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He's not saying that robots are going to take literally every job ever. Only the majority of them. I believe I read that stores don't encourage self-checkouts

He's not saying that robots are going to take literally every job ever. Only the majority of them. I believe I read that stores don't encourage self-checkouts very much because having humans around significantly decreases shoplifting. This may be less necessary if we get better AIs for monitoring security cameras. I've never read anything about self-driving cars being impossible in bad weather, only that no has done it yet. Machine vision systems are not as vulnerable to this btw and that has been improving in leaps and bounds over just the last 10 years. Lawyers still searched through documents tediously before computers. It was probably even harder then, not easier. It's at least theoretically possible create a robot that can diagnose and prescribe treatments for a patient just like a doctor. All the video claimed is that they can do statistics and search the relevant research a lot better. Which is definitely true, and see IBM's Watson. Arguments about what "creativity" means are never useful or productive. But AI that generates music well already exists and is going to continuously get better.

zecho 12y ago
I don't consider a self-checkout lane to be a "robot" in any sense. It's a customer doing the job of a once trained employee. If you've ever been behind someone new to one of these things, they're slow and annoying experiences. The main reason for them is reducing workers necessary during slow sales periods (like overnights, or weekday mornings). And anyway, the job wasn't replaced by a robot in this case. The job was replaced by a customer.
- JoachimS 12y ago
  No they aren't robots but tech that as a consequence reduce the number of employees. In Sweden there has been quite a big reduction in number of people working at the checkouts. And even if they are freed up to do other things in the stores, there has been a net reduction in number of employees.
  - SiVal 12y ago
    Yes, "robot" isn't the point. "Non-human" is the point. Non-humans replacing humans probably began with animal domestication technology and has accelerated dramatically since then. Once a non-human replaces a human, the switch tends to be permanent, so all human jobs will eventually be replaced unless technology stops progressing (only if there's a global holocaust) or if humans can forever invent new jobs (that humans do better than non-humans) at a rate that matches the takeover of old jobs by non-humans. Since the takeover is apparently accelerating, humans aren't significantly improving, and non-humans are, it's going to be a difficult race.
JoachimS 12y ago
Lawyers used to have support staff doing the sifting and collecting. Those jobs are the ones being replaced by tech first.

zecho 12y ago

I don't consider a self-checkout lane to be a "robot" in any sense. It's a customer doing the job of a once trained employee. If you've ever been behind someone new to one of these things, they're slow and annoying experiences. The main reason for them is reducing workers necessary during slow sales periods (like overnights, or weekday mornings). And anyway, the job wasn't replaced by a robot in this case. The job was replaced by a customer.

JoachimS 12y ago
No they aren't robots but tech that as a consequence reduce the number of employees. In Sweden there has been quite a big reduction in number of people working at the checkouts. And even if they are freed up to do other things in the stores, there has been a net reduction in number of employees.
- SiVal 12y ago
  Yes, "robot" isn't the point. "Non-human" is the point. Non-humans replacing humans probably began with animal domestication technology and has accelerated dramatically since then. Once a non-human replaces a human, the switch tends to be permanent, so all human jobs will eventually be replaced unless technology stops progressing (only if there's a global holocaust) or if humans can forever invent new jobs (that humans do better than non-humans) at a rate that matches the takeover of old jobs by non-humans. Since the takeover is apparently accelerating, humans aren't significantly improving, and non-humans are, it's going to be a difficult race.

JoachimS 12y ago

Lawyers used to have support staff doing the sifting and collecting. Those jobs are the ones being replaced by tech first.