AI replacing white collar workers. Not SF but a current reality!

[elam]

Automation is primarily a threat to people who perform repetitive tasks. We're still many, many years away from automation being able to do anything in an unpredictable environment that requires creative thinking.

Thats true, but most office jobs are repetitive. In 1973 we had typing pools employing lots of girls. In accounting we had comptomitry employing many women. Likewise telex operators, switch board operators even lift operators. By the mid 1980s all these jobs and others were gone due to automation.

I can't remember the last time I went into a bank, for decades I've been using online banking (in the early 1990s phone banking). At the supermarket, each year there are fewer serviced check outs. Its all DIY. One person supervising/giving assistance and a security guard.keeping watch. Lots of people unemployed. The latest trend is the replacement of supermarkets with online shopping - order online and its delivered to your door (more people unemployed = cleaners, shelf stackers, check out chicks, supervisors, security guards, mall managers etc)

[elam]

Why would paralegal work be outsourced to PhDs anywhere? And what does that have to do with IT?

Apparently, way back when, in the Philippines, studies in USA case law were seen as a future. USA law firms actively availed themselves of this resource. Not only were the Filipinos more proficient than their USA counter parts they were a hell of a lot cheaper.

There was a time they had vast libraries of USA law. That has now been digitized and indexed. So now one person can do what use to be done by teams of paralegals, The time will come when the human back-office element will disappear completely...a lawyer (or whatever)r will simply speak to their computer (or whatever) and whammo everything he needs to know will appear on whatever...

Think about the early search engines. Then google arrived about 18 years ago.. Each year it progresses exponentially. Its changed my life, and I presume yours too...I no longer buy books or newpapers or magazines...everything I need or want to know I can find online!

[elam]

Outsourcing and automation is leading to erosion of the middle class. Societies will be divided into the wealthy few and the impoverished and hopeless multitude with terrible consequences for the multitude. Jobs serving the super rich will be fairly scarce because the rich will be a very small percentage of the total. The modern industrial economies will collapse because the poor will have insufficient wealth to run them. The lead up to this collapse is by increasing personal debt, leading to bankruptcy. The recent 2008 collapse was a taste of what is to repeated more powerfully.

Here in Oz we have always prided ourselves on being egalitarian. That's going to have to change. We'll have to take a page out of the elite British household of the 19th century and institute an upstairs, downstairs culture - master and servant.

I've been telling young guys to pursue the growth industries = research, pharmacy, chiro, physio, nursing or aged care - hands on occupations (GPs have had their day. These days they just send people for diagnostic tests and read reports. Surgeons are on the way out. We already have robots that perform the really intricate stuff. Pathologists also are on the way out, increasingly diagnosis is automated). My alternative advice to young guys is to take on a trade - electrical or plumbing not building (carpentry, brick laying).

[elam]

I told my wife about this article, and she said, "Well how hard is it to mark every claim 'Denied!'?"

The company is a Mutual Insurance Company. A mutual insurance company is owned entirely by its policyholders. Deny claims and you lose policyholders (lose capital) and ultimately the company becomes unviable.

But your wife has a point when it comes to stock supported insurance companies who are dependent on maximising profit to maintain their share price..

[elam]

The explanation given to us by our most IT-focused teacher at uni (an informatics engineer and entrepreneur) is that the idea is for people to take over the more creative jobs as automation is progressively used to take over the rest of the tasks. I guess the idea is good in principle (increase productivity and efficiency, produce at lower costs and prices, etc.) but its implementation, and the unlikelihood of those obsolete experienced workers training for completely new and different tasks, is the issue. And I guess some would add wealth distribution issues arising from this like FF above.

I don't have a very formed opinion on this yet, but from what I know, I am hopeful and somewhat optimistic towards issues such as this. I think we'll manage.

The way I see it is TWEB will have an increase in clientele. For a lot of people the issue won't be financial but boredom = how to fill in the day.

I survived 15 rounds of retrenchment over a ten year period and fed up with the corporate world manipulated circumstances to ensure that in the next round I would be retrenched (it was worth a years pay to me). Funny thing, on my final day I was offered a position in another part of the company but I was so fed up I rejected it. So at a little over 50yo I was unemployed and couldn't care less.

The original plan was I'd take a break for a year or two and then go contracting or consulting but family and health issues intervened, so apart from some fun jobs doing film work, I've never returned to work.

Apart from discovering the freedom of doing whatever strikes my fancy, I discovered that provided you own your house outright (which I do) you don't need a lot of money (even if you smoke & drink in moderation, which I do). With a few intelligent investments, I'm still self funded and living off that one years pay I received thirteen years

Admittedly, I don't take expensive holidays, go to the theatre or frequent expensive restaurants any more - why bother. I don't mind cooking so rarely get take away these days, and besides I can make most things for a third of the price that Maccas & Hungry Jacks charge.

The plus factors here in Oz are health care is free (except for medication) and there is a thing called the Seniors Card that gets me discounts at participating stores (most stores) and discounted bus, train, ferry travel within a hundred plus mile radius - max of $2.50 all day travel to anywhere you can goto in a day or goto and return in a day).. With minor inconvenience I can get anywhere I want to go by public transport, so I've given up the car and discovered a new sense of freedom.

Not having a car means I don't have to waste money on Rego, CTP Insurance, General Insurance and the cost of petrol & maintenance = I save umpteen thousands of dollars a year.

Actually, I find the bus more convenient than the car - don't have to battle traffic, just sit back relax and read a book or look out the window and enjoy observing the area change or communicate with strangers etc Also, the hastle of finding somewhere to park disappears,

Admittedly, if I leave Sydney and move to the North Coast, which I might do at some stage (if I can afford it) I'll have to go buy another car - which means a significant loss of capital, a marginal loss of ongoing income, and a significant increase in ongoing expenses. Public transport up there is a bit of a chore. If so I'm going to miss the relaxed, car less lifestyle I now have...

[Sparko]

Tassman is our resident quotebot.

[Sparko]

Thats wishful thinking. Back in 1980 I was employed by a British company to rationalise their accounting bureau - eliminate duplication. After a few weeks of following paper trails I ended up in the computer facility (at the time run by actuaries). Up shot. 30 people got retrenched, a couple of people got redeployed - it has always bothered me but the reality is that was my job!

How does that make what I said "Wishful Thinking?"

Worldwide grads from Uni can't find employment - there just aren't enough jobs to go around. Back in the 1970s we had high unemployment, but great social security (the dole) and the then govt encouraged people to seek an alternate lifestyle = join or form a commune.

The reason they can't find employment is because they study for the wrong sectors. Usually academic sector. If they studied for where the jobs ARE, like electronics, robotics, and various other tech sectors, they would have jobs. Like I said, automation moves the jobs from one sector to another. You might not need 10 people to assemble widgets in a factory, but you will need 10 people to create the robots that do, and maintain them, program them, design new ones, program them, build them, and so on.

[Sparko]

Apparently, way back when, in the Philippines, studies in USA case law were seen as a future. USA law firms actively availed themselves of this resource. Not only were the Filipinos more proficient than their USA counter parts they were a hell of a lot cheaper.

There was a time they had vast libraries of USA law. That has now been digitized and indexed. So now one person can do what use to be done by teams of paralegals, The time will come when the human back-office element will disappear completely...a lawyer (or whatever)r will simply speak to their computer (or whatever) and whammo everything he needs to know will appear on whatever...

Think about the early search engines. Then google arrived about 18 years ago.. Each year it progresses exponentially. Its changed my life, and I presume yours too...I no longer buy books or newpapers or magazines...everything I need or want to know I can find online!

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[One Bad Pig]

Apparently, way back when, in the Philippines, studies in USA case law were seen as a future. USA law firms actively availed themselves of this resource. Not only were the Filipinos more proficient than their USA counter parts they were a hell of a lot cheaper.

There was a time they had vast libraries of USA law. That has now been digitized and indexed. So now one person can do what use to be done by teams of paralegals, The time will come when the human back-office element will disappear completely...a lawyer (or whatever)r will simply speak to their computer (or whatever) and whammo everything he needs to know will appear on whatever...

Yeah, that's not how it works. There is certainly less need for paralegals than there was, but paralegals don't often research case law (and, in any case, it's faintly ridiculous that a job that would be assigned to paralegals here would be done by PhDs elsewhere).

Think about the early search engines. Then google arrived about 18 years ago.. Each year it progresses exponentially. Its changed my life, and I presume yours too...I no longer buy books or newpapers or magazines...everything I need or want to know I can find online!

Now if only you could critically approach the online content in order to assess its reliability.... Every quack with an internet connection can now get his kooky theories in front of billions - much, much easier than getting someone to publish it.

[Mountain Man]

Thats true, but most office jobs are repetitive. In 1973 we had typing pools employing lots of girls. In accounting we had comptomitry employing many women. Likewise telex operators, switch board operators even lift operators. By the mid 1980s all these jobs and others were gone due to automation.

I can't remember the last time I went into a bank, for decades I've been using online banking (in the early 1990s phone banking). At the supermarket, each year there are fewer serviced check outs. Its all DIY. One person supervising/giving assistance and a security guard.keeping watch. Lots of people unemployed. The latest trend is the replacement of supermarkets with online shopping - order online and its delivered to your door (more people unemployed = cleaners, shelf stackers, check out chicks, supervisors, security guards, mall managers etc)

The next big automation boom in the US will be the fast food industry, spurred by people thinking they deserve top-dollar for doing menial, low-skill jobs. The irony is that if they hadn't been screaming about $15/hour then the fast food business wouldn't have started looking for alternatives to human workers.

[Sparko]

The next big automation boom in the US will be the fast food industry, spurred by people thinking they deserve top-dollar for doing menial, low-skill jobs. The irony is that if they hadn't been screaming about $15/hour then the fast food business wouldn't have started looking for alternatives to human workers.

I agree with that. And the people that design and build these automated restaurants will need workers, who will be paid a decent wage, probably more than $15/hour, because they are SKILLED labor. Jobs moved.

[Mountain Man]

Think about the early search engines. Then google arrived about 18 years ago.. Each year it progresses exponentially. Its changed my life, and I presume yours too...I no longer buy books or newpapers or magazines...everything I need or want to know I can find online!

The downside, of course, is that there's a lot of garbage online, too, and it's often difficult or impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff if you aren't already somewhat knowledgeable on the subject.

[Sparko]

The downside, of course, is that there's a lot of garbage online, too, and it's often difficult or impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff if you aren't already somewhat knowledgeable on the subject.

yep. And that is why AIs will never take over jobs that require judgment. They just follow pre-programmed rules. They are not actually intelligent. They don't KNOW what they are doing. They just follow pre-programmed rules and logic trees. If this, then that. They are only as good as their programmer. And can't improvise, or make actual judgments.

[elam]

The next big automation boom in the US will be the fast food industry, spurred by people thinking they deserve top-dollar for doing menial, low-skill jobs. The irony is that if they hadn't been screaming about $15/hour then the fast food business wouldn't have started looking for alternatives to human workers.

I forget where - Japan? Saw on the tech news a while back that some fast-food joint had replaced their servers with robots. Don't know if they are true bots or just semis with a remote control capability = human intervention for trouble shooting.

Here in Oz they are trialing driverless buses. The big ironore transports (front end loaders & trucks) up in the Pilbera that have been in use for a few years are driverless, they are monitored from Perth - a couple of thousand miles away.

I can't think of an occupation that hasn't/won't replace people with AI. I speculate industry will only need 1 human monitor the AI process where once they had 10 or more people performing a task, so that leaves 9+ people unemployed and probably unemployable for each automated task when you extrapolate the numbers across an industry...

I'm not scared of automation, then again I'm fascinated by gadgets and how they work...

Just now I was mentally comparing effort needed in performing the household duties of my grand mother, my mother and my wife and how technology delivered more and more free time for the stay at home mum...

[One Bad Pig]

Just now I was mentally comparing effort needed in performing the household duties of my grand mother, my mother and my wife and how technology delivered more and more free time for the stay at home mum...

Except, somehow, with all the technology, we have less free time than ever.