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I was wondering if anyone here has ever been made redundant from a non-manual job, or are worried that they might be, due to technological changes?
If so, I would be interested to know because I am writing a feature for a newspaper on white-collar automation and I am trying to find some case studies.
No, I am actually hoping for a robot that can do the tedious and repetitive parts of my job. A huge portion of my time is wasted in writing code or developing algorithms to do repetitive operations after I've figured out the advanced mathematics to model a system.
What I would really love is an android (or a neural implant) which can be taught to do simple tasks, and handle some changes in input. For instance, Excel can be programmed to repeat an operation on a spreadsheet using the "record" function. However, if you try to get it to do the same operation on a spreadsheet which is formatted slightly differently, it will choke. So you have to spend 2-3 hours writing a VBA code to allow multiple types of spreadsheets to be input, or re-formatting all the spreadsheets into something the recorded macro can handle. This is insanely tedious and a total waste of my time. You only need the logical processing power of an 8-year-old to do 90% of my job, but NOTHING gets done without the advanced-degree training required to do the other 10%.
A robot with an AI as smart as an 8-year-old human could, therefore, make me 10X more productive.
I suppose I ought to worry about a robot with an AI as smart as me, but I just don't see that happening any time soon when even the smartest multi-million-dollar logical machine on the planet thinks that grasshoppers eat Kosher food or that LAX is the largest airport in Canada.
Edit:
As you can see I've thought far too long on this subject. What I really need is a AI which knows when it's wrong and knows when it's right. Currently we code using incredibly stupid software which can only point out to you basic errors like no closing a for:loop or missing a bracket. That's akin to a spell-checker on a word processor; pretty useless when it comes to checking if the content makes sense. What we really need is software editing interfaces which are as smart as a grammar checker, and can recognize errors or changes in patterns, then correct them itself.
However, considering how awesomely dumb Microsoft's grammar checker can be, maybe even that's asking too much. The main problem is that our computers these days can't really learn. They can mimic and force-fit patterns (like when google tries to guess what you want based on your past behaviour) but they're often dead wrong, because they're not REALLY thinking, they're just blindly pattern-fitting. There's just not enough ability to network and cross-check inputs. Computers just don't have enough intuition yet, to do what I want, I suppose.
Well, when they do make my android, I hope they can give it a sense of humor, or at least some tolerance, so that it doesn't commit suicide or murder me when I curse it up one side and down the other for being too goddamn stupid to exist, since that's what I do nowadays when our current algorithms fail to guess right.
Last edited by sponger42; 04-18-2011 at 01:25 PM..
I could see it replacing a large portion of my basic job function relatively soon, but it will be a long time before my entire job could be replaced. I'm an analyst in the transportation industry and as such I spend a lot of time running reports, identifying trends and performing comparative analysis. It is perfectly reasonable that a computer could do the heavy lifting of writing reports and even doing some of the basic comparisons. However, my brain, experience and knowledge are still needed to analyze that data, place it within our customers context and develop solutions.
Personally, I would love to be able to just think or tell the computer what I want to compare and how I want it sorted and have it spit out the information.
Alot of the paperwork and cost/benefit analysis I do can be replaced by computers at anytime.
A big part of my job requires wining and dining executives and taking them to gentlemen's clubs in order to get new business. I don't know when a computer will be able to pick up on human personalities in order to entertrain them appropriately. Hopefully not soon!
I think a lot of people fall in this boat. Where half their job is a repeatable process, while the other is conceptual.
my issue is all the offshore design mills that can create crappy logos for under $50, or websites for under $200. Thankfully I still have freelance clients that under stand quality and service.
I fix computers and they are a ways off from being able to repair themselves. There are too many ID10T errors out there.
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