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.

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.

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: 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.