So there'll be one or two people taking care of those human decisions when necessary... when there used to be ten people taking care of the whole process.
So it doesn't automate all the jobs out of existence; it just automates most of them out of existence
Yeah, they're probably keeping the people who allow them to automate and are laying off the people who, otherwise, need to do the work manually / semi-manually when there is no automation.
Anytime you automate something that someone is doing manually, and you're automating it so well, there's a good chance what you build might replace the people doing it.
Yes, all kinds of jobs - but are there actually a substantial number of people doing those jobs compared to the number of jobs that are easy to automate away?
I don't know if everyone's work can be automated. I hear people who have automated close to 100% of their work. I don't even understand what kind of job that would be. Maybe someone could illuminate me.
I do understand this very well as someone who builds process automation tools. There are infinite menial jobs to automate, but in the end the benefit is only realised by the capital owners and employers, rarely the employees.
Very cool, now the last step, automate the picker. So no humans are required to do this work. Saves a lot of money. And Amazon can be cheaper still.
This is what IT is all about. Automate the humans away.
Now what are we going to do with all those humans that are not capable of doing work that cannot be automated away?
A job could be performed by a human, but still be automated in the sense of virtually all decision-making being made elsewhere, turning pretty much every form of labor into assembly-line work, with human supervisors only present to wear a badge of authority, affirm the computer's decisions, and formally transact hiring and firing.
A lot of jobs were meant to be automated. Jobs (actually the work itself and the tasks invilved) generally go through phases. Phase 1 is to find cheaper ways to do the same thing and Phase 2 is automate that thing.
Yes, I think there's a huge opportunity to automate the easy 80% of many jobs without requiring general AI. You just bring the people back on line when it gets stuck.
You'll never see a hospital with no humans working in it, but moving patients around, cleaning and sterilization of equipment, patient info processing, analysis of test results, and even diagnosis are among the many tasks that can be automated.
You'll never get a full education without ever seeing a human teacher, but we already live in the day and age where a single instructor can teach thousands of students at a time. Standardized tests were probably the first form of automation any of us personally experienced, and it's not hard to see low hanging fruit that allows for improvement.
There will always be artists, but a lot of what those artists do to pay the bills is automatable. Robo-articles are already a thing, and many things like corporate music are similarly ripe targets. Similarly the tools for artists become steadily more powerful - animations, for example, that would have taken an army just a few years ago can now be made by a single individual.
You need a human face for social work, but there's a lot more to it than just empathy. Whether it is keeping track of paperwork or combing through old documents, technology can allow fewer workers to do more.
Similarly, law is overwhelmingly clerical work. For every hour litigating or meeting with clients, there are many hours spent reviewing case law and processing documents, both tasks well suited to automation.
There have never been more tools for supervisors and similar middle management positions. Tracking KPIs and scheduling are very automatable. Combined with reduced reliance on labor, where once you needed a large bureaucracy to run a place, now a single individual per shift might be sufficient.
I don't think I need to say anything on this site about the abundance of tools for IT automation.
The degree to which automation will affect you depends on what fraction of your time is spent doing automatable tasks. If only 10% of your tasks are automatable, odds are you'll see little change. If 90% of your tasks are automatable, you better hope you're in the top 10% of your field. The idea that your job can't be automated because one thing you spend 20 minutes a week doing is better done by a human is a fantasy.
reply