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Robots taking people’s jobs—examples

Puppycow

Penultimate Amazing
Joined
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World's First AI-Powered Humanoid Robot CEO Enters the Boardroom
As concerns rise about robots and artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the workforce, the world’s first humanoid robot has been given the corner office as one company’s new CEO.

Mika is the brainchild of a collaboration between Hanson Robotics and Polish rum company Dictador. This CEO robot isn't just a technological marvel; she has been programmed to embody the distinctive spirit and core values of Dictador.

"I don't really have weekends — I'm always on 24/7, ready to make executive decisions and stir up some AI magic," the robot told Reuters in a "video interview" at the time.

OK, I know. I’m not that gullible. This is clearly a gimmick. I’m sure that if someone were to examine the company charter and whatever legal documents define who the actual decision-maker(s) are, they would find that the robot does not have actual legal authority or legal standing as a salaried employee.

But there have been and will be actual people who are either replaced or made redundant or obsolete by technology in coming years. Things already look somewhat dire in my own industry, translation. I still have a job and I haven’t heard any rumors about layoffs coming up but it does make me worry about the future. There’s a new trend called MTPE, which stands for machine translation plus editing. As an editor I think nobody is yet confident enough to say that we don’t even need a human being to check this and make sure that there’s no glaring errors. But in 5 years, who knows?
 
Automation has been quietly transforming how we work and the kind of work we do for years. Are there still travel agents around? Probably, but I bet it's not nearly the industry it used to be. There was a time, you needed to book a flight, you had to talk to a human being, explain what you want, work with them to get it all set up. Now you just hop on the airline's website and click through a few screens backed by automated systems. Get to the airport, if you don't need to check luggage you don't need to talk to a ticket agent at all. You can just check in via an automated kiosk. Or check in from home via an automated system the night before.

Speaking of air travel, lots of airports have tram systems connecting different terminals and concourses. Those are all automated. Did any tram driver lose their job, though? Probably not. Rather, those jobs were never created in the first place. The tram was always going to be automated.

I'm in IT - systems administration. Amazon Web Services provides a vast suite of automated tools, that allows me to quickly set up virtual datacenters full of servers and databases and network infrastructure. Hundreds of datacenter install and configuration jobs that were never created, because the robots do them better.

And most of my job is actually developing automated systems to handle all my virtual datacenter setup tasks at the touch of a button. The robot isn't taking my job. I'm building the robot so I can give it my job.
 
I know of an office undergoing "digitisation" in which three people recently retired after around 100 years of service between them.

The office had to close.

There might be a sort of Venn diagram that can be drawn that has old staff, new staff, computers, IT people, and incorrect/correct information.
 
I know of an office undergoing "digitisation" in which three people recently retired after around 100 years of service between them.

The office had to close.

There might be a sort of Venn diagram that can be drawn that has old staff, new staff, computers, IT people, and incorrect/correct information.

Interesting. I'd like to know more about this office to understand. How many people worked there, including the three? Was it one office of many or the main office? Was it just the office that closed or the whole company? Are you saying that these three had essentially been irreplaceable essential employees?
 
I know of an office undergoing "digitisation" in which three people recently retired after around 100 years of service between them.

The office had to close.

There might be a sort of Venn diagram that can be drawn that has old staff, new staff, computers, IT people, and incorrect/correct information.

Was this supposed to be on topic? Where's the robot taking anyone's job?
 
Was this supposed to be on topic? Where's the robot taking anyone's job?

I'll allow it. It could be a counter-example. Or maybe not. I'm curious to hear more though.

"Digitisation" is a rather broad term and many offices have been successfully "digitized". In fact, I think that computers are now an essential tool in the modern office. I doubt that's why the office had to close.
 
I'll allow it. It could be a counter-example. Or maybe not. I'm curious to hear more though.

"Digitisation" is a rather broad term and many offices have been successfully "digitized". In fact, I think that computers are now an essential tool in the modern office. I doubt that's why the office had to close.

Naw. ON is telling tales orthogonal to the topic of the thread.
 
It was a regional land mapping and management office. I don't actually know if the digitisation and new software that's been implemented can replace them. I gather nobody knows yet.

It's up to you to "allow" my post or not.

I thought it was on the convergent topics of knowledge replacement, staff structure, and human and machine learning, not merely some simplistic idea of robots.
 
If anything, it seems rather late in the game to be talking about "digitizing" an office. That's a thing that mostly happened decades ago. Perhaps they had to close because they were too late to digitize?
 
If anything, it seems rather late in the game to be talking about "digitizing" an office. That's a thing that mostly happened decades ago. Perhaps they had to close because they were too late to digitize?

Many foolscap and odd-sized paged hardcopy files still hadn't been scanned, I gather, and there were lots of very large old maps.
 
It was a regional land mapping and management office.
Many foolscap and odd-sized paged hardcopy files still hadn't been scanned, I gather, and there were lots of very large old maps.

OK. So I infer that it was some sort of government office.

It sounds to me like the closure might be because whatever function they used to provide is no longer needed in the age of digital maps. These old paper-based maps are historical curiosities now. In that sense, one could say that the "robots" have taken their jobs, albeit indirectly.

I thought it was on the convergent topics of knowledge replacement, staff structure, and human and machine learning, not merely some simplistic idea of robots.

Yes, I don't intend a strict definition of the term robot.
 
OK. So I infer that it was some sort of government office.

It sounds to me like the closure might be because whatever function they used to provide is no longer needed in the age of digital maps. These old paper-based maps are historical curiosities now. In that sense, one could say that the "robots" have taken their jobs, albeit indirectly.



Yes, I don't intend a strict definition of the term robot.

They needed to know things like when or if to send in a surveyor to settle boundary disputes in the instance of discrepancies and possible encroachment.

I guess a software programme could be programmed to do that, but I don't know if anyone designing the software knows what the rules are. There are, I gather, a cromulent number of laws and rules that haven't been taught to younger or tech-savvy staff.

I could be misconstrued as taking the side of the retirees here. I'm ambivalent . I believe the laws and rules are all gazetted, so they could be searched.
 
Ah, that makes some sense. But the functions of one office could be reallocated to another. Perhaps it made sense to consolidate these functions in one central location along with other government functions.
 
If anything, it seems rather late in the game to be talking about "digitizing" an office. That's a thing that mostly happened decades ago. Perhaps they had to close because they were too late to digitize?

I think about the office I first worked in back in Grover Cleveland's second term. We had a typist pool. A few years later there were Wang word processors, and I can remember my boss scolding me when he caught me amending a document I had written out in longhand after I saw the printout. His concern was that I would be seen as just a typist. It was funny because he was no Luddite, and when I explained that it was easier for me to make the changes as compared to drawing arrows and writing new paragraphs, he said okay but to get up if any guests or higher-ups came in. Of course, all the typists are long gone now.
 
I think about the office I first worked in back in Grover Cleveland's second term. We had a typist pool. A few years later there were Wang word processors, and I can remember my boss scolding me when he caught me amending a document I had written out in longhand after I saw the printout. His concern was that I would be seen as just a typist. It was funny because he was no Luddite, and when I explained that it was easier for me to make the changes as compared to drawing arrows and writing new paragraphs, he said okay but to get up if any guests or higher-ups came in. Of course, all the typists are long gone now.

The modern equivalent is what in my company we call either an "operator" or sometimes "DTP" (desktop publishing). They make the final document to be delivered to the client look professional and clean. Choosing the right fonts, spacing, pagination and so on. I only edit the words and leave all of that stuff to them.

But I do remember back when I first started here that we literally did a similar thing. That is, the document to be checked would come printed out on paper double-spaced and I would mark it up with edits (using a green pen, always green) to be made by the operator/DTP people. And that was this century too.
 
i work in manufacturing, which is pretty heavily automated.

in manufacturing, when you're talking about robots you're talking about the classic arms with articulating joints, but it includes others. basically anything that can move in a 3d space on multiple axii would be considered robot. automation is much more general and would probably apply more to what you're getting at.

definitely eliminated some jobs over the last 15 years, more than it created. the jobs it created are more difficult and technical due to the increased complexity and broad skill set needed to work on them, but higher paying.
 
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/FA2235H041S00


At 13 minutes in.



A young woman is brutally murdered by her ex boyfriend in a school gym changing room. He used a hammer.


The Guardian published a story.


https://www.theguardian.com/austral...ydney-school-coach-st-andrews-cathedral-death


Microsoft Windows picked up the story and published it on the Windows News Feed.
AI is used to publish the content. The AI added a poll.
What do you think is the reasons for the womans death?


1. Murder.
2. Accident.
3. Suicide.
The comments section was not impressed.


Microsoft used to have journalists doing the work but they were replaced with the AI.
 
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The modern equivalent is what in my company we call either an "operator" or sometimes "DTP" (desktop publishing). They make the final document to be delivered to the client look professional and clean. Choosing the right fonts, spacing, pagination and so on. I only edit the words and leave all of that stuff to them.

...snip...

That is what my other half does, been doing it for 25 years for the same company. There are less operators these days, but that is because there is less need for the work, automation has not so far been able to do their job. It's been tried a few times and it hasn't been successful. Whether the latest "AIs" will be able to do his job is something being looked into, so far it seems rather unlikely. (They also tried to outsource to the likes of India but had terrible experiences and it has always come back to having a local team the bankers and analysts can interact with.) Part of the reason why it hasn't been automated is because those that dictate the work like to say things such as - and I'm not joking - "Duplicate this page from someone else's deal book but make it look pretty and add in a map". Any decent AI would be telling them to go away rapidly within an hour.

Interestingly internally his group have used ChatGPT to create or rather "edit" their own training documents. Everyone reckons they are improved by the process, but they have still had to go back and edit some of the work ChatGPT did because it made some changes that "textually" were correct but not actual process/ops correct.
 
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i work in manufacturing, which is pretty heavily automated.

in manufacturing, when you're talking about robots you're talking about the classic arms with articulating joints, but it includes others. basically anything that can move in a 3d space on multiple axii would be considered robot. automation is much more general and would probably apply more to what you're getting at.

definitely eliminated some jobs over the last 15 years, more than it created. the jobs it created are more difficult and technical due to the increased complexity and broad skill set needed to work on them, but higher paying.

That's what I do, service the robots for Automated Material Systems in a manufacturing environment. Like much of the examples given by theprestige this entire factory was designed and constructed (20 odd years ago) specifically for this type and level of automation.
 
The AI added a poll.
The comments section was not impressed.


Microsoft used to have journalists doing the work but they were replaced with the AI.

Yeah, this is why you can't just automate this kind of stuff entirely.

At a minimum you need a human being to check and approve the final result before you send it out the door for the whole world to see.

Adding AI-generated polls to news articles seems like a terrible idea.
 
Hmm...

If you stretch the meaning of 'robots' slightly, my house has quiet a few.

Powered/automated roller shutters on the windows.
Automatic washing machine.
Automatic dish washer.

Stretch it a bit further and all the vacuum cleaners may count (not just the robot one).

Remember, once upon a time, people used to beat clothes on the rocks by the river, dishes had to be washed by hand, and carpets had to be taken outside, hung up, and beaten to clean them.

All of those things have taken away work from someone...
 
Remember, once upon a time, people used to beat clothes on the rocks by the river, dishes had to be washed by hand, and carpets had to be taken outside, hung up, and beaten to clean them.

All of those things have taken away work from someone...

The automation of many domestic tasks is also one of the things that propelled the transition of women into the workforce.
 
No doubt, somebody will come along and say that AI will create more jobs than it displaces because that's what happened 100 years ago when automobiles displaced horses.
 
anybody want to touch on that a lot of these companies have all these automated systems but still charge service fees like a person is doing it?
 
Well, here's some people who lost their jobs because of ChatGPT. Specifically because of USING ChatGPT:


The things some people don't seem to understand is that these things are CHAT bots, not real general purpose AI. It's only supposed to produce text in the STYLE of whatever it's been trained on. E.g., in that case on legal documents.

It's a far more sophisticated statistics program than my own Mark V Shaney implementation, and trained on far more text, but it's still just fitting statistically chosen random words into a plausible sentence structure. Like, if it's trained on legal document, it will (eventually) notice the X vs Y structure, and just invent a Pat Fenis vs the state of Nirvana to fill it in as a precedent.

What I'm saying is that it won't actually work as a lawyer any time soon, and much less as a CEO. Anyone betting their company on it actually being a general purpose AI, might well find out what... well... let's say, quoth Baofu from Persona II EP, "they call this the logical results." :p
 
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anybody want to touch on that a lot of these companies have all these automated systems but still charge service fees like a person is doing it?

Do you have an example of a company that does this, that we could touch on?

For all we know, you're talking about companies charging for their services, which is a normal thing, or charging a fee to maintain the systems that are providing these services, which is also a normal thing.
 
anybody want to touch on that a lot of these companies have all these automated systems but still charge service fees like a person is doing it?

not AI, but similar. I used to work in Real Estate Appraisals. When I started, and as late as 2002, we were using 1 hour photo, and gluing those to hard copy reports, had plat maps faxed over by title companies, photocopied map pages and used stickers to denote Subject and Comparables, etc. We charged $350. When we went all digital, it saved a lot of time and money. We then charged...$350
 
not AI, but similar. I used to work in Real Estate Appraisals. When I started, and as late as 2002, we were using 1 hour photo, and gluing those to hard copy reports, had plat maps faxed over by title companies, photocopied map pages and used stickers to denote Subject and Comparables, etc. We charged $350. When we went all digital, it saved a lot of time and money. We then charged...$350

And rightly so. You knew you have plenty of customers at that price. There was apparently no pressure from competitors to lower your prices. Why would you lower your prices? To be nice? Were your customers offering to pay more, just to be nice?
 


The video is only about 20 secs.

Here in Japan some restaurants now have robot servers. I've been to the one myself and been served by a robot (It's a chain restaurant so probably a different location). However, I don't think it has replaced the staff. The robot will carry food to the table but people still bus the table. The robot can't do that part. It has no hands for one thing. It's basically a stack of shelves that moves autonomously. They put a screen on the front with a smiley face to make it look friendly.
 
Once we reach the singularity, all bets are off.

Sure.

In the mean time, I am not betting that the singularity won't come "any time soon".

As an actual programmer, who's followed this crap for a while, I'd actually bet my ass that it won't any time soon. Because, literally, these are just chatbots fitting statistically-weighted words into a sentence structure, which they learned, as well as those weightings, by being trained on millions of texts.

(Well, plus other applications which basically boil down to: build a matrix of Bayesian probabilities to fiddle with the parameters of a function someone else came up with.)

Maybe one day we'll have a general purpose AI. I hope, anyway. And maybe one day the singularity will come. And maybe one day the world serpent Jörmungandr will poison the atmosphere, before being defeated by Thor, while Fenrir eats the world with his jaws open all the way to the sky. But neither day is now :p
 
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The video is only about 20 secs.

Here in Japan some restaurants now have robot servers. I've been to the one myself and been served by a robot (It's a chain restaurant so probably a different location). However, I don't think it has replaced the staff. The robot will carry food to the table but people still bus the table. The robot can't do that part. It has no hands for one thing. It's basically a stack of shelves that moves autonomously. They put a screen on the front with a smiley face to make it look friendly.


We've had robots that deliver food for some years now, mostly around campus (Oregon State University), but also in a tiny town next door for some reason. they're pretty impressive in their ability to navigate traffic.
I think they're not more common in other towns, 'cause they'd probably get vandalized and beaten up. My town is pretty safe.

https://youtu.be/VKyk6ZVnNms?si=kJZLmieskRFoWvWj
 
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Well, here's some people who lost their jobs because of ChatGPT. Specifically because of USING ChatGPT:


The things some people don't seem to understand is that these things are CHAT bots, not real general purpose AI. It's only supposed to produce text in the STYLE of whatever it's been trained on. E.g., in that case on legal documents.

It's a far more sophisticated statistics program than my own Mark V Shaney implementation, and trained on far more text, but it's still just fitting statistically chosen random words into a plausible sentence structure. Like, if it's trained on legal document, it will (eventually) notice the X vs Y structure, and just invent a Pat Fenis vs the state of Nirvana to fill it in as a precedent.

What I'm saying is that it won't actually work as a lawyer any time soon, and much less as a CEO. Anyone betting their company on it actually being a general purpose AI, might well find out what... well... let's say, quoth Baofu from Persona II EP, "they call this the logical results." :p

I don't know what to expect "any time soon", given that even experts in the field have been surprised by the rate of recent progress. Its entirely possible that the current progress will hit a ceiling and slow down, though it's also possible that it will continue for a while. Regardless, the current version seems to be increasing productivity:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh2586
We examined the productivity effects of a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the assistive chatbot ChatGPT, in the context of midlevel professional writing tasks. In a preregistered online experiment, we assigned occupation-specific, incentivized writing tasks to 453 college-educated professionals and randomly exposed half of them to ChatGPT. Our results show that ChatGPT substantially raised productivity: The average time taken decreased by 40% and output quality rose by 18%. Inequality between workers decreased, and concern and excitement about AI temporarily rose. Workers exposed to ChatGPT during the experiment were 2 times as likely to report using it in their real job 2 weeks after the experiment and 1.6 times as likely 2 months after the experiment.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06590
Generative AI tools hold promise to increase human productivity. This paper presents results from a controlled experiment with GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer. Recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in JavaScript as quickly as possible. The treatment group, with access to the AI pair programmer, completed the task 55.8% faster than the control group. Observed heterogenous effects show promise for AI pair programmers to help people transition into software development careers.
 
As an actual programmer, who's followed this crap for a while, I'd actually bet my ass that it won't any time soon. Because, literally, these are just chatbots fitting statistically-weighted words into a sentence structure, which they learned, as well as those weightings, by being trained on millions of texts.
All you are saying is that the algorithms currently being used by ChatGPT make it unsuitable for replacing lawyers or CEOs or other professionals.

What makes you think that better algorithms won't be employed "any time soon"?
 
Do you have an example of a company that does this, that we could touch on?

For all we know, you're talking about companies charging for their services, which is a normal thing, or charging a fee to maintain the systems that are providing these services, which is also a normal thing.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/10/ftc-proposes-rule-ban-junk-fees

here's an article about junk fees and why people don't like them and why they are a problem. charging for a service you're not providing is what i'd consider to land under bogus fees. convenience fees and processing fees are great examples, but really anytime a company charges for a service they aren't providing is dishonest. having to charge for something they did is ok, no having to do it anymore but still charging for it is a lie.

i know you framed it as why would they be nice, but that was actually a really good and pretty straightforward example. they charge $350 for a service that was a lot of labor to cover an expense, it became not a lot of labor due to technology advancement, but the price stayed the same. no lying and ripping people off isn't being nice, it's dishonest.
 
"Robot outsources its low-paid menial job to human to focus on painting and writing"

- The Chaser headline. ;)
 
All you are saying is that the algorithms currently being used by ChatGPT make it unsuitable for replacing lawyers or CEOs or other professionals.

What makes you think that better algorithms won't be employed "any time soon"?

Basically that I'm not seeing any work published on anything even remotely resembling a general purpose AI, really. Maybe it will happen. But it will take years at best to even be trained to that purpose, even if someone came up with better algorithms today that enable that.

Literally everything done today is just using millions of cycles to tweak matrixes of probabilities to feed into someone else's functions. Yeah, it's using neural networks. Still the same deal. It won't go from being a chat bot to inventing the warp drive in a flash of inspiration, because it literally can't. It can only tweak the probability matrices it was programmed to.

Will a breakthrough happen eventually? I have nothing to base that hope at the moment, but I like to hope so. Oh elder gods, I wish. But I have this defect: I can distinguish between wishful thinking and reality :p

I'm not gonna think that because a glorified backtracking algorithm (something I can't even call "AI" with a straight face, as it's the dumbest and most primitive brute-force kind of approach) managed to find a way out of a maze in just a billion iterations, it means it can replace a CEO, or really do anything else than find a way out of a maze. It's the kind you can impress laymen by showing them that like three little people icons learned to open the way for each other in a maze, but really, not only they can't do anything else, and will be back to ground zero even on a different maze, but it's not even the most efficient way to solve pathing. By far.

Will we get better at it some day? I sure hope so. But that day isn't today.
 
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