Japanese White-Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced by Artificial Intelligence (qz.com)

Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work is also becoming increasingly competent. From a report on Quartz: One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with "IBM Watson Explorer," starting by this month. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.

Comments

As if this is new

[ranton]

As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people. My current company has seen over 10x profit growth over the past five years with a 20% increase in manpower. And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.

People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

I used to be supportive of things like welfare reform, but this is throwing up new challenges that will probably require new paradigms. Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population

This then throws up the question of whether we should have a universal basic income. But one potential positive trend of this would be an increase in time spent home w/ family, thereby reducing the time kids spend in daycare and w/ both parents - not just mom or not just dad. What needs to be worked in is a mechanism to support their basic needs - home and food. Anything beyond that - they are welcome to do anything that pays them anything w/o having to worry about whether it meets expenses.

Re:As if this is new

[Oswald McWeany]

I completely agree. Even jobs which a decade ago looked irreplaceable, like teachers, doctors and nurses are possibly in the crosshairs. There are very few jobs that AI can't partially (or in some cases completely) replace humans. Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?

Or is the gap between haves and have nots going to grow exponentially, even above today's growth as those that own the companies and AI bots make ever increasing money and the poor suckers at the bottom, given just enough money to consume the products that keep the owners in business.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?

It depends on the country, I think. I believe many countries, like Japan and Finland, will indeed go this route.

However, here in the US, we are vehemently opposed to anything that can be branded as "socialism". So instead, society here will soon resemble "The Walking Dead".

Re:As if this is new

[EvilSS]

I think even in the US it will hit a tipping point when it gets bad enough. When our consumer society can't buy anything because they are all out of work, we will need to change our way of thinking about this, or watch the economy completely collapse.

Re:As if this is new

[alexgieg]

The problem is that AI is becoming faster at learning the new job opportunities than people are, thereby gulping them before people even were there to be replaced. And this speed is growing. You cannot beat an exponential growth with a linear one, or even with just slightly slower growing exponential one.

Re:As if this is new

[matbury6017]

“Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” -- Abba Eban

Which is frequently misquoted as, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thingafter they have exhausted all other possibilities."

So when the starving mob are at the ruling elites' gates with torches and pitch forks, they'll surely find the resources to do the right thing.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

I'm going with the latter (complete economic collapse). There's no way, with the political attitudes and beliefs present in our society, and our current political leaders, that we'd be able to pivot fast enough to avoid it. Only small, homogenous nations like Finland (or Japan, even though it's not that small, but it is homogenous) can pull that off because they don't have all the infighting and diversity of political beliefs that we do, plus our religious notion of "self reliance".

Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

People that do trivial tasks like looking at numbers on documents, something a computer can easily do, are prime for getting replaced.

Face it, if you aren't creating new things, you're the first to go. Maintaining a process is basically pattern recognition.

Re:Obviously

[kwerle]

SInce this is very very similar to what my partner does, I feel like I'm a little qualified to speak on the subject at hand.

Yeah, pattern matching should nail this - but pattern matching only works if the patterns are reasonable/logical/consistent. Yes, I'm a little familiar with advanced pattern matching, filtering, etc.

Here's the thing: doctors are crappy input sources. At least in the US medical system. And in our system they are the ones that have to make diagnosis (in most cases). They are inconsistent from one doctor to the next. They are inconsistent from one day to the next. They are inconsistent from one patient to the next. They are inconsistent *within a patient* when the original diagnosis was wrong. And what's possibly worst of all: they disagree.

In the US we do the same kind of thing - base payouts on what the doctor diagnosed. They need to write specific magic words in the right way. So my partner looks at medical records and then confronts the doctor - somehow trying to suggest what they left out without making a diagnosis (because she's not a doctor, so she's not allowed to).

As you can imagine this is a delicate dance. Some doctors have egos. In any case, many of things she does are fixing errors [of omission, often], but others are a lot more complicated and sometimes very rare (some medical conditions just don't come up very often).

Finally, if you think having a person hound a doctor to get something corrected might be tricky - imagine having a machine try to do the same thing. Some doctors may be more resistant to that...

The easy answer to this is: that process is crap. Fix doctors/the system/whatever.

I agree.

Good luck with that.

Re:That's weird

[phantomfive]

"Watson" is a marketing term from IBM, covering a lot of standard automation. It isn't the machine that won at Jeopardy (although that is included in the marketing term, if someone wants to pay for it).

IBM tells managers, "We will have our amazing Watson technology solve this problem for you." The managers feel happy. Then IBM has some outsourced programmers code up a workflow app, with recurring annual subscription payments.

Re:Japanese workforce is growing old

[avandesande]

Japan is notorious for being far behind on office automation.

That is "automation". AI is something else...

[gweihir]

When you have people basically implementing a process without much understanding, it is pretty easy to automatize their jobs away. The only thing Watson is contribution is the translation from natural language to a more formalized one. No actual intelligence needed.

Re:I'm not worried

[Waffle Iron]

He's hired primarily free market people as opposed to corporatist

Free marketers don't generally campaign on a platform of protectionist trade policies and direct government intervention in job markets.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[fluffernutter]

Seriously? Quite a bit actually.

Then why don't you give at least one specific example.

There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid.

And this is where a system like Watson shines. While you may be able to fall back on personal experience to make these judgement calls, Watson can easily run thousands of simulations on each set of numbers, based on real world possibilities. You will always be making a guess based on what might happen, but Watson will come close to knowing what will happen.

See there is your problem. Every company is unique in some way.

Sure this is obvious. If every company were not unique in some way, then Watson would only need to learn from one company; thus the need for Watson to learn off of several hundred companies. The reason why the case for AI is hard to understand is because we are not able to fathom remembering every detail of every company and being able to isolate what was done differently in company 237 that allowed it to prosper versus company 938. We would have trouble even comparing two companies down to the detail that Watson would be capable of. Given 1000 companies, Watson will know what every single one did right and wrong. Watson will know where mistakes were made simply because it will be able to find another couple companies in its dataset that did better or worse in a similar circumstance.

This all said, I am far from an AI believer. I don't think AI will really be able to drive a car in the near future, at least not as dynamically as a human. However, most professions will benefit from Watson's ability to understand huge datasets down to excruciating detail and freely be able to pick out specific scenarios that worked in the past. This isn't really even AI, it is just a very organized search engine. The human mind almost does these things backwards through necessity, because we cannot process such large datasets.

Re:Failure of imagination

[fluffernutter]

Were those people able to get hired elsewhere?

Your question is complete. The correct question to ask is if these people were able to get hired elsewhere *at the same salary when adjusted for inflation*. To that, the answer is no. It hasn't been true on average since the 70's. Sure, some people will find equal or better jobs, but salaries have been steadily decreasing since the onset of technology. Given a job for less money or no job, most people will pick the job for less; and that is why we are not seeing a large change in the unemployment rate.

Re:This is not news or new

[djinn6]

I think you've been drinking too much Ayn Rand Coolaid.

As people are freed from jobs that are highly repetitive, there are always more complex, less repetitive jobs out there because the consumer is always looking for the next big thing to improve their lives/increase their free time/reduce their work load.

And everyone has both the talent and the initial capital to create that next big thing?

Entire multi billion dollar industries have been created after the introduction of the ATM and will continue to be created.

Why does it matter if a dozen people made all of those billions?

If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US...

And there are 7.4 million unemployed people, and that's not counting people who want full-time employment but only found part-time work.

The Obama economy was of his own making after the first 2 years due to the ACA and excessive regulation, and, like the Carter economy, it will be unleashed with the next administration.

Yeah and Bush did a real great job...