Have you ever been replaced by a robot?
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Cruiser (
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September 10th, 2015
Have you had a job that is now being done by a robot? Do you have a job now that could be replaced by a robot? Do you know that your future boss may also be a robot?
There is a story out today where 3 robots replaced 60 welders and another where Hitachi has implemented robot bosses who tell the workers what to do and how to do their jobs better and faster.
This to me is disturbing and very Orwelian. As we approach technological singularity, just how prepared are to manage the explosive growth of artificial intelligence.
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34 Answers
My first job while I was in high school was packing yogurt in the boxes to ship to stores. Four of us on the line, one did the boxes and each of the rest of us put four containers in each box as it moved down the line. It paid well but what a stupid job. I was glad they got a robot to do it.
I work in an industry (Securities Trading) where business volumes are two orders of magnitude greater than 30 years ago, but 90% of employment has been replaced by computer. My first 4 jobs in the business were all automated 15 years ago.
The only reason I am still working is because I moved up into strategy planning and business development.
One of my first jobs was as a receptionist. Now you can press 1 for English and enjoy the rest of the maze of number pressing.
@cazzie I despise auto phone receptionists.
I have been replaced by a robotic fleshlight.
Not replaced exactly but substituted occasionally. ‘Course, with the me running out of C cell batteries is not a concern so I will probably never be fully replaced.
Yeah – my Ex’s new wife. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Two boys replaced me in the school band, they owned their own kazoos & I broke mine in an unfortunate boating accident. They were not robots, but their names were Andy Roid &...ahh, fuck it :D
I remember Ahfuckit. He went on to become first chair kazoo with the London Phillhumonit Orchestra.
Well, not exactly. The closest would be when I was teaching at the Adult High School Diploma Completion program. The company used a teaching website, so basically all the students did was learn by reading the stuff. Then there would be a quiz, and a final exam. All that I was required to do was to read the essays and give a grade or suggestions. I never even met some of my students.
My ex has been replaced by two new appliances. One is a can opener.
@cazzie Brilliant! Mine too – and another of them was a back scratcher.
Not a robot but I used to make jet turbine performance charts (on orange K&E graph paper). I made calculations with a slide rule and an accounting machine made by Friden. All can be done with simulators in real time.
No to all your questions. However, computers have radically changed how I work.
Nope I still think it will be a while,although they have come out with a self driving truck it still requires a driver behind the wheel to monitor everything.
As a CNC Machinist, I am the guy who sets up and programs the robots. I think my job is safe.
@Dutchess_III I had a slide rule.
@jerv … I think my job is safe. Maybe for about 15 years…
If one were to believe what certain futurists have written, such as Ray Kurzweil The Singularity is Near, or Gordon Moore Moore’s Law, we might be closer than we think to robots/androids/computers that are more intelligent than we are, and that are able to design even more intelligent, maybe even sentient artificial intelligence.
If robots do all the work, what are we supposed to do with the 60 plus years of life we are usually stuck with? How and why will we live?
I agree @rojo and the gap between the rich and poor just keeps getting bigger and bigger,but what happens when there isn’t anyone left to afford the goods and services their wonderful robots are pumping out?
Right after high school, I had a mail room job that involved collating multi page form letters and stuffing them into envelopes. Almost the entire mail room department has been placed with various machines.
Like @Adirondackwannabe I worked several jobs in a food factory that were eliminated by robots.
Fun stuff, like palletizing cases of 12 soup cans into an alternating pattern.
Or shoving 12 taco dinners into a cardboard box, 2 at a time. That one was ‘automated’ by forming the box over a stacking machine where you stepped on a pedal and 12 were shoved in the box for you. Then there was a case-packer that formed the box, filled it, taped it, and spit it out and all I had to do was grab the heavy sumbitch off the line and palletize it. Woe was me, when the job finally automated to the point that one person fed the case-packer raw materials (tape, boxes) and another ran a palletizer automatically stacking 2–4 products at the same time.
Oh, the good ole days of mindless, repetitive-motion, back breaking labor!
Damn the machines.
I shake my head when I hear cold miners bemoan the fact that they are “losing a way of life”. That you would wish that upon your kids,
Machines have been taking over repetitive manual labor for over a hundred years. Seems to me they manage to make more jobs in some ways.
Longer than that, @Dutchess_III.
Imagine the horror of the ditch-digger’s union when the steam shovel was invented in 1839.
I have been reading quite a few articles on this robot topic and it seems there are other angles to the impact of robots not yet touched on here. One company used to offshore his pottery production to China, he invested in robots to do the pottery production and can do it here as cheap as it cost to make in China and retained all his employees and he company has grown and is recruiting more employees. Robots may in fact be keeping jobs here and even creating more.
Those poor children put out of work in the textile factories in England.
@Dutchess_III Here is a good article on why robots could actually create jobs and much higher paying jobs of the ones robots replace and uses an example of the loom similarly like your cotton gin example.
Nice, @Cruiser.
It’s like, remember when computers would mean we wouldn’t use so much paper? Guess what….
The “techological singularity” (human minds and consciousness somehow being absorbed and replaced by artificial intelligence) is an idea that sells books but it’s also not something that’s going to happen. It mainly demonstrates how head/thinking/language/idea-oriented our culture and our technologists have become.
What the rest of your question is talking about, however, is the doing by robots of tasks that required humans, and so the loss of paying jobs for humans, since our economic model is based in survivalism, scarcity, and competition, and corporations are allowed to be all-for-profit, government-buying, amoral power-hungry organizations with no limits to their potential size or power. That economic model, unchecked, was always proceeding faster and faster to eventually reduce all humans to powerless pawns and consume all the planet’s natural resources, until something stopped it – either self-collapse, revolution, or environmental and/or social collapse. Robotics just accelerates the process, which is probably ultimately a good thing, because the faster and sooner a collapse happens, the less damage to humans, society, and the planet will be done, and the sooner we can re-invent a system that serves the good of people and the planet.
What’s needed now is invention of new economic models and practices that are sustainable for all people and species on the planet, and breaking out of the illusions created by our old economic models.
“What’s needed now is invention of new economic models and practices that are sustainable for all people and species on the planet, and breaking out of the illusions created by our old economic models.”
Yes, but newer models won’t allow for those like the Koch brothers or Walton family to exploit others for their own gain, so the only way we’ll see a new system is probably revolution. And while revolutions are almost never pretty, I see this one getting rather ugly.
It also assumes that we don’t have a revolution for other reasons; the Oath Keepers protecting Kim Davis from US Marshals is kind of disturbing.
@jerv True. I agree it’s already ugly and will get worse before it gets better. I have few tears stored for when the powers that be will fall. Though revolution means turning, and that the turning of revolutions can and does take many forms. It’s happening, and will happen of necessity. But how it happens and how quickly, and what gets created next, and what gets transformed, destroyed or spared, are open to many possibilities.
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