Post by Willow on Aug 7, 2014 10:18:00 GMT 9.5
THEY already assemble our cars and soon they will drive them for us, too. But robots are about to prove that they are equally as suited to white-collar as they are to blue-collar work, a report by an independent think tank suggests.
Experts have predicted that doctors, accountants, lawyers and the rest of the professional classes are to be supplanted by artificial superintelligence and advanced robotics by 2025.
Two contrasting views are offered in the report to be presented overnight by Pew Research Centre. Those who take a utopian view believe this will free humans from office routines and allow them more free time. The dystopian forecast is of unemployment spiralling out of control, social unrest and humanity’s destruction.
When Pew asked 1900 technology experts whether they believed that automated artificial intelligence and robots would displace more jobs than they create by 2025, they were divided evenly. However, most agreed that robots or other insentient beings would take over many human jobs within the next decade and political and educational institutions were ill-equipped to deal with the rapid change.
Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, said: “Human salespeople, nurses, doctors and actors will be symbols of luxury; the silk of human interaction as opposed to the polyester of simulated human contact.”
Highly skilled jobs would be whittled away by sophisticated machines, she suggested.
Humans have struggled with the idea that they might be the first to share a world with insentient, intelligent beings. Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the Blade Runner film) suggested the only thing separating humans and androids would be empathy.
As such, experts predict that jobs requiring compassion, such as nursing, primary school teaching and care working, would still be done by people, whereas lawyers, accountants, surgeons, librarians, soldiers and call-centre workers would lose out. Jamais Cascio, a technology futurist, said: “These (compassionate) jobs are traditionally performed by women. One of the bigger social questions of the mid to late 2020s will be the role of men in this world.”
Larry Gell, founder and director of the International Agency for Economic Development, said: “Anything and everything that can be automated to replace humans will be done.”
People were the single biggest cost to most companies, he said, so the process of replacing them with cheaper automatons would only accelerate. However, Elizabeth Albrycht, a senior lecturer at the Paris School of Business, suggested the idea of a “job” would change utterly.
“If we consider ‘jobs’ as they are generally thought of today, either blue-collar or white-collar, the displacement will be extraordinary,” she said. “But we cannot assume that ‘jobs’ will stay the same. Our ways of making a living are going to shift at the same time.”
So being involved in the implementation of large IT systems I know how long and hard the change process is - there is no way that this level of change will occur within 10 years - more like 100 if it does
Experts have predicted that doctors, accountants, lawyers and the rest of the professional classes are to be supplanted by artificial superintelligence and advanced robotics by 2025.
Two contrasting views are offered in the report to be presented overnight by Pew Research Centre. Those who take a utopian view believe this will free humans from office routines and allow them more free time. The dystopian forecast is of unemployment spiralling out of control, social unrest and humanity’s destruction.
When Pew asked 1900 technology experts whether they believed that automated artificial intelligence and robots would displace more jobs than they create by 2025, they were divided evenly. However, most agreed that robots or other insentient beings would take over many human jobs within the next decade and political and educational institutions were ill-equipped to deal with the rapid change.
Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, said: “Human salespeople, nurses, doctors and actors will be symbols of luxury; the silk of human interaction as opposed to the polyester of simulated human contact.”
Highly skilled jobs would be whittled away by sophisticated machines, she suggested.
Humans have struggled with the idea that they might be the first to share a world with insentient, intelligent beings. Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the Blade Runner film) suggested the only thing separating humans and androids would be empathy.
As such, experts predict that jobs requiring compassion, such as nursing, primary school teaching and care working, would still be done by people, whereas lawyers, accountants, surgeons, librarians, soldiers and call-centre workers would lose out. Jamais Cascio, a technology futurist, said: “These (compassionate) jobs are traditionally performed by women. One of the bigger social questions of the mid to late 2020s will be the role of men in this world.”
Larry Gell, founder and director of the International Agency for Economic Development, said: “Anything and everything that can be automated to replace humans will be done.”
People were the single biggest cost to most companies, he said, so the process of replacing them with cheaper automatons would only accelerate. However, Elizabeth Albrycht, a senior lecturer at the Paris School of Business, suggested the idea of a “job” would change utterly.
“If we consider ‘jobs’ as they are generally thought of today, either blue-collar or white-collar, the displacement will be extraordinary,” she said. “But we cannot assume that ‘jobs’ will stay the same. Our ways of making a living are going to shift at the same time.”
So being involved in the implementation of large IT systems I know how long and hard the change process is - there is no way that this level of change will occur within 10 years - more like 100 if it does