Your Job Taught to Machines Puts Half U.S. Work at Risk

[Purveyor]

By Aki Ito Mar 12, 2014 12:01 AM ET

Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer?

When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance.

“We were able to get the information we needed after reviewing only 2.3 percent of the documents,” said Greene, a Minneapolis-based partner at law firm Stinson Leonard Street LLP.

Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that replicate human judgments that were too complicated and subtle to distill into instructions for a computer. Algorithms that “learn” from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.

The advances, coupled with mobile robots wired with this intelligence, make it likely that occupations employing almost half of today’s U.S. workers, ranging from loan officers to cab drivers and real estate agents, become possible to automate in the next decade or two, according to a study done at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-12/your-job-taught-to-machines-puts-half-u-s-work-at-risk.html

[upaloopa]

1. What's the need for these robots when 1/2

the people have no money to spend?
Are we going to lower the population to accomodate!
There is going to be some new model for the society

[quadrature]

2. do you really need a lawyer, when 90% of what they do

could be done by a law student? -->
that likely lives in Ireland or India.

[Negativity]

3. whats the point

Who's going to buy your product when half of us have no money to spend because we don't have jobs. Woohoo

[Redfairen]

4. Don't be a silly

The rich will do quite well shuffling all the money back and forth betwixt one another. Half the country can go starve and rot. The greasy profits won't be bohered by it all.

[blkmusclmachine]

6. Soylent Green

[LiberalElite]

7. Earlier this week my asthma doctor

told me he attended a conference in San Diego about automation in medical profession and joked that in a few years, he could be replaced by an algorithm.

[AdHocSolver]

8. Automation gives power to those who write the software that drive the computers.

How quickly people forget the elections that were decided by voting machines that were programmed to use secret, proprietary software.

What was the algorithm used by some voting machines: Flip every third vote for the Democrat to the Republican candidate.

There is no reasoning with a computer. Computers consider themselves infallible.

Corporations automate everything because it gives them unlimited decision making capabilities, and makes it more difficult to challenge computer "errors" or fraud.

So-called "artificial intelligence" is as valid a term as "free trade" and the "tooth fairy".