The Robots are coming

Have you got a job? Do you want to keep it? Maybe you should be looking over your shoulder. Machines are making humans obsolete in the workplace. Welcome to the twenty first century.

It's evolution at work. Biology is outmoded. Steel, plastic, and silicon is the future.

In truth, it's only common sense. Who in their right mind would employ bolshie, workshy, bastards when they could get twice the output for half the cost from a machine. And remember, no strikes.

Bank of America is testing “completely automated” branches, its latest push into self-service as CEO Brian Moynihan seeks to further lower costs at the Charlotte-based company, an executive said Tuesday.

Dean Athanasia, co-head of consumer banking, disclosed the new branches at a financial services forum in Florida, during a discussion on Bank of America’s efforts to cut expenses and improve efficiencies.

[ http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/banking/bank-watch-blog/article131267794.html ]

Well, I guess if you're planning a career move, it's best to give banking a miss.

I'm not worried.
They are programmed by humans, with all their faults and vanities.

Even if these machines are made of metal instead of flesh, they are bound to have their own vulnerabilities.

I'll just need to find out which part of these robots are the equivalent of a butt and kiss it.

Machines are programmed by humans, for now. But what happens when the machines start programming themselves?

They are still their creator's creations.

We'll just need to put the fear of God in them. It's a proven strategy that's been working for thousands of years.

Mmm ... I don't know. The fear of God doesn't seem to be unduly efficacious where humans are concerned.

Our machines are starting to speak a different language now, one that even the best coders can’t fully understand.

Over the past several years, the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley have aggressively pursued an approach to computing called machine learning. In traditional programming, an engineer writes explicit, step-by-step instructions for the computer to follow. With machine learning, programmers don’t encode computers with instructions. They train them. If you want to teach a neural network to recognize a cat, for instance, you don’t tell it to look for whiskers, ears, fur, and eyes. You simply show it thousands and thousands of photos of cats, and eventually it works things out.

[ www.wired.com/2016/05/the-end-of-code/ ]

With machine learning, the engineer never knows precisely how the computer accomplishes its tasks. The neural network’s operations are largely opaque and inscrutable. It is, in other words, a black box. And as these black boxes assume responsibility for more and more of our daily digital tasks, they are not only going to change our relationship to technology—they are going to change how we think about ourselves, our world, and our place within it.

[ www.wired.com/2016/05/the-end-of-code/ ]

The implications of an unparsable machine language aren’t just philosophical. For the past two decades, learning to code has been one of the surest routes to reliable employment—a fact not lost on all those parents enrolling their kids in after-school code academies. But a world run by neurally networked deep-learning machines requires a different workforce. Analysts have already started worrying about the impact of AI on the job market, as machines render old skills irrelevant. Programmers might soon get a taste of what that feels like themselves.

[ www.wired.com/2016/05/the-end-of-code/ ]

I can add this that's about it
lol

It would seem that the march of technology is mechanising pop stars' voices. With a bit of luck it shouldn't be long before the overpaid nonentities become redundant, and are replaced by machines:

It's not as if it's brain surgery that they're doing:

Now, talking of brain surgery:

When we talk about self-driving cars, we think of flashy companies like Uber, Tesla and Google, who are building vehicles designed to transport us around a Jetsons-like future. But the real and immediate upside is in trucking—a $700 billion industry where a third of the costs go to drivers. From a technological perspective, trucks are the quickest and easiest to replace en masse, since the vast majority of their travels take them along highways, which are infinitely more predictable than city streets. Plus, self-driving trucks are more efficient, which cuts down on fuel costs. States have already laid the foundation for an autonomous future, so this is 100% happening.

[ https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/02/self-driving-trucks-could-make-donald-trump-a-one-.html ]

Ive heard about this for awhile but only Cars , I hope there good WIFI or what ever it runs off,
I don't like the thought of tucks in convoy barrelling down the highway, Its hard enough to get Mobile phone reception in some places,

Researchers from MIT, the University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology joined forces for a project that reads like something out of a William Burroughs novel. Crafted from dried pig intestines, the little origami robot is designed to hatch from inside a swallowed capsule and unfold like an accordion.

Once inside the swallower’s stomach, the little meat ‘bot moves around with a “stick-slip” motion, utilizing the friction of its surroundings to propel itself forward, while steering with magnetic fields. Those magnets serve a dual function — they also go to work picking up small batteries swallowed by the ingester.

Apparently it’s a more widespread problem that you likely know. According to MIT’s numbers, 3,500 watch batteries are reported as swallowed in the U.S. each year. Some of them are gotten rid of the old fashioned way (you know, poopin’), but sometimes they burn the stomach or esophagus tissue while in there. So researchers figured this would be as good a use as any for the folding robot they’d been working on.

[ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/12/meatbot/ ]

While over in the land of the Prophet they've got their eye firmly fixed on practicalities:

lol that's funny Have u seen that space ex private Rocket in the states that they will reckon will do a orbit around the moon I suppose that's classed as a robot

And if you're planning on a little larceny, better watch out:

So, if you were planning a fulfilling career in property security, maybe it's time to think about garbage removal instead.

It would seem that the quantity of personal debt in the UK is reaching worrying levels again. People want the good things in life, but in many cases don't have the means to pay for them. Clearly, in too many cases, emoluments are lagging behind expenditure. And this, mark you, in a country with a low unemployment rate relative to other developed nations. So what happens when technological change forces more and more people to take pooly paid jobs? Is education the key? It would seem not:

Britain’s failure to create sufficient high-skilled jobs for its rising proportion of graduates means the money invested in education is being squandered, while young people are left crippled by student debts, warns a new report.

The mismatch between the number of university leavers and the jobs appropriate to their skills has left the UK with more than half of its graduates in non-graduate jobs, one of the highest rates in Europe, according to research commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

[ www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/19/uk-failed-create-enough-high-skilled-jobs-graduates-student-debt-report ]

Simply put, we are starting to reach the point where all but a lucky few will always receive inadequate rewards from employment. That, ultimately, will impact on consumption, which will, in turn, have a negative impact on employment. The situation, as it now stands, is untenable.