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Japanese insurance firm replaces 34 staff with AI

42 points by Zuider 10y ago

juskrey 10y ago
And adds 68 staff to IT dept.
- vkou 10y ago
  Just like a small cab company in the 1920s butchered its dozen horses, and replaced them with 30 auto mechanics?
  - fonFonRoo 10y ago
    That don't make them horses no less butchered.
  - aminok 10y ago
    Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer. The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita. The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.
thinkingkong 10y ago
What I find interesting is how hard it is to explain this concept to other people in business. Its like a whole new type of innovators dillema but for staff and not products.
new299 10y ago
This was posted last week here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13283167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13283167 My comment then, and still is, that this isn't really much of a story: The cynic in me thinks this is likely a total non-story/spin. I find it unlikely anyone would be so confident a AI system that they are "planning to introduce" that they'd schedule staff cuts. What's more likely is that staff cuts were already planned. This puts a great spin on a (I would guess most likely free/cheap) experimental deployment of Watson.
- wapz 10y ago
  > Fukoku Mutual will use the AI to gather the information needed for policyholders' payouts - by reading medical certificates, and data on surgeries or hospital stays With that statement I definitely agree with you. If they said they were replacing something like 20% of their call-center staff I would think it's a reasonable thing to do (AI voice recognition and comprehension these days is amazing), but not for important documents like surgery data.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    This sounds very much like a glorified OCR+language parsing application. AI? I don't think so. True story: we sent a call out for ~10 summer interns this year, and got a big response, like over a thousand applicants total. My colleague, rather than spend two weeks sifting through their emailed-in grade transcripts and computing average grade (which we use as a first-stage coarse filter) spent one day writing a Python script that OCRs all the PDFs, extracts the grades, sums up and then gives us a shortlist of the best candidates.
    - manmal 10y ago
      To me it reads as if Watson will make decisions (or rather, propose them) about whether a damage case is accepted or not.
- onion2k 10y ago
  I find it unlikely anyone would be so confident a AI system that they are "planning to introduce" that they'd schedule staff cuts. I think it's reasonable to assume any company considering AI to replace people would do a lot of due diligence first. This is very likely a well tested and "proven" system, to whatever extent you can prove it. The plan to introduce it to the business, and make jobs redundant in the process, would only happen once that first due diligence stage is complete. To that end, I don't see this as a PR move to make redundancies look better, but a very early signal of what is likely to happen to many "knowledge worker" jobs in the long term.

42 points by Zuider 10y ago

juskrey 10y ago

And adds 68 staff to IT dept.

vkou 10y ago
Just like a small cab company in the 1920s butchered its dozen horses, and replaced them with 30 auto mechanics?
- fonFonRoo 10y ago
  That don't make them horses no less butchered.
- aminok 10y ago
  Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer. The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita. The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.

thinkingkong 10y ago

What I find interesting is how hard it is to explain this concept to other people in business. Its like a whole new type of innovators dillema but for staff and not products.

new299 10y ago

This was posted last week here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13283167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13283167 My comment then, and still is, that this isn't really much of a story: The cynic in me thinks this is likely a total non-story/spin. I find it unlikely anyone would be so confident a AI system that they are "planning to introduce" that they'd schedule staff cuts. What's more likely is that staff cuts were already planned. This puts a great spin on a (I would guess most likely free/cheap) experimental deployment of Watson.

wapz 10y ago
> Fukoku Mutual will use the AI to gather the information needed for policyholders' payouts - by reading medical certificates, and data on surgeries or hospital stays With that statement I definitely agree with you. If they said they were replacing something like 20% of their call-center staff I would think it's a reasonable thing to do (AI voice recognition and comprehension these days is amazing), but not for important documents like surgery data.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  This sounds very much like a glorified OCR+language parsing application. AI? I don't think so. True story: we sent a call out for ~10 summer interns this year, and got a big response, like over a thousand applicants total. My colleague, rather than spend two weeks sifting through their emailed-in grade transcripts and computing average grade (which we use as a first-stage coarse filter) spent one day writing a Python script that OCRs all the PDFs, extracts the grades, sums up and then gives us a shortlist of the best candidates.
  - manmal 10y ago
    To me it reads as if Watson will make decisions (or rather, propose them) about whether a damage case is accepted or not.
onion2k 10y ago
I find it unlikely anyone would be so confident a AI system that they are "planning to introduce" that they'd schedule staff cuts. I think it's reasonable to assume any company considering AI to replace people would do a lot of due diligence first. This is very likely a well tested and "proven" system, to whatever extent you can prove it. The plan to introduce it to the business, and make jobs redundant in the process, would only happen once that first due diligence stage is complete. To that end, I don't see this as a PR move to make redundancies look better, but a very early signal of what is likely to happen to many "knowledge worker" jobs in the long term.