How hard will the robots make us work?

[labbe5]

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/2115 ... gle-amazon

In warehouses, call centers, and other sectors, intelligent machines are managing humans, and they’re making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous.

On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.

The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.

These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.

[Lobster]

Ai is the robo worker who recently responded to me when I had one of amazons security cameras almost stolen. Ai (AI - gettit! ) was pretending to be human, so a deliberate mistake was introduced. A similar algorithm was implemented by our local police non emergency AI ...

Here is what my well dressed criminal wore. Found the camera, have video of a potential suspect, can I send it to the police using an iPad ... no (email technology too hard for this apple device)
https://youtu.be/TLw4fLVdswY

Anyway for the Preston Bezos tinhats:
https://www.ctacorp.com/cyber-security/

... and remember your next nurse may be a robot

[Fossil]

... and remember your next nurse may be a robot....

As long as it ain't a proctologist!

[Moose On The Loose]

I for one welcome our new electronic overlords.

The luddites were folks who opposed the new Jacquard looms that were automating the cloth production and putting weavers out of jobs. Today we like woven materials with complex patterns on them. Those were made possible by the very machines that they hated.

The ATM machine has put many tellers out of a job but I doubt we would get rid of them today. I am not someone who favors the latest automatically but those things are how I do almost all my banking.

Almost all passenger aircraft are actually flown almost entirely by the computer. NTSB (US National Transportation Safety Board) almost always attributes any crash to "pilot error". Currently the NTSB is run by humans so I can't see how computers could blame the people more on that one.

We are coming up on a another election here in the US so the Russian 'bots are busily populating the social media full of hate speech and conspiracy theories. Soon they will be the source of almost all social media content.

I am currently called on to design some RF stuff. I didn't get out my Smith Chart or slide rule to do any of it. Software has done all the hard stuff so far.

So far there is no evidence that robots eat meat. Thus when we are farmed and cared for we won't have to worry when they want us to form a line and walk up a ramp.

[musher0]

No one will see the difference.
Human bosses are / were so predictable.
That's why their behavior could easily be translated into algorithms.
(Where's that tongue-in-cheek icon?)