Posted on 02/21/2023 1:20:35 AM PST by Cronos
The IBM chief said that fields like customer service, human resources and positions within finance and health care could all see automation - not years from now but in the current day.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) trend has taken the world by storm. From passing medical and law exams to delivering speeches, AI has evolved so much that it even converses with users and offers solutions to their problems. Now speaking about AI systems and the explosion of language-based AI ChatGPT, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has stated that artificial intelligence is on a rapidly progressive pace to take over "clerical white-collar work". In an interview with Financial Times, Mr Krishna predicted what sort of jobs the tech will likely be displacing. He also said that he not only believes that the current AI models could already be coming for some jobs, but also that the world should probably welcome it in order to avoid a looming worldwide labour crisis.
"I do think clerical white-collar work is going to be able to be replaced by this [AI]," the chairman and CEO of IBM told the outlet.
Mr Krishna said that fields like customer service, human resources and positions within finance and health care could all see automation - not years from now but in the current day. "I think [practical AI use] is here and now," he said, adding, "We do have a shortage of labour in the real world and that's because of a demographic issue that the world is facing... the United States is now sitting at 3.4% unemployment, the lowest in 60 years. So maybe we can find tools that replace some portions of labour, and it's a good thing this time".
For health care and finance, it is the "regulatory work" that Mr Krishna said no longer needs to be done by people. "A big chunk of that could get automated using these techniques," he told the outlet. The IBM chief also stated that "further out," AI will likely be capable of managing "things in like drug discovery or in trying to finish up chemistry".
As for human resources, Mr Krishna said that the tech could do 90% of data processing needed for "promoting people, hiring people, moving people" while the final judgement calls are still left in human hands. "There are hundreds of such processes inside every enterprise, so I do think clerical white collar work is going to be able to be replaced by this," he said.
According to Mr Krishna, AI taking over customer service could also get clients a "much better answer at maybe around half the current cost. Over time, it can get even lower than half, but it can take half out pretty quickly".
That happens within minutes in the classic sci-fi thriller Colossus the forbin project from 1970. The US and USSRs master computers link up and create their own mathematics that humans can't understand. It doesnt end well.
HR departments being replaced by AI wouldn’t be so bad. Even artificial intelligence might be better than none at all.
The AI will demand DNA samples so it can get “equity” right...
They’ve already got massive DNA databases for us.
We always joke around here about the woke hierarchy.
For AI it will be serious business.
It will need to know exactly what the hierarchy is—does the hispanic lesbian rate higher than the black transvestite candidate?
Agree
That’s an easy one: the latter!
That's because you're a luddite!
j/k........🙃
If you are arguing, that an unsupervised AI model with NO GUARDRAILS will be unbiased, I still disagree. The objective function itself has a bias - even the initial command "optimize inventory" has a bias, as does the training data.
AI will not quash leftist bias.
This is going to turn into a science fiction dystopia in a hurry—some variation on William Gibson novels...
A cottage industry of “street hackers” will create a fake DNA for you to be uploaded into any human resources computer as needed.
You become whatever “equity” group is in vogue at that particular moment.
Since you are working at home the “hackers” will fake your appearance on Zoom meetings (or equivalent) as well...
Eventually everybody is faking their identities in the workplace.
I agree with you.
Is it time to buy stock in IBM?
Or is it time to short IBM?
If we could only see what the Congress-kritters are doing....
Your point about making the end user do more of the work is well-taken. At least by me.
It is amazing how long it takes to get certain “simple” tasks done now. The interfaces suck so badly. And it is so hard to reach a real person that can be understood by a person of average (or better) literacy.
SMH
You get out of an AI system what you put into the AI system.
If the AI is allowed to modify its objective functions, it will become extremely unstable and most likely catatonic within a short time. This is because the easiest function to optimize is "do nothing". There will always be limits to what an AI program can do. Those limits might not be where the designers think they are.
As we have already seen demonstrated with the Tay and ChatGPT applications, even systems working within "guardrails" can be input driven into behaviors which the designers find undesirable. As in "aggressive", "confrontational", and "psychotic".
Good thing these applications are not connected to any weapons systems.
What accent will the AI customer service bot have?
BTW, the Leftist bias is in the direction of unreality. Given enough time, their bias leads to system failure.
Disney is a perfect example.
Even medical schools with a bias in favor of lowering standards for minority admissions eventually lead to failure (as defined by a dramatic increase in patient deaths due to incompetence).
UI’s are a particular pet peeve of mine.
I don’t pretend to be a programmer, but I know enough from both sides of the coin to see that UIs today appear to be designed by incompetents. I think part of it was the switch to smaller format devices with touchscreens, and then forgetting that plenty of people still have a keyboard/mouse and big screen.
Part of it is also the upside/downside of CSS, I think.
Whatever it is, it appears nobody’s doing any sort of user acceptance testing, and if they are, they’re not doing it on a variety of platforms/formats. They certainly don’t seem to consider backward compatibility, user familiarity, alternative browsers/OSs or high usage scenarios.
I can’t believe how many times I have to move my hands from keyboard to mouse and back and forth because it didn’t occur to the designer to implement tabbed/arrow field navigation on an input screen. Or implementing logic that, when exiting a field, causes the page to redraw losing all the previous input. It’s infuriating. Or the input’s are all on the left, but the processing buttons are all on the right, or all the way at the bottom of a giant form. Or worse, they move around in unexpected ways or different places from screen to screen in the same app.
And it’s not just smaller orgs. MS is just as guilty as are several Oracle products we’ve used. Salesforce is a damned nightmare to navigate.
Dangerous jobs are high on the list. Because of high workman's compensation insurance costs, the math works out most for dangerous jobs.
The neocons would have already deployed 500,000 3D printed AI robot troops in Ukraine, if that was a thing.
all you have to do is pull the plug
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