To ask your opinion about where we are headed as a society with regards to robots and job obsolescence?

[Calltheguards]

Not sure if this is on anyone else's radar but it seems like artificial intelligence and robotics are going to keep improving until all jobs are programmed and automated in to non existence? This appears to be happening at a quicker pace than we currently recognise.

This could lead the future to a robot revolution of sorts and the end of work as we know it.

Of course some jobs in automation engineering and robot maintenance will be created, but these will be far fewer than the current number of jobs that society has available. The majority of the public will be rendered jobless eventually.

Now what path do you think people will go down. Will we just let things happen as they happen? Will we turn towards more socialism? I don't think socialism is bad by the way, the NHS is socialism but it seems that many disagree with this.

I would like a civil discussion if possible, I really wonder what people's thoughts are in regards to this particular predicament we will find our selves in.

My company has already started with robots, we used to work 3 people in a cell, with the robots we only need 1 person now, we have gone from having 24 agency staff per shift, to 0!

I wont be good at articulating this properly, but i think consumables will slowly and increasingly be split into 'real' 'handmade' things and 3D printed 'computer made' things. More being paid for the made by real human in a factory things.

My DH is a builder and he is a little unsettled by you tube videos of bricklaying robots and pop up card board houses. Mass production like that has a lot of negatives though, and some trades will never truly die out. Hopefully.

The more menial style jobs will probably be taken by robots, but the new technologies that emerge will in their turn create new types of jobs.

I feel like we are going to have to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.

I can't see any job not being under threat from being programmed.

I posted upthread without giving an example, but have just remembered the example I read recently. Book-keeping used to be an incredibly long and laborious job -- every time a figure was changed you had to go and rub out other figures and change them too. Took a great deal of manpower.

The spreadsheets were invented, and overnight there was no call for the number of bookkeepers who had existed. The job became quick and easy. The number of bookkeepers employed fell by at least half. Can't remember the figure.

However - now book-keeping was easy all of a sudden it was possible to store loads of data and do all sorts of exciting things with the data. Enter the data scientist - a whole branch of computer science which wouldn't have existed without the spreadsheet and database.

So technology takes jobs, but it also creates new ones.

We're heading for universal basic income. If there's no jobs it will be the only way to keep things running

Production line house building is already underway and popular in other countries but the U.K. is many years away from having the infrastructure in place to make it mainstream- and in fact, it’s a huge trades shortage that will drive it, not a desire to get people out of a job.

To be honest, I think there is a big difference between what’s possible and what your average company will invest in. The investment will be huge. Many companies- big names, small names, listed, unlisted, public charity etc.... have chaotic systems as it is, despite the fact there is no technological reason for them to be poor. The reason is that the investment is huge, it takes a lot of time, and will take a long time to see payback. Also many boards are not inclined to push this because it’s as alien to them as the rest of us.

My view is that manufacturing will lead the way but I don’t think we’ll be seeing service industry robots for a very long time- maybe not in my lifetime.

There will be different jobs.

I’m old enough to remember the same conversations about computers. News papers full of articles about how we would have so much leisure time in the future. Lol 😂

Technology definitely creates jobs but you wouldn't need as many jobs because of automation. It would also leave behind the people who could not handle automation engineering work.

We have introduced bots at work to undertake admin type jobs.

Technically, No has lost their job. When we set up this department it was always the plan. Therefore we took lots of temporary staff on a higher wage with the full knowledge it wasnt permanent. Cost us a fortune, as plenty leave when they got a permanent job somewhere and we would have to recruit again.

But honestly, the amount of times they fail, means that we actually employed some temp staff on perm as the shit hits the fan when they fail.

That said, I’m certainly telling my children that mechanical engineering is the thing to study....

We're going to have to face up to some unconfortable things, like confronting the whole idea of us selling certain hours of our life to justify our existence. We'll simply have to get our geads around universal basic income, sooner rather than later for less pain.

In the NHS, I can see a lot of roles being lost. Medical secretaries - a lot of the audio typing has been outsourced to India / The Philippines or automation dictation systems are used. Far fewer secretaries and audio typists needed.

My local Trust, not a huge one, had 20 admin jobs going. I’m sure they would love to cut them if technology allowed. They have check in machines in outpatient clinics now, they don’t have full time receptionists now, just one per shift.

I’ve read Rise of the Robots and the future does not look rosy.

I think AI will augment some jobs that exist today.

For instance, in the area of HR. When reviewing candidates on paper, AI has no bias and won't instantly feel dislike for someone so, on paper, it will level out that playing field. AI can collect, process and analyse huge amounts of data, leaving HR professionals time to do more with less admin.

IBM Watson Health is a great example of AI and health professionals working really well together, but this is because Doctors can override the machine's conclusions and push for a human solution.

Banks using AI currently have bank tellers and officials using a 'tick box' system which doesn't work all the time.

We are in good place now where we can look at roles, reimagine them and 'future proof' them plus create new roles and ensure the future generations adapt well and fast so they don't make themselves obsolete.

I don't fear AI in its current form, but do realise that the pace of change is such that I might eat those words in a decade or so.

I don’t know a lot about you but my office jobs have been largely pointless. I sat there counting down the hours and doing little. What a waste of a life.

If UBI was implemented I would do some voluntary work, art, write a novel.

Retail jobs - more self checkouts, robots stacking shelves. Far fewer staff needed.

Jobs closely related to births, funerals, and mending the plumbing will all, i imagine, be relatively safe for a long while yet :)

I’m an editor. I’m sure one day AI will be able to do what I do (and I use some great automated tools to help me, for example, standardize US or UK spellings and phrasing) but it’s not there yet. It can’t pick up on nuance like a human can...at least for now.
We are essentially living through the modern equivalent of the industrial revolution - event that, rather than moving from an agriculture-based economy to an industry-based economy, we are moving from an industry/service-based economy to something different altogether. I agree that UBI is probably the way forward.

Such a good question, it is one of the four major challenges that we need to face.

And (to be honest), this forms a large part of why Brexit is a rational economic response, because the Eurocrats are going to respond by being protectionist/regulatory and that is the last thing we need in the face of China/India.

I think that there will be universal welfare as a response to this increasing AI.

But its important that UK focus on being at the forefront of R&D.

I think a citizen income is the only way.
Some people are already pretty unemployable so fewer jobs will create really unemployable folk.

Well there’s the industrial revolution which took a lot of manual jobs. There also car factories and the like almost fully automated and the loss of printers since desk top publishing. But somehow we have the lowest unemployment rate since 1975. And if you go back 100 years it’s less than 1% difference. While I agree a lot of jobs will be going, a lot of new jobs will be created.

New jobs will be created but most people will not have the intelligence or aptitude to be engineers, scientists etc.

A lot of low-skilled jobs will go and a lot of people working those jobs will simply be unable to find other work.

As long as no-one, at any point in the future, decides to develop a line of unhackable, bio-mass eating, self-replicating war bots I think we'll be okay.

The industrial revolution created jobs. Thats what it was all about: moving from subsistance agriculture and cottage economies to mass employment.