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Will IBM's Watson put your job in jeopardy?
- gst 16y agoAs a society it should be our goal to have all the repetitive and dumb work been done by machines. If a machine can do your job it wasn't that challenging in the first place. In that case your job provides absolutely zero benefits to the society.
- georgemcbay 16y agoThat is easy to say so long as your own job still falls above the cut-off line of what machines can reasonably do. The scary part is that line will probably rise up to the point where it encompasses all jobs currently done by humans within my lifetime.
- gst 16y agoThat's not scary, that's good. It's also inevitable if Ray Kurzweil is right and computers will soon exceed the mental capabilities of humans. It's only scary if you think in today's economic model where automation implies unemployment and where unemployment implies poverty. But just think of the following arguments: - If a person a hundred years ago would have predicted today's technology, this person might have thought that this technology will destroy most of the jobs and unemployment will raise. Instead, people moved to new types of jobs and economy continued to grow. - Even if computers and robots can take over all of the jobs this does not need to be a bad thing. Of course this would not work in today's economic systems, but there could be new systems where computers and robots do the work and humans equally profit from the results.
- georgemcbay 16y agoLong-term good is often very short-term scary. Our economic models will not be adjusted to this new reality very quickly.
- christkv 16y agoha ha, no. Considering the difficulty of humans equipped with the most advanced pattern matching hardware ever devised by evolution to discern nuances of meaning in spoken language I would say it's a rehash of the AI promises of the 50's that feel short of any practical implementation. We still got a long way to go before a skynet shows up and fires us.
- ryandvm 16y agoIt doesn't happen overnight. I'll go out on a limb here and say that we are only 10 years away from the first completely autonomous delivery trucks. Google is already doing this with human co-pilots. Once there is solid statistical data showing that a computer driver is safer and cheaper than a human, the phase-out of the human drivers will be pretty swift. After all, imagine the competitive advantage you'd have if your trucking company can replace a human driver with a computer. One that can drive 24 hours a day while making fewer mistakes. Even if this technology cost half a million dollars (and it won't), doing so would be a no-brainer.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoOnce there is solid statistical data showing that a computer driver is safer and cheaper than a human, the phase-out of the human drivers will be pretty swift I'm not so sure. Solid statistical data won't deter lawyers filing frivolous suits over every accident. "If only Big Faceless Co. didn't employ faceless robots, this sympathetic human might have lived! You should award lots of punitive damages." Not to mention the teamsters would probably have a law against robot drivers passed...
- kiba 16y agoPeople will say the same things 50 years later! However, it is a fact that AI are pervasive in our world today. We just don't recognize it as artificial intelligence.
- christkv 16y agoTrue but this kind of stories conjure up the classic idea of the human computer :). Practical use is cool like the google self-driven car I'm not sure if it's a learning system (does anyone know ?). I figure deduction to be the truly hard part to do. Like deducting the laws of geometry by observation or something similar. But hey I'm an amateur on this :)
- dantheman 16y agoNo.
- jwcacces 16y agolets all go down to ibm and throw our shoes in the machines, only then will our jobs be safe!!!
- recampbell 16y agoWell, I think it is clear that increased productivity due to improvements in information technology has resulted in slower job growth during this recovery compared with past ones. Corporations have been able to achieve top line growth with minimal hiring. But there are other factors at play. Too much of the US labor force was dedicated to housing, and those people are going to take a long time to either retrain or find new work with their existing skills. They are not being replaced by software (yet). However, I essentially agree with the article. Software and robots will make it easier for corporations to grow profits with out hiring people, and that this increases the threat of income inequality.
- ryandvm 16y agoOnly if your job is giving answers in the form of a question. Oh shit - that is what I do.
- presidentender 16y agoIt might. The automobile made it difficult to find work shoeing horses. I do not lament this.
- dstein 16y agoNo, not yet. But Ken Jennings is definitely out of a job.
- 9ec4c12949a4f3 16y agoDoes your job require imagination?
- johnohara 16y agoWhen we think of humans being replaced by automation we often think of robotic devices such as ABB arms, Asimo, and such. But it appears the greater influence may come from "stationary," large-scale, HAL-like systems designed to interact effectively with human beings. Watching Watson run-up the score so quickly was unsettling and I now understand why Kasparov cried. It makes one truly realize that nowadays, if the task can be automated, it probably will be.
- georgecmu 16y agoI hope it will put the following jobs in jeopardy: - secretaries - receptionists - middle managers
- sudont 16y agoThe middle manager's only job is to retain the appearance of usefulness to remain employed.
- georgecmu 16y agoWell, a good middle manager does a couple of useful things: - keeps track of schedules and workloads - insulates his team from clients' and upper management's requests - does whatever his team needs him to do to stay productive Watson can do at least two out of three.
- bitwize 16y agoSecretaries will only be threatened once they can put Watson's computational capacity into about a kilogram of mass and install it in one of those Japanese girlbots.