Reading the paper it's based on (Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, Oxford Martin School) is pretty funny. It starts with them fawning over Siri, claim

Reading the paper it's based on (Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, Oxford Martin School) is pretty funny. It starts with them fawning over Siri, claiming that this is somehow evidence that in the future we're going to stop wanting to talk to actual humans when we call up Comcast to complain about their billing mistakes: "Advances in user interfaces also enable computers to respond directly to a wider range of human requests, thus augmenting the work of highly skilled labour, while allowing some types of jobs to become fully automated. For example, Apple’s Siri and Google Now rely on natural user interfaces to recognise spoken words, interpret their meanings, and act on them accordingly. Moreover, a company called SmartAction now pro-vides call computerisation solutions that use ml technology and advanced speech recognition to improve upon conventional interactive voice response systems, realising cost savings of 60 to 80 percent over an outsourced call center." Then they show the same amnesiac fawning admiration the financial press does when reporting what Foxconn says: "Foxconn, a Chinese contract manufacturer that employs 1.2 million workers, is now investing in robots to assemble products such as the Apple iPhone." Yes, in 2011 they started making threats to their employees about replacing a million or so workers within 3 years with some kind of super-robot: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/foxconn-to-replace-human-workers-with-one-million-robots http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot... The bizarre eemployee union dance party threat didn't exactly pan out. They employ 100,000 more people now than they did then. The core of this paper's methodology is "we asked a bunch of ML researchers how good they thought AI was and they replied "really, really good": "First, together with a group of ml researchers, we subjectively hand-labelled 70 occupations, assigning 1 if automatable, and 0 if not." Real sciencey.