Robots are coming for more and more of our jobs, and not just low-wage ones, says Zeynep Tufekci in the Sunday New York Times. I’ve written recently that robots can replace writers and that they can assist in the production of pretzels and beer. But that’s not all.
Tufekci, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, cites a machine that performs Pap smear diagnostics just as a well-compensated college-educated lab technician might, an embodied avatar kiosk with emotion-detection software that acts as an immigration agent, and emotional-processing software that can deliver “mood-targeted” advertising.
Robots, Tufekci writes, require not only sophisticated algorithms but also vast amounts of human-generated data harvested from the digital world. The robots, she writes, don’t necessarily outperform humans but do a “good enough” job without the cost and control issues associated with “pesky humans.”
Tufekci raises the interesting point that motivations for replacing humans with machines used to be spoken about much more openly. She cites ads for an automated accounting system; the ads ran in leading business publications in 1967 and urged companies to replace humans with automated systems that “can’t quit, forget, or get pregnant.”
Today, purveyors of automation would be more circumspect, but the goals remain the same, notes Tufekci: “Replace humans with machines.”
Aside from becoming pregnant, perhaps the only thing a robot can’t do is get sarcastic. But I’m sure that’s only a matter of time.
Concludes Tufekci, “We don’t need to reject or blame technology. This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another.”
