Japanese White-Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced By Robots

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Robots aren't happy just taking factory jobs anymore, they are now taking white-collar jobs in Japan as well. Just think about how much money the company will save when all the humans are replaced.

Fukoku Mutual will spend $1.7 million (200 million yen) to install the AI system, and $128,000 per year for maintenance, according to Japan’s The Mainichi. The company saves roughly $1.1 million per year on employee salaries by using the IBM software, meaning it hopes to see a return on the investment in less than two years. Watson AI is expected to improve productivity by 30%, Fukoku Mutual says. The company was encouraged by its use of similar IBM technology to analyze customer’s voices during complaints.
 
"Woe to you, oh Earth and Sea, for the Devil sends the beast with wrath,
Because he knows the time is short...
Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast
For it is a machine's number,
Its number is X and Eighty Six."


 
so you have a task that has to happen exactly the same every time with no mistakes... you use a robot to do the task and hire a human to walk along and make sure they are doing the task and when it makes a mistake it does not complain and redoing all the work. so those thirty four workers then either start their own competing company with the training they received doing the same thing for more clients. Take the skills of problem solving and start offering a company that research claim errors or a couple other paths...

I wonder about people when they start screaming that receipt scanning can be better done by a human being for billing records that are new. You want some to look into old records or make decisions based on those scans then you need someone with both common sense and rational thinking, which means a thinking person. I feel bad that people are losing their jobs but people are better at tasks that are not tedious or mind numbing... then again I don't expect the robot to be anything more than a computer driver arm that follows the guild lines of code written by a person. Some one still has to bring the mail to the office, someone has to open it up and sort the parts that can be scanned by a computer what is not ledigable and so forth.
 
Humanity will need to begin ramping down its numbers. A situation where there are many more people than jobs isn't a sustainable one, at least for a civilized society. As for the UBI bullshit, I do not believe people should be paid simply for existing.

Quality not quantity.
 
computers (and technology in general) have been replacing white and blue collar workers since their inception.... efficiency and all that

Humanity will need to begin ramping down its numbers. A situation where there are many more people than jobs isn't a sustainable one, at least for a civilized society. As for the UBI bullshit, I do not believe people should be paid simply for existing.

Quality not quantity.

Certainly not the popular opinion, but you're not wrong
 
Humanity will need to begin ramping down its numbers. A situation where there are many more people than jobs isn't a sustainable one, at least for a civilized society. As for the UBI bullshit, I do not believe people should be paid simply for existing.

Quality not quantity.

I'm not as callous as you do, but it really all boils down to reproduction is not and can never be a human right. If you one of the countless assholes all over the world who can't afford have children and still do anyway you have exactly zero moral standing to school others on ethics.
 
I'm not as callous as you do, but it really all boils down to reproduction is not and can never be a human right. If you one of the countless assholes all over the world who can't afford have children and still do anyway you have exactly zero moral standing to school others on ethics.

Reproduction, a innate function, should be governed by law?

Eugenics is very effective when done through communities, food and vaccines. Helps keep royal bloodlines and preferred races growing....
Sadly, too many people are starting to think this is morally acceptable behavior.

It's immoral to have any control or dominance against a persons will.
 
Reproduction, a innate function, should be governed by law?

Eugenics is very effective when done through communities, food and vaccines. Helps keep royal bloodlines and preferred races growing....
Sadly, too many people are starting to think this is morally acceptable behavior.

It's immoral to have any control or dominance against a persons will.
If you expect government to materially support you and your choices, then how free are you? Dependency is the antithesis of freedom. If you wish government—meaning taxpayers—to support you, then that support should come with hefty strings attached, up to and including sterilization.

This is why I said civilized society—or maybe modern society would be a better term. If you can scratch out a living for you and your offspring by hunting and growing your own food, then have at it.
 
If you expect government to materially support you and your choices, then how free are you? Dependency is the antithesis of freedom. If you wish government—meaning taxpayers—to support you, then that support should come with hefty strings attached, up to and including sterilization.

This is why I said civilized society—or maybe modern society would be a better term. If you can scratch out a living for you and your offspring by hunting and growing your own food, then have at it.

He's just the typical hypocrite scum: Advocate irresponsible behavior under the guises of high-horse morality, and when the problems arise it's suddenly become the society's responsibility to deal with it, not his.
 
He's just the typical hypocrite scum: Advocate irresponsible behavior under the guises of high-horse morality, and when the problems arise it's suddenly become the society's responsibility to deal with it, not his.
Ayup. His type throws hissy fits even over the idea that EBT should be limited to a few staple foods. You can't have your cake and eat too.
 
Reproduction, a innate function, should be governed by law?

Eugenics is very effective when done through communities, food and vaccines. Helps keep royal bloodlines and preferred races growing....
Sadly, too many people are starting to think this is morally acceptable behavior.

It's immoral to have any control or dominance against a persons will.
With today's medicine and social guarantees it's too easy to overpopulate. Just look at how many people have huge families that they can't support because they decided to have a huge family. Everyone else is supposed to help because that's somehow the right thing to do, even though everyone knows how kids are made and how expensive they are to bring up. Add the fact that we don't really need any more people on this earth and limiting thr amount of children one can have starts making sense. This is especially necessary because natural limiting factors to population growth don't apply to humans any more.
And how is it immoral to have control over a person's will when that person's will ends up hurting or making problems to someone else?
Now, I love cars. Would it be right for me to go out and buy a bunch of them and then bitch and moan and request assistance from others when I'm unable to make payments for them, insurance, fuel etc., ask for someone else to buy me a house with a bigger garage because they don't fit on my lawn anymore? No, it's my decision and so the consequences are also mine to bear. In such a situation I could sell the cars - but you can't sell children. Children are complicated, it is expensive and difficult to bring them up - why would something like this be allowed to be brought into this world willy-nilly?
 
There are a lot of ugly threats in our future. No matter what side of the isle your political beliefs fall (global warming, pandemics, famine, clean water, energy, war caused migrations, terrorism, etc), there appears to be plenty of opportunities available to cull the worlds population a bit.
 
All the more reason to start looking to space. Science fiction is riddled with stories of an overpopulated earth forcing humans to expand. Seems like if we dont want to take less moral routes, we need to look at other options like this.
 
You first.
Oh right, that does not include you.
I know you are purposely being a belligerent ignoramus, but there is a difference between killing living humans and not making new ones.
 
Guaranteed basic income may sound like a commie fantasy, but capitalism is going to make it a reality.
 
Long Term Economies aren't based on keeping people busy, but rather efficiency of production for inputted effort and resources.

If you use 1 million men to produce 100 cars, only 100 people will have cars. not a very good situation.
If you use 1 million men to produce 1 million cars, everyone will have a car. Better situation. But everyone has to toil to have one.
The logical progression is the following
Using 100 men to production 1 million cars, 1 million people have a car and only 100 men had to toil for them to exist. Ultimately the superior situation.

Short term these improvements lead to unemployment but this actually frees these men to work elsewhere taking the saving from more efficient production into new areas as well.

The benefits fail without competition in the marketplace something those with political power on any side of the isle at the moment despise. So the negative impacts are deeper and more prolonged than they should be.
 
If anything losing the middle class and losing population is a guaranteed way to become extinct. Enjoy your bloodline coming to a halt when you don't have kids or are unwilling to sacrifice to make it happen.
 
How much money will be saved in the long run when taxes start going up to support the unemployed? Or when nobody can buy the products because they have no money?
Well, eventually you will have a post-scarcity economy, in which to be fair you'd really have to set a "basic income" redistribution of robot labor. So the poorest person would make say the equivalent of $50K today, and then whatever else they want to do to take on more responsibility is up to them.

The alternative model, is whoever owns all the robots, who can build more robots, gets to keep everything... in which case you have maybe fifteen people that have 99.999999% of the wealth, and everyone else living in poverty unable to compete with the machines.

That's the real dystopian future... its not machines taking over and thinking for themselves, its a handful of people owning the machines and telling those machines what to do.
 
If anything losing the middle class and losing population is a guaranteed way to become extinct. Enjoy your bloodline coming to a halt when you don't have kids or are unwilling to sacrifice to make it happen.

The rich will just live out their days blissfully counting their accumulated wealth, in their money fortresses. /with robots to defend them.
 
How much money will be saved in the long run when taxes start going up to support the unemployed? Or when nobody can buy the products because they have no money?
That's not how modern capitalism works. It doesn't think that far ahead, it mostly responds and focuses on profits for the next quarter or two.

If you expect government to materially support you and your choices, then how free are you? Dependency is the antithesis of freedom.
I agree with your argument, but I think you're making the wrong conclusions. You're right in that dependency is the antithesis of freedom, however we are ALL dependent on our own stomachs. So whatever method most reliably guarantees they get filled could arguably produce the most freedom, because then you're free to spend your time on other things. The LESS reliable methods you have to feed yourself, the less freedom you really have, because then it can consume every part of your being trying to keep yourself fed. Typically people who work 3 jobs aren't doing so for their own betterment, their doing it to make ends meet. A lot of times in discussions about freedom, "freedom from hunger" is an aspect that tends to get ignored.
 
Fukoku Mutual will spend $1.7 million (200 million yen) to install the AI system, and $128,000 per year for maintenance, according to Japan’s The Mainichi. The company saves roughly $1.1 million per year on employee salaries by using the IBM software, meaning it hopes to see a return on the investment in less than two years. Watson AI is expected to improve productivity by 30%, Fukoku Mutual says. The company was encouraged by its use of similar IBM technology to analyze customer’s voices during complaints.

Interestingly this companies name in English translates to "Fuck Ah You".
 
so you have a task that has to happen exactly the same every time with no mistakes... you use a robot to do the task and hire a human to walk along and make sure they are doing the task and when it makes a mistake it does not complain and redoing all the work. so those thirty four workers then either start their own competing company with the training they received doing the same thing for more clients. Take the skills of problem solving and start offering a company that research claim errors or a couple other paths...

I wonder about people when they start screaming that receipt scanning can be better done by a human being for billing records that are new. You want some to look into old records or make decisions based on those scans then you need someone with both common sense and rational thinking, which means a thinking person. I feel bad that people are losing their jobs but people are better at tasks that are not tedious or mind numbing... then again I don't expect the robot to be anything more than a computer driver arm that follows the guild lines of code written by a person. Some one still has to bring the mail to the office, someone has to open it up and sort the parts that can be scanned by a computer what is not ledigable and so forth.

This is Watson AI, machine learning. It's already being used to replace Doctors in some situations. It can access a vast amount of information faster than any human can to provide a diagnosis. We're not talking about code that is written to do if this, do that. It evolves and gets smarter.

Thing is, a human is just a biological machine. We follow routines and work off of knowledge that we've input. The machines have reached a point where they can learn the job quicker and do it better with less mistakes.

AI/Automation isn't coming for just blue collar work. It's going to replace white collar jobs. Why pay an analyst $150k on Wall Street when a machine can do it without emotion at a fraction of the second. There's already a wide amount of HFT (high frequency trading) machines that make trades so quick they make money off of the lag by human reaction. We're talking buying and selling the same stock within a second - they're given an unfair advantage by being installed at the markets themselves. So they can see a purchase trend, buy it, then sell it before the other systems finish executing.
 
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Good, this is good neww. Now may be they can get back to making more good ninja movies.
 
Others can try various welfare schemes, good luck on their experiments, but America's approach will probably be similar to this:

15629343716_907a590cba_b.jpg


Trick is to try landing on the right side of it, so train/study hard, save your money wisely, and hope for good luck weathering the job market until things hopefully settle down at some point.
 
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The rich will just live out their days blissfully counting their accumulated wealth, in their money fortresses. /with robots to defend them.

You expect things to continue as they are. I don't expect this to continue. As with all things-there is a ending.
 
Wow, this thread got touchy.. lol.

Ya'll need to just relax. We're going to get hit by an asteroid and become extinct anyways..
 
That is really sad. It is so expensive to live there. Just a tiny little apartment costs an arm and a leg.

I won't be around to see it but I would love to know what it is like in 50 years and 100 years when there are simply not enough jobs to go around.
 
Humanity will need to begin ramping down its numbers. A situation where there are many more people than jobs isn't a sustainable one, at least for a civilized society. As for the UBI bullshit, I do not believe people should be paid simply for existing.

Quality not quantity.


So the sole human purpose to have a job?

If robots can produce enough for all, what skin off your back is it to pay people for, "simply existing"?
 
So the sole human purpose to have a job?

If robots can produce enough for all, what skin off your back is it to pay people for, "simply existing"?

If it is possible to get to a point where robots can sustainably support us without population control, I would agree with you. However, our current population is not sustainable, and some people will inevitably abuse the system if controls are not put in place.
 
If it is possible to get to a point where robots can sustainably support us without population control, I would agree with you. However, our current population is not sustainable, and some people will inevitably abuse the system if controls are not put in place.

I would disagree with the current population being unsustainable, although the growth of it perhaps is. The systems to generate enough food are already there, but the distribution isn't - although perhaps you mean, realistically, that just isn't going to happen. I'd likely agree with you, but find it interesting to talk about theoretical ideals.

If robots can produce enough food, clothing, create housing and basic level of medical care to provide to everyone, what is the issue? Where is the abuse, aside from puritanical concepts about work that have been helpful, but may eventually be unnecessary? The point that I find interesting but never seem to see brought up is that major increases in leisure time for the masses have always brought about major advances in science, culture and technology, would this not be in effect a net positive, even if some people are morally opposed to many people being just "slackers"?
 
I would disagree with the current population being unsustainable, although the growth of it perhaps is. The systems to generate enough food are already there, but the distribution isn't - although perhaps you mean, realistically, that just isn't going to happen. I'd likely agree with you, but find it interesting to talk about theoretical ideals.

If robots can produce enough food, clothing, create housing and basic level of medical care to provide to everyone, what is the issue? Where is the abuse, aside from puritanical concepts about work that have been helpful, but may eventually be unnecessary? The point that I find interesting but never seem to see brought up is that major increases in leisure time for the masses have always brought about major advances in science, culture and technology, would this not be in effect a net positive, even if some people are morally opposed to many people being just "slackers"?

Because people don't want to just live. They want to enjoy the luxuries of life.

Sure, our current population is sustainable if everyone went to vegan diets. However, who wants to do that? With the current meat consumption of people, we would need something like 2 and a half earths to sustainably support it with our current population.

What about people that enjoy watersports? Will everyone get a boat? Or how about flying?

Advancements in technology have not always been brought about in leisure. Many, I would argue the majority, of major advancements have been brought about for their potential use in military and then trickled down to the general population, where their application were then broadened. A good number of other advancements were brought about to increase the national wealth and power relative to other nations. Very few advancements were made out of the goodness of someone's heart.
 
so you have a task that has to happen exactly the same every time with no mistakes... you use a robot to do the task and hire a human to walk along and make sure they are doing the task and when it makes a mistake it does not complain and redoing all the work. so those thirty four workers then either start their own competing company with the training they received doing the same thing for more clients. Take the skills of problem solving and start offering a company that research claim errors or a couple other paths...

I wonder about people when they start screaming that receipt scanning can be better done by a human being for billing records that are new. You want some to look into old records or make decisions based on those scans then you need someone with both common sense and rational thinking, which means a thinking person. I feel bad that people are losing their jobs but people are better at tasks that are not tedious or mind numbing... then again I don't expect the robot to be anything more than a computer driver arm that follows the guild lines of code written by a person. Some one still has to bring the mail to the office, someone has to open it up and sort the parts that can be scanned by a computer what is not ledigable and so forth.

All of that will eventually be automated. Mail sorting has been partially automated for ages. Eventually the cars will drive the mail to the location and I suspect a robot will be quite capable of putting the mail in a box. Illegible issues will eventually go away. My guess is they'll have one rate for hand written labels and a cheaper one for machine printed labels (that can easily read by machine).

Tax S/W already takes tons of jobs away from tax preparers. Personally, I'm going to compare my accountant to HR Block's software this year to see how much (if anything), the accountant saves me).

As for researching billing issues, you may have people for that, but only so long as they haven't figured out how to automate it. Maybe we'll have new jobs and maybe we'll have masses of unemployed/underemployed people. I expect the latter. That's what's happened to manufacturing labor over the last 30+ years.
 
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