AI. Are You Concerned?

[Raven]

It's on the TV more and more, I don't like it and yes it both worries and scares me. I think we are digging our own graves with this.
More jobs lost all the time, people becoming unemployed and having to claim benefits, the government squawking about having too many costing too much, as the AI gradually take over everything.
Where will it end?
What if the bods let these things get too clever? They could decide we are not needed, who's to stop them?
NO, I think it's a big mistake getting involved with a project like this.

[klondike]

We are a very long way from any takeover. Not to say that many jobs couldn't be done by AI. In fact AI would be able to make just as good a job of mending potholes as my local council.

[Alex]

It doesn't worry me, people will always be needed for when the robots break down 

[Jacqueline]

So if jobs are going why do they say we need mass immigration? dosen't make sense.

[klondike]

I worked at Ford Parts in the 70s and early 80s. There was a huge section of accounts people that ran the length of one side of the main office block. I went back there on a contract in the mid 90s. All those accounting jobs had gone. Instead those desks were all filled with people working in IT.  They weren't Ford people though - most were employees of the big outsourcer who had taken over most of the IT and who I was contracting with. 

[Raven]

BBC News - 'Inevitable' jobs will be more automated, says new AI adviser
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66128106 

[Michael Rolls]

back in the 60s I was in charge of an accounts section of 24 clerks and two typists. The clerks spent their days entering orders into ledgers with boring entries like '12/s/1 soap toilet 24 @1d 2/-'
They were all married ladies doing it for pin money. Computers were still a thing of the future for Surrey County Council, but Middlesex had just installed a computer to handle just that sort of task, so my boss and I went to see our opposite numbers to discuss the possibility of hiring time on their computer which they reckoned could do the whole of my sections week's work in one day a week. Just one problem - the charge for that day would have been more than the entire salary bill for a week of my section.
Things have, of course, moved on!

[klondike]

Indeed so. The work would be outsourced to India these days and you'd have no typists but 48 well paid folk sorting out the cockups made by the outsourcers.

[Michael Rolls]

very probably!

[Scrumpy]

It doesn't worry me, people will always be needed for when the robots break down 

I remember the fantasy film  West World  with Yul Brynner... Robots controlled by humans... They very soon became like those that were controlling them..
  Very clever in it's day..

[klondike]

There is a series with the same name and basic idea. I enjoyed the first two seasons but gave up on the third where they had left the WestWorld complex and were among us incognito.

It's lizards not robots.

[JBR]

There is a series with the same name and basic idea. I enjoyed the first two seasons but gave up on the third where they had left the WestWorld complex and were among us incognito.

It's lizards not robots.

Excellent!
I have copied and saved that for future use!  Thanks.

[klondike]

Could do with an update of course. I probably still have the morphing software. Might wait till we get the next PM though. After all they are a bit like buses these days.

[klondike]

Here's an update

[Michael Rolls]

an improvement!