrial Revolution let's not forget there was 70 years of mass unemployment and misery. The Luddites who lost jobs never say employment again. Their Children didn't either. It wasn't until their grandchildren that we started seeing the new economy and by then the Luddites were dead and buried. Plus a lot of that was solved by shipping people overseas, but there really isn't an 'overseas' anymore. We've already colonized the new world.

Basically we're either going to redistribute the wealth of the machines or enter a new Dark Ages. Everybody sorta forgets the human race spent 1200 years with everyone but the 1% and their servants living like shit.

Re:The wealth transfer is complete

[backslashdot]

So you handed over your wealth to the global elite for some temporary gains and now you're mad about it?

Re:No

[mikael]

Good job WYSIWYG and Postscript laser printers never replaced printshop workers who assemble copper plate letters onto rotating print drums and strip them off afterwards.

Not only repetitive tasks.

[duckintheface]

An AI that can beat the human champion at the Go game (https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=alphago) is capable of learning a task of unlimited complexity. The only limitation will be the difficulty of training the AI. Given enough training time, there is no job that can't be replaced.

Re:Not only repetitive tasks.

[Hognoxious]

The only limitation will be the difficulty of training the AI.

Pah! The workers can do that during their notice period.

Re:No

[Aighearach]

You wouldn't expect a burger flipper to ever need to climb a ladder, but guess what...

Right, so each geographic area will still need one human employee per fast-food chain. Instead of a whole crew of humans at each location.

It doesn't sound like you really wrapped your head around the math needed here.

Re:No

[Aighearach]

I don't think you realize how little versatility is actually required for those jobs, or how versatile software can be.

The example above of climbing ladders, that doesn't happen very often if the store is designed not to need ladders.

There is not much about a fast food order that is different than a factory production line. Currently, it would require the same sort of expensive equipment and so doesn't happen. Humans are cheaper. That is their only advantage for 99% of the job.

Simple answer is NO

[kheldan]

Everyone is getting their panties in a bunch over this when it's just not going to happen. There is no such thing as 'AI', there are just cheesy 'expert systems' that mimick intelligence for a very limited subject. There are simply too many things that humans need to do that you can't make a machine to do, and there are too many things that humans won't accept a non-human to do. Also you want to invoke World War 3? Put hundreds of millions of people out of work worldwide. There WILL be war. But it's all good: Because it's not going to happen anyway. Everyone is spreading FUD on this subject just like they're doing with self-driving cars. None of this technology is anywhere NEAR the point where people are being led to believe it is. Rest assured that you'll all live out the rest of your lives without having to worry about some robot taking your job.

Re:No

[Aighearach]

That's because the store is designed with human workers in mind. Of course you have to use ladders.

You don't think robots can stack neatly, or drive to the store and make purchases, that is where you just aren't even trying to picture it.

Re: No

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Who's going to straighten up the aisles throughout the day as customers move through? Who's going to detect then replace a lightbulb that burned out on the floor? Who's going to clean up kid-vomit or pick up broken glass? (Don't forget how lawsuit-happy this country is.)

Denial? I've actually have worked in retail and in fast food, I remember what my jobs actually were and the bizarre silliness customers cause. As of today your options are to automate very specific tasks of running a place like that, or you can build a low-maintenance facility that, frankly, will be ugly. Nobody likes using the bathroom at the park.

Yes, I get that the point is to have fewer humans on the crew, the issue is that you really over-estimate how much of that you can really do. So long as you have to keep the people around anyway, they're going to decide not to bother to automate some things. "Well, the robot can clean the floor... but not until someone moves all the chairs. Oh, hell, skip the mop-bot and just have the guy that's moving the chairs do the mopping."

I don't have a mental issue that prevents me from believing it will happen one day. What I do have is experience in working in these places that tells me that there are far more of those little tasks invovled in running a place like that. Also I am under-impressed with our current state of robotics, at least in this context. Yes, we can build a machine that can reliably assemble a burger. We just can't build it to properly clean itself every night.