Nicholas West

Activist Post

It has previously been theorized that all humans will be outsourced to robots by the 2045 date of The Singularity. However, we already are seeing the rapid replacement of workers in a wide variety of areas, and it is having an undeniable economic impact.

The science of artificial intelligence is being fully embraced by all of the major tech companies. With such investment behind various robotic and A.I. initiatives, we are beginning to see a strong acceleration toward replacing humans as completely as possible.

One entrepreneur in the field is now saying that for specific jobs there very well could be 100% replacement in just 5 years.

The economic elite have not hidden their agenda of replacing human labor with machines. Speaking at the most recent Davos economic conference – widely considered to be the elite economic forum to discuss trends and political strategy – an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Jeremy Howard, had some stunning announcements that indicate a major shift in employment is set to occur very soon.

Howard stated that we have hit a critical threshold where machine intelligence is performing better than even the leading experts in the fields of medicine, science, and banking, among others. Howard went on to assert that we are about to encounter conditions akin to those that occurred after the Industrial Revolution replaced manufacturing and agricultural workers to a vast degree.

And this is for highly skilled labor. But as A.I. entrepreneur and owner of London Brand Management, Dmitry Askenov, asserts – salespeople, call center staff and customer service personnel are really on the chopping block.

In these types of information acquisition and information relay jobs, computers could function faster and with a far lesser degree of error. As Askenov’s company website indicates:

For example, if someone asks a question, the system understands it and finds an answer, and gets back in the same tone of voice; it ‘echo’s’ the sentiment. If the same person asks five more questions, the system understands this person is engaging with the product and can notify one or more of the appropriate people in the organisation who can then follow up the customer’s interest. The only difference between how a real human would do this and our system is the speed of the reply and that our system is tireless – it can work 24/7/365 and can reply to a potential customer’s question with the correct information in milliseconds.

Our system, like a human, understands natural language such as questions and feedback as well a the product knowledge held by clients and in the public domain. It then finds the required information, performs programmed actions and replies as a human would. (Source)

Some people might believe that computers are still in the stages of merely processing information and could never communicate in a human manner to be equally effective where social cues are concerned. Not so, says Askenov:

It not only reads the keywords and understands the kind of information you are trying to learn; it also interprets context, sentiment, and can even understand humour. It also remembers and learns as you talk to it, so it’s capable of having a proper conversation.

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