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

[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.

Queue the chicken littles

[sjbe]

Calm down everyone. This is just a continuation of productivity tools for accounting. Among other things I'm a certified accountant. This is just the next step in automation of accounting and it's a good thing. We used to do all our ledgers by hand. Now we all use software for that and believe me you don't want to go back to the way it was. Very little in accounting is actually value added activity so it is desirable to automate as much of it as possible. If some people lost their jobs doing that it's equivalent to how the PC replaced secretaries 30+ years ago. They were doing a necessary task but one that added little or no value. Most of what accountants do is just keeping track of what happened in a business and keeping the paperwork flowing where it needs to go. This is EXACTLY what we should be automating whenever possible.

I'm sure there are going to be a lot folks loudly proclaiming how we are all doomed and that there won't be any work for anyone left to do. Happens every time there is an advancement in automation and yet every time they are wrong. Yes some people are going to struggle in the short run. That happens with every technological advancement. Eventually they find other useful and valuable things to do and the world moves on. It will be fine.