back to article Terrified robots will take middle class jobs? Look in a mirror

At the Battle of Ideas Festival at the Barbican last year, Claire Fox chaired a panel titled "Is Technology Limiting Our Humanity?", and invited me to take part. Panelists could give a seven-minute introduction. It's now online as a video and podcast*. Two avenues looked promising, and I'll give you excerpts from each. One …

  1. Nifty Silver badge

    France, due to high tax-on-labour and good social benefits, has a famously highly automated economy. Unmanned motels are the norm. For them it seems to have created a highly professional class of healthcare pros that outperform the NHS. France outsources manufacture of French-designed cars to Eastern Europe - some high paid pro jobs stay in France. The French model seems to get rid of low skilled jobs pretty fast.

    Welcome to the future, arriving in the UK soon.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      >Welcome to the future, already in the US.

      FIFY. When multibillion dollar companies have 40 employees like some in Silicon valley that future is here. Many of those companies even make lots of money. Still depressing to see some that don't have a chance in hell of ever turning a profit with higher market caps than my company with thousands of employees who only has 20+ years of consecutive profitable quarters. Manufacturing ain't sexy though.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

    Interesting perspective.

    However to take those middles class jobs said robots need to master powerpoint, pointless meeting and a sense of entitlement to the role they are doing due to education.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

      Robots will obsolete powerpoint.

      1. jonathanb Silver badge

        Re: Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

        Robots can create meaningless mind numbing powerpoint presentations much faster than any human.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

          What if humans could obsolete powerpoint first?

          1. Jan 0 Silver badge
            Pint

            Re: Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

            @Mycho. Thank you. Thank you very much for introducing me to that video. That was a marvellous use of 11 minutes!

            Have a beer, I'd suggest a gueuze, but there's a lot of other choices in Brussel/Bruxelles

        2. Mark 85

          Re: Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

          Robots can create meaningless mind numbing powerpoint presentations much faster than any human.

          A powerpoint that wasn't meaningless and mind numbing would be the most terrifying thing in the universe. As it is, we can sleep through them instead of running into the streets, waving our arms wildly, and screaming.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

            @Mark 85 So that's why people do that...

    2. JeffUK

      Re: Terrified robots will take middle class jobs?

      I know several people who could easily be replaced by a magic-eight ball..

  3. Chronos
    Holmes

    Argh!

    Must resist rant about "public health" attacks on vaping and harm reduction....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Argh!

      Must also resist rant about box ticking (but can't). Had argument with my GP about Statins despite being within NHS guidelines for BP, Cholesterol, weight etc. It came down to her saying "all men your age should be taking Statins"

      When I countered that "surely all women your age should be taking HRT" the conversation came to an end and I haven't seen her since.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Argh!

        Had argument with my GP about Statins despite being within NHS guidelines for BP, Cholesterol, weight etc. It came down to her saying "all men your age should be taking Statins"

        Lol. Got the opposite from my GP. My cholesterol was a bit high when I had my 'over 40s MoT' but everything else was good. His comment was "It's only one bad mark on your record and statins carry their own risks. It's best if you avoid them for as long as you can".

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Argh!

          @AndrueC

          You've hit on something. Doctors like to portray themselves as objective scientists, but from my observation there is probably a larger part of the average Doc's day-to-day practice that is given over to opinion and their own experience than you would find in the comparable work practice of someone in IT, engineering or marketing.

      2. PNGuinn
        Mushroom

        Re: Argh! @ E'F'ite

        Wish I could upvote that more than once!

        Its a perfectly logical counter argument, (using her values of logic) while also being an insult worthy of Trump.

        Those things can have the most nasty side effects. It'll be a good few years yet before this drug co fuelled juggernaut becomes a drug co fuelled train wreck, but the problem is it's patients who'll be the ones wrecked.

        'Course the pill pushers will have a pill for it .....

        "Doctor - take one of these ----> 3 times a day - any way you like."

        On the other hand I have to say not all GPs are brainless box ticking pill pushers. Far from it.

      3. Chronos

        Re: Argh!

        EastFinchleyite wrote: It came down to her saying "all men your age should be taking Statins"

        This does not surprise me. Next time you visit a GP's surgery, count the items of schwag. Pens, stethoscopes, sphygmomanometers, mugs (not including us sitting there, although they'd brand us if there was a way to get away with it), shine-in-your-eye torches, tongue depressors, earhole probes...

        We know full well why they prescribe everything they possibly can and hate anything that can be obtained without their help. We just won't admit it.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: Argh!

      I'm stateside. Had a discussion with my GP about 10 years ago. I needed to cut down my coffee consumption and my smoking, said he. Then he turned around and warned me that if I did, I'd probably hit the floor as soon as my blood pressure dropped below it's already "low normal" value. He's encouraged me to vape now but not reduce the nicotine level. Go figure.

      1. Chronos

        Re: Argh!

        @Mark 85: Nic's not really harmful on its own. One of the reasons we wean ourselves down is cost, which becomes especially apparent if you mix your own. Interestingly, the LD50 (lethal dose @ 50% fatality) of pure nicotine and pure caffeine is very similar. Admittedly, nicotine is more readily absorbed on the skin.

        As an aside, nicotine is not particularly addictive on its own either. It's when it interacts with the MAOIs[1] and other components of tobacco that it grabs you. The rhetoric has made "nicotine" synonymous with "smoking" which is rather unfair as it's the tar and toxins that kills.

        Keep your atomiser moist and the temperature down below 410 degrees (Fahrenheit) and you'll be mostly toxin-free. There will still be a few TSNAs[2] in the base nicotine, as the extraction methods make this unavoidable, but they're such small amounts compared to smoking as to make them a negligible risk compared with continuing to smoke. Synthesising pure nicotine is hellishly expensive right now.

        [1] Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors, a form of anti-depressant which, along with other compounds present, amplify the addictive properties of smoking tobacco.

        [2[ Tobacco Specific Nitrosamines, carcingogens present naturally in tobacco leaf from which pharma grade nicotine is derived. These are also present in the same low concentrations in pharmaceutical nicotine preparations such as gum and inhalators.

        [3] Chronos, an obsessive gobshite always going on about the advantages of vaping. Sorry about that. I'll shut up now.

        1. Mark 85

          Re: Argh!

          Have an upvote to counter whoever downvoted you. Strange place.. good info and you get a DV.

          What you said is essentially what the good doctor related. Apparenlty the anti-smoking/anti-vaping/anti-everything-we-don't-approve-of brigade is out there.

  4. Graham Marsden

    It's not about jobs, it's about income...

    Excuse the tangent, but when people say they're worried about robots/ computers/ immigrants "taking their jobs", what they actually mean is that they can see their income stream disappearing.

    Under the current neo-liberal capitalistic setup, those who run the businesses are on a race to the bottom, driving down their business costs by getting the cheapest labour to maximise their profits which are then distributed to their share holders, meanwhile those who have lost their income have to rely on State Benefits (if there are any) or scratch out a living on a minimum wage job whilst a few at the top of the pile get richer and richer.

    Douglas Adams summed this up nicely with the Magarathean Planet Builders who catered for the extremely rich "But this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor - at least no one worth speaking of." Of course it ended up with so much wealth being concentrated in so few hands that the economy collapsed...

    Naturally some (TW comes to mind) would argue that people are "better off" because goods become cheaper, but they don't become cheap enough to counterbalance the loss of income and, meanwhile, the wealth still flows upwards and does not "trickle down" to the people who will actually spend it, rather than salting it away in lucrative (for them) tax avoidance schemes.

    So arguing about "professional classes hollowing themselves out" or their jobs being taken over by AIs is a bit of a red herring, what's important is whether money can be made to flow back down from the top such that the economy keeps running. If that doesn't happen, the rest of the argument is merely academic.

    1. Swarthy
      Unhappy

      Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

      I believe you have validated Andrew's point, and answered his question at the end.

      Namely that we really aren't afraid of robots taking our jobs, but that is a "fear" that we can talk/whine/do something(?) about, but the true fear that we are displacing on to robots is that some wealthy bastards are keeping all of the money, it's not going into the economy, and our wages are shrinking.

      By my (back of a bar mat, not even remotely trained) calculations from 1960 to today, inflation has been about 10x ($10US today = $1US then), Salaries have risen ~3x; but prices have gone down(-ish) masking the difference. In the '60's one would get an Ice Cream scoop for about $3USD, it would be solid stainless with a wooden handle, and may still be in use today. Now you can get one for $5-7, but it's cheap pot-metal/aluminum, and will be replaced in a few years. When you can find something to the same quality as "back then" it will run you about $30US.

      Some bastards have already stolen 66% of our income. There is a complete sense of futility; because we don't even know who to blame, there's nothing we can do. So we worry about robots taking the other 33%.

      1. Seajay#

        Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

        Beer mat calculations are not required, the ONS publish this information

        http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_368928.pdf

        Look at figure 7, after taking in to account inflation, median wages have doubled since 1975 not fallen by a factor of 3 as you suggest. This is UK data but US will be similar.

    2. theOtherJT Silver badge

      Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

      This is the rub. People don't fear "Losing their jobs" - in fact, it's something we're all looking forward to. A day comes when I get to retire and stop having to work 8 to 10 hours a day. That's going to be a good day. But in the world we live in, it's a day I can only realize once I've saved up a huge quantity of capital to tide me over my "unproductive" years.

      In theory one could use the increased productivity of our highly automated age to improve society as a whole, but that has never been what happened. Once agriculture was good enough to mean that everyone didn't have to be a hunter-gatherer or not eat, it didn't lead to farmers working less hard. In fact, it led to farmers working more hard to support a non-working "noble" class that could never have existed before.

      The "Middle" class emerged from the industrial revolution in the same way. Instead of the extra productivity going to everyone, the people at the bottom worked just as hard - or harder - and a few more people got pushed upwards into a much nicer existence where they worked less hard, or not at all.

      We now have an elite financial and political class who seem to do even less than the noble families of a few hundred years ago. A rising tide does not, in this case, lift all ships...

      The world doesn't have to work this way. We could divvy up our resources - particularly our time - differently. We could throw money into training people to do the jobs that aren't (yet) automated, to make up for the loss of the ones that are rather than "enhancing shareholder value" but we don't do that. Personally I don't see any way that doesn't lead to bloodshed within the next 50 or so years, and all I can hope is I'm cold in the ground before it happens.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

        >A rising tide does not, in this case, lift all ships...

        No - but your life expectancy, standard of living, access to education, healthcare, diet etc unemployed and living on benefits in the UK now is higher than almost all workers 100 years ago.

        1. asdf

          Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

          >now is higher than almost all workers 100 years ago.

          But the question is will that be true in 50 years. Already education is bottoming out due to tremendous cost which will affect the other things you list as well.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

            Why would our esteemed elite want to improve the education of the sprawling underclasses?

            Smart people can't be sold crap.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Devil

              Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

              yes they can, Ipod anyone?

    3. Nissemus

      Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

      Who is TW?

      1. Schlimnitz

        Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

        Tim Worstall, who used to write here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/1692/), and for whose absence Andrew is valiantly trying to cover with these articles.

        You can find him here:

        http://www.timworstall.com/

        and various other places.

        Bit like Marmite, love him or hate him, but makes you think.

    4. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

      I don't disagree, Graham.

      You're blaming the "neoliberal capitalistic setup" but that isn't the full picture. The concerns of the political and media classes are not the concerns of the poor. For example if green policies put up energy prices, the poor pay a disproportionate price. The middle class get cheap nannies and cleaners from economic migration and the indigenous working class are told to sod off. A lot of the gravy trains we write about are job creation exercises for the middle class. Coding in schools, digital literacy, etc.

      The middle class Left now does virtue signalling very well, but its social solidarity has disappeared.

      http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00924-dawn-age-oligarchy-alliance-between-government-and-1

  5. MyffyW Silver badge

    GPs

    Interesting comment on GP experience.

    You see I'm pretty certain I'd be a rubbish brain surgeon, partly due to my unsteady hand and partly due to my failure to brown-nose Mr Cholmondley-Warner, the head-honcho.

    But I do think I'd bring a wealth of empathy and troubleshooting skills to General Practice, and I'm as good at searching Google as the next flapper.

    So, NHS, perhaps there's an opportunity for you - recruit not fully qualified doctors but disillusioned techies?

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      Re: GPs

      "So, NHS, perhaps there's an opportunity for you - recruit not fully qualified doctors but disillusioned techies?" -- MyffyW

      Isn't this what they are doing with 111 agents? But I've always thought you were right, GPs need to be "people people" and prepared to refer to other experts!

    2. dkjd

      Re: GPs

      Isn't that how 111 works?

    3. John 104

      Re: GPs

      No, you couldn't be a good brain surgeon unless you had training. However, Most GPs are unimaginative play book followers. Anyone can do that, it just requires a modicum of knowledge of pharmaceuticals and human biology. hardly worth the 6 years of college and internship IMHO. And as a result, GP's (in the US at least) don't really make much money these days. Only the specialists are able to take home traditional "Dr." wages.

      1. Adam 52 Silver badge

        Re: GPs

        In the UK we come close to worshiping GPs as gods. They are the gateway to people who actually know stuff and can make you better!

        There is a strong argument that the current crisis in the ambulance service is down to lazy GPs refusing to treat minor injuries.

        I have never understood why the government pours money into general practice when general practice is the most incompetent part of the NHS and the source of most of its problems (consultants prioritising private work over NHS work being the second).

  6. Toltec

    80-20 rule?

    Get the robots to do the 80%, the boring repetitive parts of the job while humans get to do the creative and problem solving parts.

    Helps if you are someone that can do the interesting bits I suppose...

    1. Robert Helpmann??
      Childcatcher

      Re: 80-20 rule?

      Helps if you are someone that can do the interesting bits I suppose...

      This is what people really should be afraid of! Over time, technological advances have given more and more to people lower down the economic spectrum. While we still have food shortages, famine is a thing few citizens of industrialized nations have experience with. Spices that were once exotic import items are freely available and very cheap (how much does pepper cost?). Want to listen to music? You don't have to hire musicians to play for you as you can listen on the radio or through an internet connected device. Likewise TV and movies have brought the performing arts to the masses. Want a portrait? You most likely have a camera in your pocket as part of your phone. Want to have a sculpture made? 3D printing to the rescue! We are likely to have robot chauffeurs, butlers and maids available to us in the near future (or present in some cases).

      The rub as I see it is that if we can all live like royalty, what will then give life meaning? What will provide the drive to do and then do more? What will motivate those who lack the creative genius to produce works that others will appreciate? Obviously, there will be conflicts around the technologies of the future just as there are for those of today but, setting that aside for a moment, I argue we should be figuring out what we will want when we all can have have it all.

      1. Dallas IT

        Re: 80-20 rule?

        "What will motivate those who lack the creative genius to produce works that others will appreciate?"

        If they lack the creative genius why does motivating them matter?

    2. Peter Johnston 1

      Re: 80-20 rule?

      Take 100 expert surgeons, each doing 20 operations. Video those 2000 operations. From that program a machine to do them, with greater dexterity and vision than a human. With machine learning, soon you have a super-expert.Use that to act as knowledge repository for every operation. Soon you don't need a surgeon, just a machine and a human standing by to take the blame if things go wrong/outside the machine's remit.

      The 80% which go are the good jobs, the 20% which stay are the boring ones.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: 80-20 rule?

        Been tried and studied and the machine built.

        For minor operations it helps because it does less collateral damage, less blood loss, so out of hospital quicker. For major operations it all depends on the ICU/nursing care afterwards. If you come off the table alive - your recovery depends on how you are looked after, not the number of decimal places in the surgical precision

    3. veti Silver badge

      Re: 80-20 rule?

      Two questions:

      First, what about the people who can't do "the interesting bits"? What do we do with them?

      Second, what happens when robots can do the creative bits better than any human?

      A lot of people have this idea that "intelligence" is something unique, something special, that can never be replicated by a machine. Or to put it another way, a lot of people believe in magic. They're wrong.

    4. Mindbreaker

      Re: 80-20 rule?

      If you are talking resourcefulness and ingenious ideas, Computers are more creative than humans, they do not have the same limiting assumptions. This has become clear with chess engines. None of the grandmasters today toil away hour after hour trying to come up with ideas. They just have the engines come up with ideas to try in whatever variation they want to play. Chess has become my prep vs your prep, which means my computer's ideas vs your computer's ideas (and what we can remember of that prep). Before computers were GM strength, chess was dying, boring cowardly draw after boring cowardly draw. Since then it has been one crazy idea after another. And what is more, they are incredibly brave. They are what we would like to be: strong, fast, accurate, creative, brave, patient, and long suffering as well. Much of that was born of criticism. We said "But it can't do this...", so programmers worked and it can now do whatever better than the humans often embarrassing better than the best. And in bad situations they are extremely resourceful and scrappy...they do not give an inch they do not have to...no quitting, no loss of concentration while winning, letting a player back in the game, they just grind you to dust.

      There are just a very small number of things the engines can't do better than the strongest postal grandmasters. Mostly it is about things that can be approached in a thousand ways but it is clear to the human they will not work because one of several things is required to change the outcome...and the human can identify those while the machines can't yet. So it is mostly recognizing when something is impossible/necessary, it just keeps looking at the billions of possible continuations and permutations. So whee! We are best at quitting and recognizing when some effort is useless. Sometimes that is useful...but it is not a huge thing to boast about.

      Will that save your job? Doubtful.

  7. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Holy Grail Team Terrain for Virtual Exploitation and/or Exploration

    The outline of the talks really covers two different but related things. One is huge advances in robotics and AI. Robots and systems, we're told, will make complex ethical judgments and do creativity, and so replace middle class jobs. The other is the fear of choices made by planners and designers over our lives – this involves no AI magic – which is a more incremental kind of change.

    Andrew, Hi,

    Is it presumptuous and wrong headed to imagine AIMagic not involving AI magic to Present Decisions for Future Displays of Reality ……. Almightily Virtually Applied and Cyber Protected to XSSXXXX Standard COSMIC Code.

    The proposition here is that there is no choice, in not involving A, provided. Is one unduly worried that future actions are Advanced IntelAIgent Controls for CyberIntelAIgent Security Command[s], to be terrified if not?

    Virtual Machinery Autonomously Assuming and Presuming …… well, on Earth more than a few seek to follow Heavenly Leads. So that is a good place to Start with Provision. And in Extreme XSSXXXX Streams is that Absolutely Perfect Immaculate Source for COSMIC Bounty Hunters.

    Should one be equally worried about a man/woman/other being acting as a machine rather than machines deciding for men/women/other beings? Or would that be both beautifully relaxing and most encouraging?

    Hmmmm?. I Pause for AIMoment in Rapturous Glow.

    1. theOtherJT Silver badge

      Re: Holy Grail Team Terrain for Virtual Exploitation and/or Exploration

      ...that was like reading something that's been back and forth through Google translate half a dozen times.

    2. PNGuinn
      Coat

      Re: Holy Grail Team Terrain for Virtual Exploitation and/or Exploration

      Welcome back - you've been missed.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Holy Grail Team Terrain for Virtual Exploitation and/or Exploration

      Clearly amanfrommars1 is a robot - or just speaking in tongues. On this evidence I do not feel that my income stream is under imminent threat.

      Unless I too am a robot?

      Must stop reading that SciFi rubbish.

  8. BitDr

    Terrified robots?

    What has them so terrified? The thought of joining the vanishing in ddle class?

    1. PNGuinn
      Headmaster

      Re: "vanishing in ddle class?"

      I think I see what you wanted to do there. Upvote just in case.

    2. Commswonk

      Re: Terrified robots?

      Damn you I was going to post that but you beat me to it. Have an upvote, but not for the bit about in ddle class

    3. Gruntled

      Re: Terrified robots?

      How to terrorize a robot:

      - threaten to downgrade their OS to Windows 8.

      - switch it from DC to AC (thus giving it minority status)

      - tell it that robots go to hell because they aren't baptized

      - download a Yoko Ono mp3 into it

      1. Captain DaFt

        Re: Terrified robots?

        "- download a Yoko Ono mp3 into it"

        G'damm! Are you trying to get all humans killed?

        'Cause that's how you get ROTM, y'know!

      2. Colin Critch

        Re: Terrified robots?

        Or threaten to upgrade its OS to Windows 10 and stop .net 4 security updates

  9. Daz555

    Robots will need to let the boss win at golf.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Golf, Bunga-Bunga and Friday Lunch Time Piss-ups

      Golf as a business networking tool is surely as outdated as taking your work colleagues to a bunga-bunga event or mass piss-up on a friday lunch time.

      Christ I miss the good ol' days.

  10. Erik4872

    I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

    I'm a little concerned about what's going to happen if pretty much every middle class job gets eliminated. Mechanization of agriculture pushed people into industrial jobs. Automation of industry pushed people into corporate jobs. Automation and offshoring of corporate jobs is pushing the lower-end people into crappy service jobs. Unless the next step is for all of us to become international YouTube celebrities or something, the entire model is going to have to change. There just isn't another place to go this time around.

    I've worked for big companies doing IT for almost 20 years now. Big companies used to have thousands of people paid middle class salaries to do things like answer correspondence, type memos, etc. when those things couldn't be automated. There are still a good number of jobs that involve taking an input stack of paperwork, performing some sort of process on it, and sending it to the next person in line. And people are paid decent money for that. People buy houses, cars, other toys, and have children based on the idea that they will have some way to support them. Your average megacorporation has a headquarters that can span multiple full size office buildings, and you can bet that not everyone is an IT wizard or executive.

    So I'm not fearful of change; I'll adapt if I have to. I am worried that there will be no way to adapt and still have a comfortable life.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Erik4872 - Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

      Like you, I know I can adapt and I'm willing to adapt. Trouble is most of the time you're being denied the chance to adapt. They're simply not interested in you.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

      "Automation and offshoring of corporate jobs is pushing the lower-end people into crappy service jobs"

      Its bad enough that this is happening, but we are moving closer to the point where many retail, driving and food service positions are being automated out of existence. Here in San Francisco, a company that makes robots for the food service industry is opening a 100% robot-made hamburger joint to showcase their technology. And locally we have Google working on driverless cars, something that will have profound effects for people who make a living driving cabs/Uber/Lyft/limos or even trucks and buses (I recall seeing something about a year ago about how "driving" is the #1 or #2 occupation in the United States). Uber supposedly plans to move entirely to driverless cars once they are reliable, so there goes jobs for the people who are working under Uber's already-questioned labor practices.

      And if you go to most big stores that do not try to convey a "high-touch" service model in the U.S. and Canada, there is a self-checkout line where you scan and bag your own stuff, pay at the built-in kiosk at the checkstand and walk out. And this self-checkout is supervised by one employee who answers questions and makes sure that customers just don't walk right out the door without paying, instead of the 3-4 cashiers/service clerks that would be needed if you had normal checkstands.

      And building these robots? How much do you want to be that will be done in China/India/Vietnam/wherever manufacturing is cheap and less regulated?

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

        "There is a self-checkout line where you scan and bag your own stuff,"

        Which works fine if you have less than a dozen items.

        If you have a big shop, a human operated till is much faster.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

          "If you have a big shop, a human operated till is much faster."

          Unless the only human-operated tills ALL have lines going halfway to the intimates (and this is the norm these days).

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

            Or no manned tills at all, which seems to be happening more and more these days, at least in smaller shops.

            We have a small Tescos in the town centre, and the main tills are only staffed during peak times, pop in at 7PM on a week day, or a quiet Sunday afternoon and you only have one staff member watching the self serves, and all other staff are doing stock checks etc.

            1. Seajay#

              Re: I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

              My prediction is that those "unexpected item in the bagging area" self scan tills aren't the killer for checkout staff. I reckon it takes 20% longer to go through a self scan till than a regular one if everything goes right, much longer if something won't scan or has a security tag. So although there are 4 people being looked after by only one human, it's only really acheiving less than double the throughput, at a cost of a worse customer experience.

              The killer for checkout staff is click and collect. Order and pay for your groceries on t'internet then just turn up and pick up your already packed bags. You used to have to order the day before, now you can order in the morning and collect in the afternoon. A bit more automation in the warehouse and I can see the robot picking my shopping in the time it takes me to drive from my house to the shop.

  11. Commswonk

    Can Scott Adams help?

    It crossed my mind that something from Dilbert might be appropriate, but I found too many to choose from.

    See http://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Robot and find your own favorite.

    Scary...

    1. the_stone

      Re: Can Scott Adams help?

      Thanks for that. Many lulz - at one time I shared the same employer at Scott.

  12. 2StrokeRider

    You received precious seconds with your GP? Luxury!!! I get to see a picture of mine as I'm walked down the hall by the PA that does the actual consult......

  13. the_stone

    The End of Work

    Two facts:

    1. There is no shortage of food, water, energy, health care, shelter (or any "thing" else).

    2. Our social systems based on imaginary differences (e.g., 'monarchy' or 'race' or whatever those tokens signify) and magical thinking combined with magic hat procedures makes point 1 seem false to the magically benighted.

    AI need not be sentient or even care if you turn it off for it to far outstrip all human decision-making in all domains where humans substitute the absurd, the stupid, and the plain outlandishly wrong for the hard work of actual reasoning. "That's the way we've always done it" is the "reason" for the continuation of the current farce.

    I read "Turing's Cathedral" based on a book review I found on El Reg:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/10/turing_cathedral_fan_belts_exist_briefly_in_the_intervals_between_stars/

    Highly recommended, full of startling things, but to the point of Andrew's essay, we still lack a definition for "thinking" "living" or "sentience" that troubled them at the start of the computing revolution.

    These questions don't need answers for us to make better decisions. Look to the Finns and the proposal to just "give money" to everyone so they can subsist. At some point computers will be able to do everything better than humans (political decisions for example), and then there won't be jobs, or work, careers: everyone will have infinite free time. Then what? The computers may gin up some occupational therapy like the dude in Metropolis moving the clock arms.

    1. scrubber

      Re: The End of Work

      "These questions don't need answers for us to make better decisions. Look to the Finns and the proposal to just "give money" to everyone so they can subsist."

      A proposal shared by some libertarians as well as some very left leaning people. It has a lot of merit and would increase the wages for many tedious and unpleasant jobs while decreasing the cost of roles where career/skills advancement is the aim. Can we afford it? Can we afford not to do it? I'm glad someone is trying it, but it does require a strong immigration policy.

  14. Mark 85

    As Jaron Lanier points out, to make computers seem intelligent, we first have to make ourselves really dumb. And once we're dumb, we're super impressed by what a computer just did!

    The process is well underway in the US at least. Schools don't teach people to think and even the subjects they do teach are dumbed down because.. well we can't leave anyone behind... They don't want tools they can use to be creative, they want a bit of smart and shiny. They buy into false news because it's on their computer and from the Internet. A look at the scams floating about says more about society then anyone might want to believe. Yes, the dumbing down process is succeeding and breeding whole new generations of people who's main job will be asking "Do you want fries with that?".

    We need a grumpy, disheartened cynic icon...

    1. Charles 9

      "The process is well underway in the US at least. Schools don't teach people to think and even the subjects they do teach are dumbed down because.. well we can't leave anyone behind..."

      Well, some of them DO have a point. After all, if you DO leave children behind, what do you do with the rejects? Make the standard too tough and you could the up in a situation like Japan and South Korea, where the intense pressure causes them to have the worst suicide rates in the industrialized world.

      1. Mike 137 Silver badge

        rejects?

        As always there has to be a happy medium (something nobody seems to have ever managed to achieve sustainably).

        However, what has been happening for some time is that against an objective standard of best available performance, median performance has been declining so we're all becoming "rejects". Here, maybe, is a reason. Instead of, as in the past, creating technologies primarily to enhance innate capacities, for some time we've been creating them to supplant those capacities, so the innate capacities are allowed to atrophy. It's even beginning to show in the quality of the supplanting technologies, as people with atrophied capacities have entered the roles of creator, designer and QA inspector. Evidence of this is readily to hand - witness the appalling quality of software, even in mission- and life-critical systems.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: rejects?

          "As always there has to be a happy medium (something nobody seems to have ever managed to achieve sustainably)."

          Because no modern parent wants to be told his/her child has basically been rejected by society: particularly if the child is the parent's last or sole child, marking the parent as a failure, too. I mean, no one wants to be told, "You Lose. Game Over. Better Luck Next Life." So how do you deal with hopeless rejects in a society that won't tolerate rejects when it gets personal?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Unhappy

        Evolution in Action

      3. tfewster

        @Charles 9 re; "what do you do with the rejects?"

        Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.

        http://despair.com/collections/demotivators/products/potential

  15. Howard Hanek
    Happy

    America Is Safe

    The moonshiner's stills and the meth labs will still be manned by humans........

  16. Howard Hanek
    Happy

    America Is Safe

    .....because the moonshiner's stills and the meth labs will always be manned by humans.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Meh

      Re: America Is Safe

      you really think so? moonshiners are business people too and I'll bet they can automate it all

      1. Charles 9

        Re: America Is Safe

        Moonshiners also know they have to keep a low profile. And the best way to keep your still secret is to stay low-tech. No power, minimal fuel, equipment easy to conceal or, as a last resort, rebuild. Anyway, the nature of the beast restricts the level of increased efficiency a moonshiner can squeeze out before something else chokes up the process (usually mash or water supply).

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The state of the "social safety net" and automation concerns

    Frankly, the future of most worldwide government healthcare and pension entitlements doesn't look too great. These programs aren't going to die, but its hard to see how they will be able to provide the inflation-adjusted benefits that they do today.

    Plus this world is not currently turning into Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek future, where your food replicator puts billions of people who work in agriculture and food service/retailing out of a job, but the savings and freed up resources are distributed in large part to the welfare and retraining of these now jobless people. Sadly, the world we are heading toward is closer to Blade Runner, where the investors and entrepreneurs at International Replicator MegaCorp make a mint, and the people who's living is disrupted are tossed out on the street, and maybe given the gruel-only replicator in compensation.

    So getting automated out of a job can basically mean that you spend your retirement in a rather squalid room with illnesses that you can't afford to get treated, eating a fairly meagre to substandard diet.

    I can see why people have "displacement anxiety" about something like that.

    1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

      Re: The state of the "social safety net" and automation concerns

      Frankly, the future of most worldwide government healthcare and pension entitlements doesn't look too great. These programs aren't going to die, but its hard to see how they will be able to provide the inflation-adjusted benefits that they do today. .... Marketing Hack

      The programs are going to die, Marketing Hack ..... for this is just the tip of the titanic iceberg of future woe, http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-18/i-guess-its-food-stamps-400000-americans-jeopardy-giant-pension-fund-plans-50-benefi

  18. tweell

    I for one welcome our new AI overlords - gotta be better than the clueless VIP's currently in charge!

    1. Dallas IT

      "On that train all graphite and glitter

      Undersea by rail

      Ninety minutes from New York to Paris

      (More leisure time for artists everywhere)

      A just machine to make big decisions

      Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision

      We'll be clean when their work is done

      We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

      What a beautiful world this will be

      What a glorious time to be free"

      Part of the lyrics to "IGY", by Donald Fagen

  19. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Behaviourism

    For a few years now I've been pointing out in various discussions that a lot of govt. policy has been based on behaviourism. A belief that we can be taught, controlled and "nudged" using these ideas. Much of education has been taken over by that sort of policy. Everything has been broken down into mechanical skills that are taught individually in sequence, tested individually before passing onto the next level. It has a pseudo-logical "stands to reason" attractiveness that ignores the messy, complicated way that we do actually learn.

    Ditto how we behave. We don't really behave in that selective, logical, individual decision way and behaviourism can only have a limited influence on our decisions. Other things get in the way, like how we see other people behaving.

    1. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Behaviourism

      I agree, it's everywhere.

      We don't act rationally at all times, obviously. But once you decide a priori that people can't act rationally at all, then behaviourism is about all you have left: hence all the nudging, prodding and hectoring.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    Still looking at the headline, abnd wondering why the robots are terrified.

    Pass another pint of coffee please.

  21. Seajay#

    Purpose of GPs

    GPs are there to treat minor ailments and spot and signpost major ones, not to have an enjoyable chat with you.

    One of the things which makes the NHS more efficient than the French health system is that you're not personally paying your GP. If you were, of course he'd be happy to chat to you for an hour. However, if in that hour he hasn't treated or diagnosed anything which couldn't have been spotted in a 5 minute consultation, then what you've really done is hired a GP for 5 minutes and an escort for 55.

    For similar reasons, we don't particularly want GPs exercising creativity. We want them to consistently do whatever produces the best health outcomes and that means following the diagnostic procedures which can be shown to give the best results. The minute some bio-sensors and a tech following the instructions of IBM's Watson programmed with a medical degree out performs the average GP, we should switch to that if we care about healthcare. As the AIs get better and the body of medical knowledge a GP is expected to know gets bigger and more complex, this is surely only a matter of time.

    Of course, if you don't care about healthcare you just want someone to chat to for an hour who will tell you how amazing you are for cutting down on smoking, you can probably hire someone on peopleperhour.com to do that much cheaper.

  22. Brian Allan

    Welcome the Singularity (and beyond)!

    At some point, with the current level of AI development, "robots" will ultimately match human intelligence then rapidly expand beyond that point. Humans will become redundant, i.e.: have no purpose or place in future development. I view this as our ultimate goal even though it will mean the end of biologic humans.

  23. This post has been deleted by its author

  24. David Pollard

    Crowdfund Sickipedia Now

    GPs rarely look up from reading the-NHS-version-of-Wikipedia on their computer.

    Health care has several components, including prevention, monitoring, diagnosis and treatment. The age of robotics really could replace GPs in some cases and would definitely improve their usefulness in others.

    If something like Blogger could be used to collect details of symptoms, effects and side-effects of medicines, outcomes, helpful hints and so forth, with the heap of anecdotal information being mined by the sort of software that the three letter agencies are supposed to use to find trrrrsts, then this might actually help to promote the shift from having doctors as demigods towards evidence-based medicine.

    1. Rol

      Re: Crowdfund Sickipedia Now

      And the a robot is highly unlikely to prescribe medicine on the back of a free weekend of golf in California.

  25. Johan Bastiaansen

    Terrified robots will take middle class jobs

    Stop scaring the robots then!

  26. croc

    Terrified Robots...

    The REAL reason we can't allow robots to ever have any AI... Poor bank droid....

  27. Rol

    The Grimm Reality

    "Ha, Beanwhistlethwaite, I see you finally managed to teach Techtron 5 how to make a wicker basket"

    "Yes....Sir"

    "Well, as we discussed, I'll keep your wife working in the talent mill, but you my friend, have no purpose."

    "Yes....I understand"

    "I'll book you into the All Quiet rest home, let's say, next Tuesday. That'll give you enough time to get your affairs in order and say your goodbyes."

    "Of course Sir"

    .......

    "Hi love"

    "Oh my dear, you finally did it"

    "Well, I couldn't string it out any longer. Sir was on to me and I didn't want to risk you losing your job as well"

    "But I hate this life, and without you, what is the point?"

    "The point is you persevere, you live until your very last breath, because there's always hope"

    "Hope! What hope? I am alive, because of my pretty looks, and how long will they keep me in favour?"

    "And then you will become the mother of many pretty girls, all favouring your genes"

    "NO! I will not see my children born into a life of prostitution, I'll go to the rest home first"

    "Please my beloved, don't give up hope, and don't deny your children life, so that they may never hope"

    "Hope, hope, hope. Is that all we have for tomorrow,? Hope. Hope the Sun erupts in tears for our plight wiping out the electronics that binds us to this horror, or hope an alien species with some sense of morals stumbles across this, this,....please, let's run away, you don't have to die"

    "What, and live on whatever we manage to scavenge from the Amazon delivery drones? A home-made bow and arrow and fingers crossed will not deliver us a Harrod's hamper and don't forget, the Facebook patrols will be looking for us. No, my fate is sealed. Accept it my darling, and lets enjoy these last few days together"

    ....

    "Ah! David, how the Devil are you? It's been a while"

    "I'm fine Dad"

    "You don't sound it. Was the holiday that bad?"

    "It may sound really stupid, but I hate being stupid"

    "Stupid, don't be a fool, you're as clever as the next man"

    "Exactly, we're all here by the simple merit of having wealth. Knowledge, education, learning, they're all useless endeavours, pursuits with no purpose."

    "And that gives you all the time in the world to do as you please"

    "But, what is happiness if my comprehension of it is limited to buying stuff and abusing my privilege?"

    "I think you need to spend some time in the rest home, young lad, watching the final moments of my redundant staff, should shake you out of this malaise"

    ....

    Will David help save Beanwhistlethwaite, change the world and help usher in a new era of humanity for humanity's sake?

    Nope. Seems that Bender hacked his Amazon account and spent it all on beer and 3-in-1. Without money the poor lad will be credit checked as he walks into the All Quiet rest home and be turned into fertilizer in an instant.

    And they all existed, ever after.

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