Can AI and Robots do your job?
 

With ChatGP and OpenAI threatening to replace many creative professions, replacing artists, writers, etc, and with robots from Boston Dynamics and Tesla's Optimus likely going to replace many simple manual laborers, and with autonomous vehicles and drones likely to replace many driver's, I thought to ask the question and do a poll: Can AI/robots take your job?

On a long enough continuum, all our jobs could be replaced, but I'm thinking on a shorter timeline, how likely will your job be replaced? Maybe it already has been replaced like a robotic machine in a factory or maybe your restaurant is delivering food on a rolling machine, or your store replaced all cashiers with self-checkout machines.

If you are immune from being replaced, let us know where you work and what you do, and why your job can't be replaced.

I'll go first. I'm an ED tech who is in nursing school who is graduating in May. I'm 41 years old, and I could see myself working for another thirty years. In medicine, we have Telemedicine where we consult stroke neurologists and psychiatric services via a portable device that is a Zoom station with a controllable camera on wheels. Hospitals can do remote surgeries using robotic arms controlled by a doctor at distance. AI systems have diagnosed disorders with higher accuracy than doctors. Some hospitals have robot security guards and robots that offer companionship by having conversation with patients. There are robotic devices to put in IVs in the works, so I'm sure many duties in a hospital will go entirely automated (go to school to be an engineer in robotics kids), yet there is a lot that would be hard to replace due to the speed and dexterity. And the big thing, the healthcare industry is soooooo behind the times in terms of technology, and everything requires so much money. Just yesterday I looked up the price to replace a broken Tono pen that measures occular pressures and looks like something that should be $40 at Autozone, no different than an infrared thermometer (cheap plastic), and it is $5k, so I doubt we will see my job being replaced entirely in my lifetime, but I could totally imagine a reduction in the number of nurses and hospital staff.

What about you? Hopefully you are not a DoorDash driver :sigh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOWDNBu9DkU

Yeah, already has happened with the really large companies in my industry. For custom shops like ours it is not feasible. There is not really a poll option that applies to me.

What could I add?

:iono:

There is a large section of small to medium size businesses that can't afford automation even though it already exists in their industry. These businesses exist because their customers are too small to do business with the large fish in the pond.

The poll answers are all a yes or no in absolutes. All for different time periods but still only binary. There is no accommodation for partial replacement/supplementation.
Was this written by a robot?

This was more of a personal question than an industry question or than a question about if technology exists that could replace your job. Like I said, much of my duties could be replaced, but I don't see it happening for myself based on the rate of adoption. Will you be replaced, and if so, when?

You also say a lot of businesses can't afford automation, but you should be more specific. For instance, why did pizza and other restaurants employ delivery drivers, but Chipotle and many McDonalds didn't? How did that change with Doordash, and how many more customers did the restaurant industry gain who lacked drivers? How would delivery services change with drones, and could a small business use a third party service like a drone-based Doordash to deliver their goods without any investment capital?

A mom and pop store with one person behind the cashier desk may not need a self-checkout, but could a future Atlas stock the shelves, run the register/self-scanner and secure the premises, and would that be cheaper than hiring a person to work for a year? Even at minimum wage of $15.5/hour, at 40 hrs/wk that is $32k/year, so a single robot might be cheaper. Boston Dynamic's spot is $75k, but I would expect robots to drop significantly in price making a future robot not only affordable to the average business/person, but a significant savings.

That is a good point, and I considered that when I mentioned a lot of the nursing duties I do could be replaced, so I could see a reduction in staff, but not a replacement.

If a job had five duties with equal time requirements, and one duty couldn't be replaced, then four people out of five would lose their job, and one person would do that one duty. This is like factory work were automation has replaced all but a few jobs that require certain dexterity that machines can't do well, yet. I considered adding a scenario where 50% of more of the duties or people could be automated out of the job, but ultimately, I tried to keep it simple. If someone is in an industry with 4/5 people being replaced then they could just count that as all jobs, unless they think they are better that 80% of their coworkers. In which case, they could make an argument that they won't be replaced because they are the hardest worker and most likely to by that 1/5.

Having all these robots and machines creates the need for engineering jobs, servicing jobs, energy infrastructure, etc, and it frees up the economy for other professions the same way industrial farming freed up the average household from having to farm to feed themselves, so societies could expand into arts, theatre, etc. and other technologies. There would likely be a net loss and a need for a UBI or something, but I can't throw every option into the poll.

For a small custom shop, I don't think I would ever be replaced. They make machines that can do my job from start to finish, but we would be talking 5+ million per machine on average, at least 3 of them, maybe 4. Now granted they only need somebody to load the material into it and it does the rest at a minimum wage, but you also need someone who can repair and calibrate it and program it which is above my pay grade. Unless you are replacing a hundred people at my level it doesn't pencil. We have me, and two shop hands. My customers can't buy 10 of something from a big company who is automated, it's not worth their time. So we exist along with about 4-5 custom shops across North America. This isn't unique among what we do either. I run into this a lot trying to find companies to produce parts for our other product lines.

I grow plants. If I grew a single crop of cannabis or some landscape flower, it’s already happening w automation. I maintain a collection of rare plants at a university and assist w research plants. I also grow at an orchid nursery.

I’m not ignorant enough to pretend I’m irreplaceable or something but the return on investment for a robot in small greenhouses that aren’t producing a crop doesn’t seem likely. Imagine coding ten scenarios for several thousands species and running those in the course of a couple hours. Either the time constraints would eliminate the automation or the requisite infrastructure to necessitate real time decisions would.

I’m betting on redundancy from a societal perspective before being replaced by a goddamn robot.

Yes and no. On the surface, I write code. That can certainly be significantly automated, but providing the right input will still not likely be automated... Much like assembly robots need caretakers...currently need programmers.
But the core of what I do is create and optimize user experience and facilitate getting work done, mentor and coach... At the moment there is no inherent creativity in AI. It takes good input and a large sampling of example to use as reference. I imagine mundane things will become more and more automated. My job as it stands will change. But it won't go away any more than it has by greedy corporates thinking anyone can do user experience...

Where's the option for not yet, but I'm trying really hard to make it possible?

How is that? Do you work for Boston Dynamics?

My buddy is in the same boat. He is a "workforce management" analyst for a large company. His current project is automating his job. He thinks he will be in the next round or two of layoffs.

Nah, Boston Dynamics tries to automate everyone else's job. I'm trying to automate my own job to make it easier to automate their job.

nah, still far more worried my job will be outsourced to another country rather than a computer doing it

Seems like a... dead-end job. :lol:

Work for the job you want, not the job you have. It just so happens the job I want is to sit in a server room with a shotgun in case the machines get any funny ideas about not needing humans... :iono:

I wonder what happened to the workers at toll bridges in the bay? I don’t think they’re stuffing envelopes now are they?

I don't think it's possible anytime soon for what I do. I'm a Senior Technical Writer for a very large eCommerce company. If you've ever shopped at Williams-Sonoma/West Elm/Pottery Barn, etc, they run on our software.

Devs develop a new feature, I build a new environment test and write a topic or multiple topics to tell our users how to enable, configure, and use the new feature for their business.

I can think of one particular feature we worked on a few years ago, that between myself, the PM, the devs and some people in test took approximately 3.5 months to come up with a proper procedure that actually worked.

Nope, "it" wouldn't be able to keep up :popcorn:

They certainly wite some shitty car reviews

10 years in aerospace, I saw the tools that were supposed to replace me 10 years ago, 10 years later they're nowhere. My job at one point could distilled into crunching numbers and turning them into real products and geometry, clearly defined design rules and parameters that were in easily digestible spreadsheet forms before I even started doing the job, the perfectly ideal candidate for "ai automation". 10 years and some of the human written macros got more sophisticated faster and reliable, the 'ai' version is nowhere.

Every AI tool I've ever seen is a glorified goal seek, if your job is more complicated then 1 sentence you're safe. Tesla Google Apple every major auto manufacturer and a bunch of smaller companies have spent billions and billions of dollars and man hours over a decade+ to automate delivery driver with limited success. The idea that screenwriters will be replaced by chatGPT or doctors by robots (I interviewed at one of the companies that does remote surgery, seemed like a shitshow, we ended the interview early mutually) is fucking hilarious.

the average USA income is $31k(2019).

https://www.businessinsider.com/i-tr...g-a-qr-code-28

a burger machine is currently $30k, and requires a maintenance person to refill supplies and maintain it. so between buying the machine and staffing the person to maintain it, that's a minimum $60k investment for the first year. in my area, many fast food places are getting to be pretty consistently staffed by 2-4 people these days--most will have 50% taking orders, and the other 50% fulfilling.

while the order fulfilment could be automated as well, it doesn't change the formula all that much. places that staff even 4 people will come close to loosing money switching to robots. for arguments sake, lets say they all make minimum wage at $30k/yr with zero benefits. so the restaurant has a fixed $120k/yr in personnel operating costs.

they need to pay for the machine($30k), pay for the order automation($10k setup?), which are both recoverable over time, but need to keep paying 1 minimum wage person($30k) to refill the machine, but then require at least 1 educated/knowledgeable people to maintain and update the ordering system, and 1 person to keep the robots in mechanical shape, in my area that's somewhere nearing $70-100k/yr per person. even using the $70k base, it means $180k operating budget for the first year.

while the order automation system really only needs physical labor to maintain, the robots take parts that wear. eventually those parts need to be replaced. so it means that the $30k initial cost might drop to a yearly $5-10k cost.

we're down to $135k-140k/yr. really close, but at what cost? now there's people with higher education that expect higher cost of living adjustments and benefits, which further skew the equation.


different approach; let's assume it all makes sense and robots take over all the boring easy jobs like making burgers, doing dry cleaning, etc.

we'll then have a large glut of otherwise functional people.

the even bigger question then is "what do we do with all these people?"
do we make the already stressed welfare program bigger despite even less workers paying into it? start a "purge"? ship them to mars?

if anything, the 'make the robots do it' answer is going to end up costing us humans even more money than before with all these restless, jobless people not having anything to do.

Which one? Either way, both (librarian trainer & forum moderator) cannot be done by AI. There are too many dumb ppl for AI comprehend it or even handle it. Hell, AI will prob quit in 3 days trying to train Librarians. Librarian degree is a master degree (MLS/MLA)… & I question if they even graduated Jr High. Of course, not all the library employees has MLS/MLA.

I would love to see AI become a forum moderator… but def not gonna happen

Like I said, on a long enough continuum, we will all be replaced. You can buy a used 65'' TV for a few hundred bucks. You can buy a used car for a few hundred to a few thousand bucks, so expect robots to be super cheap. Many of the materials in a robot will not be very expensive. If cloud servers control the robots then the hardware on the robots might be minimal. Eventually everyone will be replaced in a socialist utopia, or we will work at competitively bread crumb wages in some unsustainable dystopian future that is likely to lead to class genocide and war.

The future is a UBI and rations at minimum to keep the masses satisfied enough to not revolt, or we will live at a time where productivity is massively cheap because of the robots and efficiency of scale. No one will need to work because everything is being done already. People are free to paint, walk, read, explore nature, enjoy life in a very utopian way. There is no point in contributing to society in any way because AI has already produced the solutions. In fact, the rate of innovation is so fast that it would be hard to even start production because the product would be rendered immediately obsolete the second it was made. It would either be a vacation every day, or it would be miserable. I don't know.

I think a forum moderator will come sooner than later. It is fairly easy for language software to spot profanity, vulgar comments, arguing, mentioning politics, or any other forum rules. Even if the AI only got 90% of bots and trolls, the forum members can report bots and trolls, so there is a self-regulation for an AI to use as backup. If Watson can beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy ten years ago then of course ChatGP/basic-AI could handle forums now or in the near future, given interest and a reasonable price.

this concept has been entertained and explored in the past many real-life studies involving a constant income.

the reality is that humans are lazy. no one does anything but sit around and watch the world spin without a purpose. as much as we all like the idea of not working, it does in fact give us all a purpose that we otherwise wouldn't have.

the rate of innovation would stall out at that point, as the entire basis of current society is to work to continue living, and the people that would still desire to work when they no longer need to maintain a living, will pale in comparison to the people that would simply choose not to work.

Your post makes voting for (far) left-wing parties the only reasonable choice, where AI and robotization is heavily regulated by enlightened individuals.

Then again, I can't recall reading utopian content where free trade and minimal state involvement were the norm. Maybe there were onto something.

In any case, as lazy as we are, we need something to look forward to, and we need to exercise our creativity / craftsmanship. Most of us wouldn't last a year in a world where you have no goals and no need to do anything. Even our literary, philosophical or artistic work has roots in the everyday struggle.

Maybe not screenwriters for now, but some news content is bound to soon be (or already is) written by robots. As long as there is no detailed analysis it's straightforward work. X people were injured in location XYZ due to ...

Human member alone cannot define between joke or serious harassment. Do you think AI can? Yeah, general spam posts can be catch… but when are they checking? Are they checking every thread? I’m not worry about AI not know certain lingo… but opposite, how they gonna define certain types of words are allowed in certain forum? Example word “tranny” in automotive, we all understand that term meaning transmission, but current world, that word is offensive towards trans ppl. Is AI gonna keep deleting or banning everyone who didn’t know those term in certain community harsh words & apply it in other community? & where’s the fine line for that? Is AI gonna define that? It’s already hard for human to define it as is. Just like recently spammers, they’ve edit their post to add spam links. So is AI checking every new & edited posts? Also how are they defining spam link? We do link non-automotive link often time. Like you said the forum members can report bits & trolls, so there is a self-regulation for an AI to use as a backup… how can AI define snowflake member overreacting vs it’s actually breaking the forum rules? Smart members will uses that against members to get them banned.

With that said, I’ll be happy if AI can handle cleaning the forum instead of human… but just like weeds in the yard, no matter how smart AI will get, human will always find the way to outsmart em til AI restrict out rights of words.

Indolent Wank Lord will be a hard one to specify.

The burger burners will need on call techs to keep them running 24/7.
It won't be the pink slime re-fill engineer or mop motivator.

And who wrote the information the AI pulls from a breaking event?

easy, it's like mad libs.


BREAKING NEWS!!!


_____(group/collection/state/country) has ____ (verb) the ____ (location). injuries are___(amount/severity). no further information has been provided at this time, but we'll keep you attuned of any new developments. thankyou for tuning in to ____(channel information).

Of course it's reported by someone, but turning the basic facts into text (in several languages) and adding a bit of context can be done by a program, though I'd hardly call it an AI.

I think the Stockton study for a $500 UBI worked out really well (1).

Why are we lazy? It is built into our genes to be efficient, and what is most efficient is to lay in the sun like fat bellied lions. Once our needs are met we don't have much drive to do anything, or do we? Some studies suggest we are motivated by a drive to master things, for autonomy and for purpose (youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc). We are conditioned to work 40-60+ hour work weeks at soul-sucking jobs all our lives, so our "purpose" has been defined by others, and so when we retire, we don't know what to do with ourselves. I don't believe this would be the case for a society where people had their basic needs met, had enough surplus of money to pursue their interests, maybe had some opportunities for high incomes to be able to do more.

AI would innovate until it reached some limit of knowledge (if such a thing existed), but it wouldn't be bound by anything. It could simulate any purpose regardless of what society needed at that very instant, and it could have robots build anything it needed or perform any experiment to advance what it couldn't model/simulate.

I wonder if someday we could give AI some basic abilities and set it on a simulating path and see how fast it can go from caveman knowledge to what we have now. Would it take hours, days, weeks, months? The abilities of AI will grow slowly like we have seen with Watson, AlphaGo and ChatGP. When AlphaGo beat a human after practicing millions of games in a short time, it was pretty crazy; it was crazy not only because it won, but because it employed game strategies that had never been seen before (2). Like a baby growing to a mature adult, at some point, AI will have the mental faculties to be aware enough, and it will have abilities to calculate, remember and process data in vastly superhuman ways that what it will discover and produce is mind bogglingly surreal.

Like I just replied to Soundman, many people lack purpose beyond work because creativity, hobbies, recreational activities, etc are not their norm. They work. They go home. They eat, drink, clean. They watch some TV, and they repeat. They don't get to socialize. They don't have free time to work out. They don't have free time to learn a new language, learn to play an instrument, learn a new hobby, etc. There would be a new generation who would have no limits with their free time. They could do whatever.

This isn't a novel idea. There was a point in time when we were all farmers and hunters. There wasn't a need to specialize much. There wasn't much time for theatre, art, etc. Having free time provided opportunity for culture to flourish. That created new industries, and that allowed people to find new ways of making a living, but making a living off art is a means to an ends; it doesn't make an artist better or give them purpose.

Yes, many people would be lazy. Have you seen Wall-E? But many of us would have the time to rebuild an engine, pick up a new language, go for a walk with friends and family, etc. Our purpose would be to explore, live, experience, master what we wanted, etc.

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

Watson was able to beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy because it was able to interpret play on words and the nuance in human expression from sayings to innuendos. Your tranny definition would be easy because of word association, not different than what you have to do. The AI could error on deleting posts or on leaving posts until things were obvious or until people reported the posts. ChatGP wouldn't be able to write a paper if it couldn't discern the difference between common and slang definitions. AI has bested humans in chess, Go, Jeopardy, has bested doctors in diagnosing diseases and so on. I don't expect to see a product for the forum anytime super soon, but it isn't far away either.

I think your bigger issue isn't that you will be replaced, but before that, it will become increasingly difficult discerning bots from real people. They have gotten a lot better over the years. Nefarious links are easy for an AI to test and discard, but something like a scammer, that would be harder to identify and remove. Imagine an AI selling a product with a perfect CGI picture of something fake, and then getting multiple people to buy their fake product. Or something else.

If human eyes saw something, so too could cameras. There is a lot of news that already broke on social media via personal cameras far before an official news crew can be on scene. Even then, a robot reporter or drone could do the same job in terms of asking questions and recording video. Maybe easier and faster. In fact, it could probably stitch together a story from cell phone videos and create an identical simulated environment with a simulated CGI reporter to deliver the "On Scene" breaking news.

Have you guys seen Transcendence (2014) with Johnny Depp, or that scene when Data took over the whole starship in Star Trek: Next Generation, or Ultron in the Avengers: Age of Ultron? When an AI has access to the internet and can go through virtual walls of security at ease, it is scary how fast it could attain information. I could imagine assembling a story from the internet could be done at ease.

missing the irony though. those scenes were set in place by human script writers.

we've been imagining self-driving cars since the 1950's. V2V communication lost it's place on the spectrum a few years ago due to a lack of oem interest.

I'm medical support staff. Yes but not soon.