Get Ready… Humans are about to become obsolete. Over the past several decades, technology/software has become an integral part of every occupation in the nation. Little did we know that we were actually training out replacements. As business owners sought to cut costs and implement cost-saving policies, we were all asked to write down every task we perform throughout our day. Then we were put onto automated TimeClocks which were tracking our time worked in comparison to the work output. Then, as AI developed, the computer began to monitor our every move. Every click of out keyboard, every swipe of out mouse. With cameras and microphones in every device, AI was able to monitor every move of our bodies and every sound we made. AI was learning… learning by repetition, what was required to perform our job. WE HAVE BEEN TRAINING OUT REPLACEMENTS!
Now as they roll out the new automated versions of us, they are convincing us that we are needed to monitor the robot… but actually, we are just temporarily needed to give the robots actual real-time experience to practice what they have learned. Once they have been proven to be successful at completing the tasks…it is BYE-BYE HUMAN!
If you think you are immune… think again.
UPDATE 6/22/19
Is this a real-life ROBOCOP? World’s first robot police officer launched in Dubai
After kitting out their coppers with Lamborghinis and Ferraris, police in Dubai have now launched the first ever operational robot police officer, with the aim that they will make up a quarter of the force by 2030.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The world’s first operational police robot stands to attention near the Burj Khalifa
In this video I discuss the coming universal basic income, 5G technology, automation, robot security and policing, wealth inequality and other predictions for the next 10 years. Fasten your seatbelts, its going to be a wild ride!
Subscribe to our Free Financial Newsletter: http://crushthestreet.com The greatest digital job disruptor is upon us. 50% of current jobs in America are at risk of being displaced by artificial intelligence. Free report on ways to prepare for this rapidly changing landscape, visit CrushTheStreet.com/AI
Artificial intelligence programs have developed their own language for talking with each other. Facebook wanted to see if their chatbots could negotiate in English. Evidently, they are reasonably good at it, even to the point of bringing up items purely as negotiating chips that they tend to give up to meet their other goal. In the process, bots practicing by talking to bots developing a different language so they could talk more efficiently. Efficiency is admirable, but the spooky aspect is the implications it has for humans maintaining control over computer systems. As the systems develop, and as more computers communicate directly with other computers, we may create a situation where we can’t fully understand how critical systems operate. Some may cheer that. Others will worry about who is really in charge and what do humans do if the systems fail. In any case, the event demonstrates the potential for how quickly our fundamental information infrastructure (as well as more concrete infrastructure) can evolve into a new and possibly unrecognizable era.
Tim Lindner, a veteran IT analyst, confided in a note to industry insiders, eradicating jobs is the explicit goal of any online retailer. As he once wrote: “Labor is the highest-cost factor in warehouse operations. It is no secret that Amazon is moving to highly automated operations within its distribution centers, and…it has additional technology that can further reduce the number of humans it needs to process customer orders.… You have heard the old programmer’s phrase, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’… [With] the diminishing reading abilities of humans on the Receiving dock, finding an automated solution to eliminate the ‘garbage in’ problem is the holy grail. Amazon may have just patented it.”
Sawyer the Robot will work for the equivalent of $4 per day. And he’s never in a bad mood. Can you compete with that? COURTESY OF RETHINK ROBOTICS
…human workers are complicated. We get tired, hungry, distracted, angry, confused. We make mistakes, sometimes egregious ones. Machines lack our frailties and biases and are better equipped to weigh evidence fairly, without prejudice or false assumptions. Perhaps most critically, machines can retain and process data far more accurately than we can, and that data is growing exponentially.
Every minute of every day, Google services 3.6 million searches in the United States alone. Spammers send 100 million emails. Snapchatters send 527,000 photos, and the Weather Channel broadcasts 18 million forecasts. This and more data—properly collected, codified and analyzed—can be applied to automate almost any high-order task. Data can also serve as a surrogate for human experience and intuition. Online shopping and social media sites “learn” our preferences and use that information to make values-based assessments to influence our decisions and behavior. And, increasingly, machines excel in the tasks once thought uniquely human.
Bart Selman is a professor of computer science at Cornell University and an expert in knowledge representation—basically, translating the real world into terms computers can understand and act upon. He cautions that computers do not yet have full human capabilities. For example, they lack “common sense” and an ability to grasp the deep meaning of language. They are unable to “make meaning” in the human sense, and this sometimes leads them down the wrong path. Still, he says, these shortcomings are likely temporary. “The [artificial intelligence] community believes that machines will match human intelligence within the next 15 to 20 years,” he says.
And robots need not be perfect, only equal to—or a tad better than—complicated and expensive humans. And technologists are working hard to make sure they are a tad better. For example, in the case of retail, it’s become clear that many of us avoid the self-service checkout line—we prefer the cashier to punch in our purchases rather than do so ourselves. So it seems that the job of cashier—among the largest retail employment categories—is not directly at risk. But Zeynep Ton, an MIT management expert who focuses on the retail sector, says self-service checkout is only a first step and not a terribly smart one. “Customers recognized that self-service checkout is not an innovation, but merely a way of outsourcing the job to them, so they didn’t like it,” she says. “But new technology is coming that will make self-service checkout so much easier and faster, and that will have a real impact on retail employment.”
Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, directs the Creative Machines Lab, where he and his students train machines to be reflective, curious and, yes, creative—including in the kitchen. When we spoke, he was putting the final touches on a device that uses software to concoct beautifully composed gourmet delights from a jumble of pastes, gels, powders and liquid ingredients. From the looks of it, this machine could compete with a three-star Michelin chef and her entire staff. When I ran this thought by Lipson, he groaned. He says scientists and engineers like himself have a reflexive urge to automate almost every difficult task. The whole point of engineering, he says, is to alleviate drudgery and increase productivity; in the past, that was almost always the right thing to do, the good thing to do. But now he’s not so sure.
“Automation and AI will take away pretty much all of our jobs,” he says. “If not within our lifetime, then within our grandchildren’s lifetime. This is a new situation in human history, and we’re not prepared for it. Maybe we think we are, but we’re not.”
It’s only a matter of time before robots replace surgeons in the operating theatre, according to cancer specialist virtual reality surgery pioneer Shafi Ahmed.
Ahmed is a leading proponent of virtual and augmented reality within operating theatres. In April 2016 he became the first surgeon to live-stream a surgical procedure in virtual reality, with millions of people worldwide watching him remove a tumour from the colon of a patient in his 70s.
Futurologists have been predicting the automation armageddon — robots replacing human workers — for decades. Has the future finally arrived? Economics correspondent Paul Solman visits Silicon Valley to talk with leading tech thinkers and computer scientists about whether humanity is at a tipping point.
As technology and artificial intelligence (A.I.) advances, jobs in banks and offices are set to be replaced by automation, according to industry experts.
The clearest sign of how far A.I. has come was earlier this week, when against champion Lee Sedol. AlphaGo’s victory was seen as a major milestone for A.I. due to the complexity of the board game.
But AlphaGo is only the tip of the iceberg for what A.I. can do, says Professor Andre Spicer, from Cass Business School.
“According to some scenarios, A.I. will quickly replace many forms of complex knowledge work ranging from lawyers to librarians, professors to policy analysts,” Spicer said in a press release.
Another occupation under threat from automation is the bank teller. In the future, ATMs will be able to perform most of their tasks, such as opening accounts and processing loans, according to Andy Mattes, CEO of software company Diebold.
“The ATM of tomorrow is going to replace the teller,” said Mattes. “It can do approximately 90 percent of what the human being can do and it’s going to be your branch in a box.”
ATMs will be able to perform these functions at a fraction of the cost compared to human employees, said Mattes, as they will be able to check and process any paperwork.
“The new machines will identify yourself: you can put your passport on it, they can scan documents, you can literally do anything online that you would’ve been able to do in front of a human being,” he explained.
Henrik5000 | Getty Images
Office work is also set to change. Earlier this week, Blue Prism announced plans to debut on the London Stock Exchange. The company, which grew 35 percent in 2015, develops “software robots” which can perform clerical and administration tasks.
“Software robots have been deployed successfully and strategically by large, blue chip organizations that have derived tremendous value from this new solution to the labor market,” said Alastair Bathgate, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in a press release. “It’s not science fiction.”
A video commercial for the bot also shows that it has screens on the front and back to communicate with pedestrians. A screen on the front says “hello” while a screen on the back indicates its direction of travel and whether or not it’s about to stop. Self-driving car makers have experimented with similar technology, saying they help reduce accidents and misunderstandings between human and machine.
You can watch a video of the FedEx SameDay Bot in action on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon below, from 5:00 on
Machines that can think, learn and adapt are coming — and that could mean that we humans will end up with significant unemplo– ment. What should we do about it? In a straightforward talk about a controversial idea, futurist Martin Ford makes the case for separating income from traditional work and instituting a universal basic income.
Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that, yes, probably, droids will take our jobs — or at least the kinds of jobs we know now. In this far-seeing talk, he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and how to educate coming generations to hold them.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference and was featured by our editors on the home page
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and other tech titans are promoting the idea of universal basic income, as a way to help citizens weather job disruptions caused by emerging technologies. Canada is giving it a try, with a pilot program that gives participants up to $17,000 annually for three years — no strings attached. WSJ’s Jason Bellini checks in on this free money experiment. Image: Ryno Eksteen and Adele Morgan
No matter how much they want to make you believe that what is coming is a wonderful utopia where everyone is going to given ample provision and all your needs will be me, and you can use all that leisure time to pursue what interests and fulfills you, it is BS. Power corrupts and if you have not seen that clearly demonstrated you are really in La La Land. They keep talking about guaranteed income and wealth distribution. Well, none of these ideas are new and untested. The Scandinavian countries have been working under this kind of system for years now. IT IS NOT WORKING! Surprise! They want you to believe that Sweden is the “Happy Place”. Take a look at the following articles and see the facts.
Nationalists are gaining support as more people complain about the sustainability of the cradle-to-grave system.
By Amanda Billner, Rafaela Lindeberg, and Niklas Magnusson
Carl-Fredrik Bothen, 43, and Adam Sierakowiak, 33, two fathers in Stockholm who are currently off work for six months with their babies, said they are both unhappy about the way welfare is handled. They don’t feel secure about getting the health care or pension they need and feel they’re entitled to.
Although taxes have been raised in recent years, welfare has deteriorated, they said.
“I don’t trust welfare at all, I need to build my own capital,” Bothen said while sipping his cappuccino at the NK department store in central Stockholm. “The problem with immigration is that our welfare state is not quite dimensioned for it. Of course we should help people, and we have a good situation here in Sweden, but we can’t handle an unlimited amount of people.”
That sentiment is amplified in more remote parts of the country. More than 400 kilometers north in Solleftea, midwife Hedvall said the local municipality raised taxes just before the maternity ward closed. She said politicians don’t care anymore once they come into power. The closure saved 16 million kronor ($1.8 million) a year.
In the southern part of Lapland, one police car covers an area almost the size of Denmark. That might have been enough in the past, but store-owner Camilla Appelqvist in the village of Dorotea said times have changed. She had three break-ins since February, the intruders clearing out the tobacco and snuff from the store.
When she called the police to attend the most recent incident at 3:30 a.m., she was told there was nobody available. Then she was asked to wait for the day team. The local police station is only staffed one day a week, she said. The advice she got was to improve security to people can’t get in, said Appelqvist, 46.
Europe’s first national experiment in giving citizens free cash has attracted huge media attention. But one year in, what does this project really hope to prove?
Juha Jarvinen, right, is one of 2,000 participants in Finland’s two-year basic income experiment. Photograph: Mika Putro/EPA
In January 2017, the Nordic nation began paying a random but mandatory sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 a monthly €560 (£475). There is no obligation either to seek or accept employment during the two years the trial lasts, and any who do take a job will continue to receive the same amount.
“A full-scale universal income trial would need to study different target groups, not just the unemployed. It would have to test different basic income levels, look at local factors. This is really about seeing how a basic unconditional income affects the employment of unemployed people.”
Europe’s first national government-backed experiment in giving citizens free cash will end next year after Finland decided not to extend its widely publicised basic income trial and to explore alternative welfare schemes instead.
Since January 2017, a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 have been paid a monthly €560 (£475) , with no requirement to seek or accept employment. Any recipients who took a job continued to receive the same amount.
The government has turned down a request for extra funding from Kela, the Finnish social security agency, to expand the two-year pilot to a group of employees this year, and said payments to current participants will end next January.
It has also introduced legislation making some benefits for unemployed people contingent on taking training or working at least 18 hours in three months. “The government is making changes taking the system away from basic income,” Kela’s Miska Simanainen told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
Appealing both to the left (who believe it can cut poverty and inequality) and, more recently, to the right (as a possible way to a leaner, less bureaucratic welfare system), UBI looks all the more attractive amid warnings that automation could threaten up to a third of current jobs in the west within 20 years. Other basic income schemes are now being tested from Ontario to rural Kenya, and Glasgow to Barcelona.
Rapid development of self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence and robotics are expected to aggravate inequality, as wealth goes to those who own the robots. Technologists and politicians are proposing solutions like universal basic income and job retraining to keep job displacement from leading to poverty and homelessness. While many see the coming problems, there is little agreement on how to fund them, and few doubt the degree of expected change. AJ+’s documentary series on automation explores how advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and automated vehicles will affect jobs, cities and inequality. From trucking to radiology, new technology is already changing white collar and blue collar occupations, reshaping cities and concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. Robots are taking over the world as companies like Tesla, Amazon, Uber and Google are using robots to automate.
A FEW FINAL WORDS FROM ME
BUCKLE YOUR SEATBELTS PEOPLE, WE ARE IN FOR ONE CRAZY RIDE!
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Andrew Tarantola
