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

[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: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.