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Robots to Take Over Half of US Jobs Within Next Several Years, Expert Warns
Friday, March 27, 2015 11:21
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An expert in machine learning warns that advances in technology could mean the replacement of nearly half the US human workforce with computers over the next two decades.
University of Oxford Associate Professor Michael Osborne evaluated 702 occupations in the US and predicted 47% could be taken over by computers and machines in the foreseeable future.
The jobs most at risk are hospitality and food service, Osborne claimed, with 87% of the workforce there at “high risk” of being taken over by machines, the Brisbane Times reported. Trailing that are transportation and warehouse jobs at 75% and real estate at 67%. Interestingly enough, only 19% of workers in the information and software sector were considered at risk of automation.The reason behind this, Osborne explained, is that computers, even those forms of artificial intelligence that have shown some capacity for learning, lack social understanding and the ability to conceive abstract thought. Jobs that require a high level of creativity and abstract thought are less likely to be subject to automatization.
“What unites all those bottlenecks [in computer ability] is kind of a deep reservoir of tacit knowledge humans possess that’s not readily reproducible in software,” Professor Osborne told the Times.
“For example, in order to be creative, you need to understand the creative values of the society in which you find yourself.
“It’s very easy to design an algorithm that endlessly churns out paintings or pieces of music but it’s very difficult to get that algorithm to distinguish between good pieces of music and bad pieces of music.”
Many fear for the idea of super intelligent machines because of the Hollywood narrative of machines taking over the planet.
Similar projections have been made about the workforces in the UK and Scandinavia.
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Credit to Common Sense
http://nunezreport.blogspot.com/
Source: http://nunezreport.blogspot.com/2015/03/robots-to-take-over-half-of-us-jobs.html
