On November 14, 2013, Victoria Woollaston writes on MailOnline:
- Claims were made by CEO of UK artificial intelligence company, Celaton
- He said clerical jobs could disappear completely in ‘less than five years’
- People in sales, education and IT among the employees most at risk
- By 2025, machines will be able to ‘learn and reprogramme themselves’
Many of us already rely heavily on technology for everyday tasks, but the very technology we need to get through the day could soon be after our jobs – and the shift could happen much faster than we think.
Claims made by an expert in artificial intelligence predict that in less than five years, office jobs will disappear completely to the point where machines will replace humans.
The idea that robots will one day be able to do all low-skilled jobs is not new, but Andrew Anderson, CEO of UK artificial intelligence company, Celaton, said the pace of advance is much faster than originally thought.
According to artificial intelligence expert Andrew Anderson, machines can already automate tasks and learn to make decisions like humans and its only a matter of time before they replace office worker jobs completely. IBM, for example, is already using its supercomputer Watson (pictured) to answer customer service calls‘I’m afraid it’s now a reality that most clerical workers will disappear. This has profound implications for jobs of course, but huge technological advancements are being made all the time and artificial intelligence (AI) has now become very sophisticated to the extent that it can think and learn like a human,’ he said.
AI, for example, can carry out labour intensive clerical tasks quickly and automatically, while the latest models are also capable of making decision that would traditionally be made by humans.
Anderson said his company had been assessing the industry and found that the pace of change was accelerating more rapidly than Government bodies and others had prepared for.
‘[AI] can read and understand the meaning of entire documents by learning the patterns of words and phrases in context. It’s this ability to learn – and learn from the natural consequence of processing documents – that is minimising the need for clerical workers to carry out these repetitive tasks.
‘The fact that a machine can not only carry out these tasks, but constantly learn how to do it better and faster, means clerical workers are no longer needed in the vast quantities they once were.’
For example, a machine can recognise duplicate claims filed to insurance companies by knowing it has seen a phone number or an address before.
More importantly, whenever human intervention is required, AI learns from this and therefore further reduces the dependency on clerical workers.
A robot developed by researchers from Cornell University uses Kinect sensors, 3D cameras and a database of household task videos to anticipate their owner’s needs. For example, it scans the surrounding area for clues and when it spots an empty beer bottle, can open the fridge, pick up a full bottle of beer and hand it to its ownerThe case is already being seen with many online retailers using automated customer service agents.
Earlier this year, technology firm IBM turned its supercomputer Watson into a robot call centre.
The artificially intelligent computer system took on the role of a customer service manager called the Watson Engagement Advisor.
The service uses IBM’s Big Data Analytics technologies to gather data about customers and make sure the answers are best suited to them.
Watson can then personalise its responses based on the company, and the type of customer, for future calls too.
Robots are also used by the police and military as bomb-disposal experts, for example.
Earlier this year, students from Cornell University invented a robot that can fetch food and drinks, do the housework and carry out other everyday tasks.
While researchers from Bielefeld University built a robotic barman called Joint Action in Multimodal Embodied Systems, or JAMES for short.
But this advantage can come at a cost. According to a report filed last year by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the greatest loss of jobs between 2010 and 2020 is predicted for administrative, clerical and secretarial occupations.
This is set to amount to 387,000 jobs.
Mr Anderson continued: ‘AI is sophisticated enough to know if a correspondence is a complaint and then how important it is. For some people this is difficult to believe which is why we have to demonstrate it live. Seeing is believing after all.
Independent AI expert, Massimo Barbato – who wrote Thinking Beyond Limitation – said by 2025, machines will be able to learn, adjust, exercise judgement, and re-programme themselves. This is already seen in apps such as IBM’s Ask Watson app, pictured
‘The perception of ‘too good to be true’ is diminishing as more companies adopt AI to accelerate and improve profitability, customer service and shareholder value.
Anderson added that AI was a ‘game changer’ and although it could affect jobs, there were much greater benefits for the customers.
Machines can significantly increase productivity and therefore reduce costs. They can improve customer service, compliance, scale and efficiency.
Independent AI expert, Massimo Barbato – who wrote Thinking Beyond Limitation which explores the impact of technologies on everyday life – agreed.
‘While it was once mainly lower-skilled jobs squeezed by new technology, AI could undercut the ‘knowledge’ professional.
‘By 2025, machines will be able to learn, adjust, exercise judgement, and re-programme themselves.
‘The hardest hit would be professionals working in sales, education, healthcare, IT, management, finance and law – knowledge-based jobs, where analytics tools, mobile internet devices, apps or web-based services such as the cloud can be developed to outperform humans.’
Andrew Anderson’s conclusions should surprise no one who is conscious and who has even causally observed the constant shift to non-human productive inputs in the manufacturing, distribution, and sales of products, as well as the delivery of services, that has been occurring during their lifetime. The first burst of this phenomena was the Industrial Revolution. But now we are in an age of technology sophistication that is permeating every sector of industry and our day-to-day lives.
There’s nothing new about machines replacing people, but the rate of replacement is exponential and the result is that productivity gains lead to more wealth for the OWNERS of the non-human factor of production, but for others who have always been dependent on jobs as their source of income, there has been a steady decline to poverty-level labor incomes.
What must be understood (which unfortunately is not understood by conventional economists) is that there are two independent factors of production––human or labor workers and non-human or physical productive capital––productive land, structures, machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.
Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions.
Also what needs to be understood is that human productivity has not advanced (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant), but that the productiveness of the non-human factor of production––productive capital––is the reason that private sector corporations, majority owned by the “1 percent,” are utilizing the non-human factor of production increasingly to create efficiencies and save labor costs. It is the function of technology to save labor from toil and to enable us to do things that otherwise is humanly impossible without non-human input.
The critical question becomes who should own productive capital? The issue of OWNERSHIP is unbelievably overlooked by those in academia and politics, as well as by the author of the MIT Technology Review article. Yet we live in country founded upon private property rights.
Today, large streams of data, coupled with statistical analysis and sophisticated algorithms, are rapidly gaining importance in almost every field of science, politics, journalism, and much more. What does this mean for the future of work?
But what about China, the place where all the manufacturing jobs are supposedly going? True, China has added manufacturing jobs over the past 15 years. But now it is beginning its shift to super-robotic automation. Foxconn, which manufactures the iPhone and many other consumer electronics and is China’s largest private employer, has plans to install over a million manufacturing robots within three years. Thus, in reality off-shoring of manufacturing will eventually be replaced by human-intelligent super-robotic automation.
The pursuit for lower and lower cost production that relies on slave wage labor will eventually run out of places to chase. Eventually, “rich” countries, whose productive capital capability is owned by its citizens, will be forced to “re-shore” manufacturing capacity, and result in ever-cheaper robotic manufacturing.
“The era we’re in is one in which the scope of tasks that can be automated is increasing rapidly, and in areas where we used to think those were our best skills, things that require thinking,” says David Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Businesses are spending more on technology now because they spent so little during the recession. Yet total capital expenditures are still barely running ahead of replacement costs. “Most of the investment we’re seeing is simply replacing worn-out stuff,” says economist Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics.
Yet, while the problem is one that no one can no longer ignore, the solution also is one starring them in the face but they just can’t see the simplicity of it.
The fundamental challenge to be solved is how do we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with job destroying and devaluing technological innovation and invention so not all of the benefits of owning FUTURE productive capacity accrues to today’s wealthy 1 percent ownership class, and ownership is broadened so that EVERY American earns income through stock ownership dividends so they can afford to purchase the products and services produced by the economy.
None of this is new from a macro-economic viewpoint as productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth. The role of physical productive capital is to do ever more of the work of producing more products and services, which produces income to its owners. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
The 400 wealthiest Americans and the other 1 to 10 percent richest Americans are rich because they own wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets. The disenfranchised poor and working and middle class are propertyless in terms of owning productive capital assets.
Because productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth, shouldn’t we be asking the question why is not productive capital the source of added property ownership incomes for all? Why are we not addressing how the system facilitates greed capitalism and envy while concentrating productive capital ownership among the 1 to 10 percent of the population?
The change that is necessary is to reform the system to provide equal opportunity for EVERY American to acquire wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets on the basis that the investments will pay for themselves––and on the same terms that the wealthy ownership class now utilizes. They are able to use the investment’s earnings to pay off the capital credit loans used to finance their investments, without having to use their own money or deny themselves consumption.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The solution is obvious but our leaders, academia, conventional economist and the media are oblivious to the necessity to broaden ownership in the new capital formation of the future simultaneously with the growth of the economy, which then becomes self-propelled as increasingly more Americans accumulate ownership shares and earn a new source of dividend income derived from their capital ownership in the “machines” that are replacing them or devaluing their labor value.
The solution will require the reform of the Federal Reserve Bank to create new owners of future productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy. The solution to broadening private, individual ownership of America’s future capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
See the article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html
Also see “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html. And also “Second Income Plan” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/second-income-plan_b_3625319.html
Also see the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.nationofchange.org/solution-america-s-economic-decline-1367588690 and “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.nationofchange.org/education-critical-our-future-societal-development-1373556479. And also “Achieving The Green Economy” at http://www.nationofchange.org/achieving-green-economy-1373980790. Also see it complete with the footnotes at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=9082.
Also see “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624 and “The Income Solution To Slow Private Sector Job Growth” at http://www.nationofchange.org/income-solution-slow-private-sector-job-growth-1378041490.
