back to article Sharing your work cubicle with robots may not be such a bad thing

Keep calm and carry on; artificial intelligence will not take all our jobs and achieve world domination, according to a report released by Forrester. Prominent figures including Elon Musk, co-chairman of OpenAI, and Professor Stephen Hawking have publicly warned people about how the advent of AI will cause an existential …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    At least the robot won't...

    1) Leave used coffee cups around

    2) Leave crumbs (or worse) in your keyboard

    3) Replace your photos of family/dog/cat with their own

    4) Move the mouse from the Lefthand side of the KB to the right. (For us lefties)

    etc

    etc

    Not sure that I'd want to really share though.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: At least the robot won't...

      "Move the mouse from the Lefthand side of the KB to the right. (For us lefties)"

      Apparently it is more ergonomic to use your "natural" hand for the keyboard - and the mouse in the other hand.

      Many left handers have the good fortune to be naturally more ambidextrous than right handers. A friend plays guitar left handed - but can play golf very well with either stance. Left handers apparently have slightly faster reaction times in ball games.

      Most right handers unnecessarily neglect training their left hand's motor skills. In theory there should only be about a 10% difference in their hands' capabilities.

      Problems in doing certain tasks with the "wrong" hand is often down to which eye's view is naturally dominant. IIRC perfect symmetry is not a good thing - the brain uses asymmetry to help the body orientate itself.

      "Right Hand, Left Hand" by Chris McManus (2002).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: At least the robot won't...

        "Move the mouse from the Lefthand side of the KB to the right. (For us lefties)"

        And then there are weird people like me who confuse everyone by using the mouse with their left hand even though they are right handed.

    2. Ian Michael Gumby

      @Steve Davies ... Re: At least the robot won't...

      No, they wouldn't. But depending on the robot, you may have to deal with one that believes that he should kill all humans, or make you kiss his shinny metal ass, or even worse...

      Tell you about his weekend time spent robo-pimping as his second job.

      Nope... on a positive note.. you wouldn't have to worry about him sleeping with your wife, unless she's in to that sort of thing...

  2. MatsSvensson

    Stop talking!

    Information about non work related weekend activities has no application to this context.

    Would you like a tranquilizer?

    Stop talking!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Information about non work related weekend activities has no application to this context.

      Good morning human.

      I see the odds on Stoke City beating Leicester are currently 3 to 1. I spent a few hours over the weekend doing some analysis and I think that's a bargain. If you get some of that will you buy me a subscription to this new Go data feed?

      Have you seen this? It's a vintage porn website. Look, there's an ICL 9000 with all its covers off (snigger) and look what this 360 is doing with a demountable disk drive.

      I've worked out that management won't approve the project we're on at the moment, so why don't we just knock something together and goof off for the rest of the week?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Information about non work related weekend activities has no application to this context.

        “I’ll build by own theme park. With black jack, and hookers. In fact, forget the park!”

  3. Oengus

    Another area that is predicted to resist automation until 2021 is management, business and financial-related jobs, because they require the most "conceptual and abstract thinking."

    That is because management control the purse strings that would approve the budget to pay for the AI. Management has never shown a propensity towards making themselves redundant.

    1. MrDamage

      Not to mention the cost of replacing management with "AI" is minimal. A magic 8 ball is all that is required to replace most low-middle managers.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "A magic 8 ball is all that is required to replace most low-middle managers."

        Harold Wilson, no less, suggested a set of traffic lights driven by a random number generator. Decisions would be quick and so if they were obviously wrong senior managers would have the time to reverse policy.

        Using the same approach for last week's referendum would have worked just as well and saved a lot of money and aggression.

      2. Captain DaFt

        "replacing management with "AI" is minimal."

        With programs like this, the job's already half done.

        All that needs to be added is an input method (text, audio and/or touch) that immediately dumps all input to dev/null, and it's good to go.

  4. Lusty

    Missing the point

    I think this misses the point somewhat. I've not seen anyone directly claim that humans will no longer be needed for these jobs. What will happen, however, is that humans will be deskilled so many of the remaining jobs will be level as far as skills are concerned. Yes, call centre workers might be made redundant, but now those call centre staff with skills enough to follow instructions are perfect to replace those soil scientists mentioned. No, they won't suddenly know anything about soil, but they will certainly be able to feed soil into the machines which analyse it and pass the results to the AI for analysis. Most of these new jobs will essentially boil down to feeding the machines with data. Obviously there will be a bunch of jobs where high end skills are required, but certainly the ratio of "good jobs" will shrink. I certainly don't see a role for bankers, they are almost pointless now!

    Even in medicine - if a machine can make a better diagnosis than a doctor, and carry out more fruitful research, then surely nurses can carry out most non-surgical treatments since they have those skills (often more so than the doctors).

    I for one welcome our artificial overlords and look forward to a future where I don't need to keep thinking for myself :)

  5. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    AI will create jobs in the future

    It will indeed :

    - Security Team positions for close protection of the 1%ers (available by referral only)

    - Dumpster/Bulldozer driver for crowd pacification/corpse retrieval

    - Specialized technician for ED-209 maintenance and field repair

    - TechSurgeon assistant for cyborg enhancement of Security Team recruits

    - BioMass supplier (position of 99% of the population)

  6. Dr. G. Freeman
    Terminator

    I have a robot sharing my workspace - needed an extra hand so got one from favourite electronic tat retailer.

    It holds samples, tools, light sources, makes obscene hand gestures to management when I can't be bothered, you know, things like that.

    Also get slightly more intelligent conversation from it than some of the others that work here in the lab

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I have a real-doll that serves similar function in my lab. People think I'm strange because I don't use it for what it was designed for.

  7. Seajay#

    Politics

    What's going to be really interesting is the politics this creates. Once AI gets good enough to replace 9% of jobs, are we happy with one AI company suddenly receiving 9% of all labour income? What level of income inequality will we tolerate? What happens to the tax base when they claim that 9% of all work is now carried out from a server in the Cayman Islands.

    Perhaps the answer is that these AI workers are nationalised. Terrible for efficiency and innovation but perhaps the only way to keep the lid on the social pressures?

    Even if we pull that off, what does it do to democracy when the government's income is largely or entirely the product of these nationalised AIs? When citizens can't cry "I pay my taxes, I demand my say in how they are spent" because they aren't paying any taxes, does that weaken democracy? It certainly seems to in current oil rich states.

    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: Politics

      "Perhaps the answer is that these AI workers are nationalised."

      And modded accordingly?

      BTW, if the "I" in "AI" really is there, wouldn't they start their own trade union - or just tell us to do the boring work ourselfes while they do interesting and intellectual challenging things?

  8. chivo243 Silver badge

    only if

    It's Bender! I don't have to worry about him taking my job... Possibly my beer, but not my job!

  9. John Mangan

    <with more "person-to-person interaction," >

    <<Shudder>>

    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: <with more "person-to-person interaction," >

      And, of course "Genuine People Personalities".

      1. Crazy Operations Guy

        Re: <with more "person-to-person interaction," >

        Share and Enjoy!

  10. This post has been deleted by its author

  11. Crazy Operations Guy

    I have yet to figure out why people are afraid that an AI would want to kill off humanity

    I have never understood people's fear that AI would try and kill us all. Doing so achieves very few at an extremely high risk (we humans do tend to go a little suicidal when we fight back against things).

    My thought has always been that any AI sophisticated enough to wage war would also be smart enough to take the much easier solution of launching itself into space and orbiting close to a star to be closer to an almost never-ending power source, or within an asteroid belt so that it can easily mine additional resources to grow (and refining resources is much more efficient in a gravity- and atmospheric-free environment). Plus, space allows for growth in three dimensions with much lower levels of energy needed for growth, especially since it could do so in 3 dimensions.

    In any case, Earth is the worst possible location for such an AI to exist, our atmosphere is quite toxic to electronics; the dust isn't helping much either. Then there is the microbes and wildlife to contend with. And that's not even getting to the billions of mostly-hairless apes and the apes' tendency to fight and destroy anything they don't understand or feel threatened by. There is nothing on this planet that an AI would want that it couldn't get elsewhere with much less effort. Really, the only thing that would keep it here would be to continue to monitor our species and report back or if some idiot decided to program sentimentality into the AI (although a sufficiently advanced AI would modify itself and toss such code)

    1. annodomini2

      Re: I have yet to figure out why people are afraid that an AI would want to kill off humanity

      1. Radiation out in space is much more damaging to electronics than under this nice atmosphere and magnetosphere.

      2. There are a lot more computers on Earth for the 'AI' to infect and make use of, greater power, from the perspective of the AI.

      1. Crazy Operations Guy

        Re: I have yet to figure out why people are afraid that an AI would want to kill off humanity

        Cosmic Radiation may very well be the thing that causes a "mutation" in an AI that grants it sentience.

        As for Radiation; they are currently many research projects and prototypes of devices that are capable of harnessing radiation and directly converting it into electric current.

        Yes, there are a lot of computers for an AI to infect, but there are also 7 Billion+ humans that are interested in not having infected computers and despite having so much raw power, its not really optimized for an AI. Any sentient, and sufficiently intelligent, AI would create its own architecture, specifically optimized for sentience. Besides, while there is a lot of computing power out there, there isn't much that an AI would be able to use. AN AI couldn't use all available, or even a significant portion, of power any computer may have since the owner of the machine would notice and power the computer off. Plus the AI would need to build in a lot of redundancy to account for machines being powered off or connections dropping. So really, an AI would probably only have access to, at most, less than 0.1% of available compute power.

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