2024 UPDATE!! Altman: prepare for AI to be "uncomfortable" 33% US jobs gone..SKYNET, AI medical advances? BASIC INCOME? 1st AI MOVIE! AI MAYOR!!

[bnew]

Two-thirds of Americans say AI could do their job

Advanced artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have sparked fears that the new technology could soon replace many careers, and workers believe it, according to a new survey.

www.foxbusiness.com

Two-thirds of Americans say AI could do their job​

Vast majority of US workers admit artificial intelligence tools could replace them, according to a recent survey​

By Breck Dumas FOXBusiness

We will see massive innovation in artificial intelligence: C3 AI CEO Tom Siebel​

C3 AI CEO Tom Siebel provides insight on the unimaginably powerful technology on The Claman Countdown.

Long before generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT emerged for public use, there were fears that AI would eventually replace humans in many existing careers. Now, most American workers believe AI could do their jobs, according to new data.

A recent survey conducted by Spokeo found that despite seeing the potential benefits of AI, 66.6% of the 1,027 respondents admitted AI could carry out their workplace duties, and 74.8% said they were concerned about the technology's impact on their industry as a whole.

A recent survey by Spokeo found most American workers believe AI could do their jobs, but they still see benefits of the technology in the long term. (iStock / iStock)

"After a year of headlines about AI taking over the world, it’s no surprise that 2 in 3 now think that AI could do their job," Spokeo CEO Harrison Tang told FOX Business. "We never would have dreamed of how impactful ChatGPT would be on the world."

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

"Whether it’s because people realize that a lot of work can be easily automated, or they believe the hype in the media that AI is more advanced and powerful than it is, the AI box has now been opened."

Nearly three out of four workers surveyed said they were concerned about the impact AI will have on their industries. (iStock / iStock)

The poll found U.S. workers are optimistic about what AI could mean for the future of work, with 78.1% saying they believe the technology could reduce some of the stresses on the job, and 76.7% saying they think AI will reduce the number of working days in the week for the average American.

WHAT IS CHATGPT?

The vast majority of those surveyed, 79.1%, said they think employers should offer training for ChatGPT and other AI tools.

Most survey respondents said they believe AI does have the ability to make their jobs easier. (iStock)

Tang said it is interesting to see the conflict in the public's current perception of AI, with the majority seeing long-term benefits while expressing concern for their livelihoods in the short term. He says the fears are in the unknown, and business leaders will need to address this by highlighting the benefits and easing concerns among workers.

"While AI sounds omniscient, we should have confidence in humanity’s ability to adapt, which we’ve done through millions of years of evolution," Tang said. "AI is simply a tool that we can use and control for good. AI will not replace humans, but it will replace those who don’t embrace it."

 

[bnew]

https://archive.is/EWyaI

Amazon got more than 750.000 robots deployed.

Most people don’t realize how fast the robotics industry is scaling

Amazon is the perfect candidate.

10 years ago, robots were practically non-existent in their global warehouse and distribution network.

But this is the actual acceleration ramp-up.

2013: 1,000
2014: 15,000
2017: 100,000
2019: 200,000
2021: 350,000
2022: 520,000
2023: 750,000

Let’s zoom in on the two last jumps.

400,000 additional robotic units in roughly two years.

That results in thousand of new units deployed *every week*

It’s clear. Beyond doubt. That AI, robotics, computer vision, will and is replacing a lot of human labor. And will continue accelerating that progress in the next decade.

It’s important to note that this will also accelerate the need for more high-skilled work. Make industry safer.

The biggest challenge we will face is the grandeur of re-skilling and up-skilling that will be facing the workforce in a relative short period of time ahead.

We’ve entered the Era of Robotics and The Age of Intelligence all at once.

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

It’s important to note that this will also accelerate the need for more high-skilled work. Make industry safer.

The biggest challenge we will face is the grandeur of re-skilling and up-skilling that will be facing the workforce in a relative short period of time ahead.

This part is propaganda.

It's the same shyt that's said every time an industry is destroyed, whether by globalization or automation.

Think about it.

Make industry safer? Usually when we talk about safety, it's with employees/consumers in mind.


OSHA: Yeah I'm here because our office received information of an industrial accident involving the electrocution of 13 workers


CEO: Those were robotic carts. We had a power surge that's all.

OSHA: Uh oh ok well...um what about....I'll need to see

CEO: Our new safety protocols, yes here they are *holds up IPAD to inspector's face*

OSHA: Well, let me see...well you know it's still req.....

CEO: Yes we're required to have manual human safety interventions but as you well know that's only if you don't have an approved AI powered master safety plan with 24/7 real time monitoring....WHICH we have.

OSHA: hmm....well I'll still

CEO:

 

[bnew]

Avatars, robots and AI: Japan turns to innovation to tackle labour crisis

Farmers, retailers and builders rethink business models as world’s fastest-ageing society runs out of workers

www.ft.com

Avatars, robots and AI: Japan turns to innovation to tackle labour crisis​

Farmers, retailers and builders rethink business models as world’s fastest-ageing society runs out of workers

At some branches of Japanese convenience store Lawsons, an avatar greets customers © FT montage

Kana Inagaki, Leo Lewis and David Keohane in Tokyo

YESTERDAY

72

With 500 days to go before the spring 2025 opening of the Osaka World Expo, its secretary-general Hiroyuki Ishige reassured the public that the multibillion-dollar global showcase would be ready on time.

Ishige’s confidence may be genuine, but the fact that he had to address the question at all is the result of a crisis far beyond his control. The Expo — a dusty, barren site with little yet built — is the most high-profile victim of a national shortage of construction workers.

A shortfall of workers in the world’s fastest-ageing economy is profoundly affecting the way the government, companies and people operate now and think about the future.

Even the most iconic features of Japan’s famous service economy are in jeopardy. Central Japan Railway ended the beloved food trolley on the Tokyo-Osaka bullet train in October, while across the country vending machines are increasingly left unfilled for days.

“Japan’s labour shortage is occurring regardless of whether the economy is doing well or not,” said Shoto Furuya, chief researcher at the Recruit Works Institute. “We are beginning to fall short of essential services on which we rely on to maintain people’s lifestyles and social infrastructure.”

RWI estimates that the country will have a labour shortage of 11mn people by 2040, with the number of people above age 65 — who already account for nearly 30 per cent of the population — expected to hit its peak in 2042.

In the past decade, Japan has relied on female and elderly workers in the face of strict restrictions on hiring overseas workers. But Naruhisa Nakagawa, founder of hedge fund Caygan Capital, said from this year this would no longer be enough and the country’s labour force would start to dwindle.

How Asia’s largest advanced economy responds to this labour crisis will be closely watched, not least by its neighbour China, whose population has also begun to shrink.

One way Japan is tackling the demographic challenge is by introducing avatars, robots and artificial intelligence to the workforce in key sectors:

Japan’s construction industry has long struggled to hire workers despite attempts to attract more women and young workers by trying everything from raising wages and offering more fashionable work uniforms to installing portable female toilets at building sites.

Still, the number of people employed in the sector has declined 30 per cent to 4.8mn workers from its peak in 1997, according to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.

The ministry data also shows that only 12 per cent of construction workers are aged under 29, while about 36 per cent are over the age of 55. So severe are the sector’s staffing problems that it was given five years to prepare for new labour rules coming into force in April that would curtail overtime for construction workers and truck drivers.

As the reality of these shortages have hit, the estimated cost of the Expo has doubled to more than $1.6bn, as contractors are forced to pay more to entice workers. Some countries, fearing soaring costs and delays, are scaling back their presence. Japan’s great national showcase could be directly harmed by its labour shortages, diplomats warned.

For Daniel Blank, the chief executive of start-up Toggle, the crisis presents a business opportunity.

Blank travelled from New York to Japan last year to promote the use of industrial robots to automate the most labour-intensive process for construction companies: the assembly of reinforcement bars. Last year, Toggle raised a combined $1.5mn investment from Tokyu Construction and Takemura, another Japanese construction group.

“Japanese companies are scouting for new technology all over the world,” Blank said. “It’s really all driven by the shortage issue. With labour becoming more expensive and harder to find, you need to find new ways to deliver construction projects.”

For decades, the giant confectionery maker Lotte has delivered its chocolate-filled, bear-shaped biscuits, Koala’s March, by lorry. Now, in preparation for an acute driver shortage as the change in overtime rules comes into effect, one of the nation’s favourite children’s snacks will be delivered by train.

Other companies across Japan, including carmaker Toyota and ecommerce group Rakuten, are making similar preparations, with the development of robots and self-driving vehicles as well as consolidations with smaller rivals.

Japan’s roughly 4mn vending machines require an army of truck drivers to keep them filled. Increasingly, the gaps between refills are widening, especially in rural areas and even in large cities. The industry is rushing to adapt. JR East Cross Station, a food and drink supplier, started using trains in November to transport cans of drinks to refill some vending machines.

At its Motomachi plant in Aichi prefecture in central Japan, Toyota has started using a fleet of “vehicle logistics robots” to pick up and move cars to the loading area. Eventually, the carmaker hopes to replace 22 human workers at the yard with 10 robots.

“The shortage of truck drivers is not just a 2024 issue but a problem we have faced from a very long time ago,” a Toyota manager said. “These efforts alone will not make up for the number of drivers we need.”

In the farmlands of Miyazaki prefecture in southern Japan last summer, a robot duck called Raicho 1 — by Kyoto-based robot maker Tmsuk — took to the rice paddies to churn up weeds. The solar-powered robot was just one of a suite of drones and robots designed to sow, nurture and harvest a standard rice crop without the use of humans. A high-pressure water cannon was used to scare off the wild boar and deer that now roam more freely as the human population in the area has declined.

The experiment that ended with the October rice harvest produced a potentially exciting result for both the company and Japan: the overall number of human hours involved in the process fell from 529 to 29, a 95 per cent reduction in manpower with only a 20 per cent reduction in total rice yield.

As the Japanese population has shrunk and aged, its agricultural labour shortages have become dire. Government data shows that in calorie terms the country was self-sufficient for 38 per cent of its needs in 2022, against a government target of 45 per cent by 2030.

That target increasingly looks impossible to hit, with the national average rate of abandoned farmlands now exceeding 10 per cent. As prime arable land has gone to pasture, analysts warn that some of Japan’s most famous agricultural products, including regional sakes and other speciality foods, could be lost.

With 43 per cent of Japanese farmers aged over 75 and the average age of all farmers at almost 68, Tmsuk’s chief executive and founder Yoichi Takamoto said Japan had little choice but to embrace a robot labour force.

In a small convenience store in central Tokyo that sells everything from toothpaste to egg sandwiches and socks, a smiling member of staff welcomes customers at the door. Amiable and animated, it offers greetings and advice from a 4ft screen.

The newly installed avatar is controlled remotely by an employee at retail chain Lawsons and is part of a trial with Avita, the company behind the technology.

“We started to think about this during the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to protect workers and it’s now a way to allow people to work who would otherwise struggle to be physically present in stores,” said Kazuki Tsukiuda, a senior Lawson executive.

Going forward, the plan is for each operator — be it a working parent, an older person returning to the workforce or someone with a disability who prefers to work from home — to control three or four avatars, enabling the retail chain to staff night shifts and rural locations.

Recommended

The Top Line Kana Inagaki

Japan’s acute labour shortages fuel a long-awaited domestic consolidation




Labour shortages have forced Japanese retailers and convenience stores, known as combini, to cut back hours and services. According to the Japan Franchise Association, the country’s convenience stores were short of 172,000 workers in 2020 and the trade body forecasts a gap of 101,000 workers by 2025. As a result, the association says 87 per cent of combini are now open 24 hours, compared with 92 per cent at the end of August 2019.

Hiring foreign students, who are able to work despite the country’s tight restrictions on immigration, is another option. But some need weeks of training to meet customer expectations. “There are only a few who understand the Japanese way of polite and genuine customer service and can deliver that in Japanese,” said Tsukiuda.

While just eight Lawsons have avatars currently, Shogo Nishiguchi, chief operating officer at Avita, said the “mission” was to have 100,000 avatar operators working across Japan by 2030. “In rural areas, avatars can keep stores open,” said Tsukiuda. “Even if we doubled wages, there just isn’t anyone to hire.”

 

[bnew]

AI is coming for architecture

Programs such as Dall-E and Midjourney are revolutionising the designs of buildings, but threatening the industry too

www.ft.com

AI is coming for architecture​

Programs such as Dall-E and Midjourney are revolutionising the designs of buildings, but threatening the industry too

A sketch and the AI image generated from it © FT montage/LookxAI/Shenzhen XKool Technology

Edwin Heathcote

JANUARY 20 2024

11

Scroll through Instagram and, if the algorithm has deduced you're interested in architecture, you will find threads of bizarre, often surreal buildings that seem possible but not probable. There are futuristic swirls of space-age stuff coagulated in buildings that evoke Zaha Hadid. There are Afrofuturist cityscapes with mud towers and spaceship docking stations which might be scenes from Wakanda, home of Marvel’s Black Panther. And there are exquisite modern interiors, complete with lens flare and dust motes so real you could touch them. All of these have been generated in seconds by AI on the back of a few words of prompting.

Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have made what might have taken an extremely skilled illustrator or animator a week to do into something any of us can commission in a few moments. There is no doubt those jobs are at terminal risk. Architects are already using AI to handle mundane tasks from distributing parking spaces and bathrooms to arranging blocks on an urban plan.

In the more accessible and more ubiquitous visual world of social media, one designer who has made waves through the application of AI to architectural imagery is Hassan Ragab. His striking works veer from dreamlike futuristic architectures in wild natural settings to surreal mash-ups of his native Egyptian cities with steampunk organicism, embracing everything from informal settlements and shabby 1970s towers to elaborate mosques and Antoni Gaudí. “It's nonstop,” he tells me. “Every day there's something new and nobody really understands what's going on. Everybody is rushing in without really thinking about what they're doing.

“In that way, it's so different to architecture, which is so slow. I left my practice in 2019 and they're still working on the same building.” The platform for Ragab's designs is not the construction site but social media. He became viral through the seductive powers of his pictures. “It is very empowering,” he says. “It allows us a freedom.” Ragab might not be having any effect on real architecture yet, but architecture is now being used extensively by non-architects as a visual medium in itself. That is interesting and will feed back into real architecture as people become more sophisticated with seeing and understanding and manipulating AI visions.

Does he think AI will put architects out of business? “There is this idea,” he replies after a pause, “that humans are the only species, the only beings that can create ideas. That is not true any more. AI can do all these incredible things. Everything is possible and we should not be afraid, we should welcome it.”

While Ragab and others are provoking AI to hallucinate new, hybrid architectures, always strange and often alien, Wanyu He is determinedly designing them to be built. A former employee of Rem Koolhaas's OMA, she founded XKool in Shenzhen in 2016 to utilise AI for design and construction. The problem when He shows me the buildings which have resulted from the AI collaborations is that, at least so far, they don't look any different from (in fact they look clunkier than) most other mass development in China.

“If it looks like that,” she says, “that is because of human decisions. Because of economies.” She explains that the way developers are using AI now is to make buildings cheaper. “In the future, architects will be empowered to show the client thousands of options and refine the best one so that even on a low budget you will be able to get the best building.”

Unusually for an architect, she is also a writer of science fiction. “We worry about AI escaping human control and causing a disaster for mankind, and in my novels most of the future AI scenarios are not” — she thinks for a moment — “optimistic,” she says, with a slightly nervous giggle. “But it is this writing which gave me an awareness to prevent these things happening. AI should be a co-pilot and a friend, not a replacement for architects.”

Among the hyperinflating barrage of images on social media for the most extravagant and futuristic visions of AI-generated structures, the version of the future that crops up most frequently might well bear a resemblance to the work of Zaha Hadid Architects. Hadid seemed to predict a future suggested by sci-fi, rather than (the possibly more realistic) one that just resembles decline and the world as a huge informal settlement. Since she died in 2016, her practice has been headed by techno-optimist and libertarian Patrik Schumacher, who made waves when he revealed that the practice had been using AI models to regurgitate its own work, feeding in past projects to generate new ones.

At ZHA’s slick London offices, Shajay Bhooshan, head of the computation and design research team, clarifies what Schumacher meant. “Using AI as a sketching tool is low-hanging fruit. Images it has ingested come from our own buildings, so it is a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model fed with our own designs. What comes out depends on what images we choose to train the model with. So it is not just ZHA buildings but enough other architecture to give it a wider cultural understanding.”

He shows me on a screen a complex plan of a city settled into a valley. “Frankly, it is easier to just feed in our own work, though, because of copyright issues, but otherwise we put in everything, right back to Roman masonry.”

How do they find AI most useful? “It allows us to front-load,” he says. “It augments the process so we can get to what the client wants quicker with faster iterations and changes. It can then make trade-offs, say between budget and environmental impact, between pedestrians and traffic.” He then flips to another urban plan. “In many ways it makes good design more rapid and more affordable.”

And the downsides? “This is a rapidly changing technology,” he says. “There's unexplainability, it is highly complex and we don't always know how the input is converted to output. Midjourney and ChatGPT have been so successful because anyone can use them and millions are, whereas this field is still very small. We need to direct AI towards valuable architectural tasks, not just images for Instagram, otherwise it will not evolve.”

Less of a techno-optimist is Adam Greenfield. A writer, urbanist and former psyops specialist in the US Army, Greenfield suggests architects have yet to wake up to the potential destruction of their profession. “AI will strip away virtually everything that an architect does,” he says. But won’t architects be able to survive as brands, in the way fashion labels are now, with the prestige of a real Foster or Hadid building? “Do we really think that a client in the Emirates or an emerging economy is going to pay a premium for the presence of the ego when they could probably have their nephew feeding some prompts into an AI generator and probably get something even more imaginative?

“This is existential for architects . . . The people who are now most enthusiastic about AI have no idea what's being done to them. What we need to ask at this stage is what are we here for? If we're not here to bring our life experiences to bear on complex problems through our creativity, then what's left? Eat and shyt? The things AI is being called to do are the things which give us a stake in existence.”

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

Fears Pentagon was 'building killer robots' sparks stricter AI rules

The Pentagon updated its 2012 directive on autonomous weapons systems to put an oversight and approval process in place in response to claims its 'building killer robots.'

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[bnew]

Alphabet cuts ties with Australian AI firm that helped train Bard and Google Search

Alphabet has ended its contractual work with Appen, the artificial intelligence data firm that helped train Google's chatbot Bard and Google Search results.

www.cnbc.com

Alphabet cuts ties with Australian AI firm that helped train Bard and Google Search​

PUBLISHED TUE, JAN 23 2024 12:25 PM EST
UPDATED TUE, JAN 23 2024 2:41 PM EST

Hayden Field @HAYDENFIELD

KEY POINTS

• Alphabet has cut all contractual ties with Appen, the artificial intelligence data firm that helped train Google’s chatbot Bard, Google Search results and other AI products.
• Alphabet contracts account for roughly one-third of Appen’s business revenue.
• Appen has helped train AI models for a star-studded list of tech behemoths, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Apple, Adobe, Google and Amazon.
  

In this article

• GOOGL+2.11 (+1.43%)
• APX-AU+0.05 (+17.54%)

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai departs federal court on October 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. Pichai testified on Monday to defend his company in the largest antitrust case since the 1990s.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Alphabet has cut contractual ties with Appen, the artificial intelligence data firm that helped train Google’s chatbot Bard, Google Search results and other AI products.

After a “strategic review process,” Alphabet notified Appen over the weekend of the termination, which will go into effect March 19, according to a filing from Appen. The company said it had “no prior knowledge of Google’s decision to terminate the contract.”

Alphabet accounted for roughly one-third of Appen’s revenue, meaning the decision to end the relationship will impact “at least two thousand subcontracted Alphabet workers,” according to a statement Monday from the Alphabet Workers Union.

Appen, based in Australia, has helped train AI models for a star-studded list of tech behemoths. Five customers — Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google and Amazon — have in the past accounted for 80% of Appen’s revenue. Appen has a platform of about 1 million freelance workers in more than 170 countries.

In 2023, revenue from work with Alphabet totaled $82.8 million of Appen’s $273 million in sales for the year, according to Monday’s filing.

Despite Appen’s enviable client list and its nearly 30-year history, the company has struggled in recent years with a loss of customers, a string of executive departures and plummeting financials — even as generative AI tools increased demand for training data. Revenue dropped 30% in 2023, after declining 13% a year earlier, which the company attributed in part to “challenging external operating and macro conditions.”

In August 2020, Appen’s shares peaked at AU$42.44 ($27.08) on the Australian Securities Exchange, sending its market cap to the equivalent of $4.3 billion. Now, the stock is trading at around 28 Australian cents, down more than 99% since its peak.

Former employees, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told CNBC in September that the company’s current struggle to pivot to generative AI reflects years of weak quality controls and a disjointed organizational structure.

Appen’s past work for tech companies has been on projects like evaluating the relevance of search results, helping AI assistants understand requests in different accents, categorizing e-commerce images using AI and building out map locations of electric vehicle charging stations, according to public information and interviews conducted by CNBC.

Appen has also touted its work on search relevance for Adobe and on translation services for Microsoft, as well as in providing training data for lidar companies, security applications and automotive manufacturers.

But large language models of today operate differently. The underlying LLMs behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are scouring the digital universe to provide sophisticated answers and advanced images in response to simple text queries. Companies are spending far more on processors from Nvidia and less on Appen.

Google and Appen have had conflicts in the past, namely a dispute about wages. In 2019, Google said its contractors would need to pay their workers $15 an hour. Appen didn’t meet that requirement, according to public letters written by some workers.

In January 2023, after months of organizing, raises went into effect for Appen freelancers working on the Bard chatbot and other Google products. The rates went up to between $14 and $14.50 per hour.

But labor issues persisted. In June, Appen faced charges from the U.S. National Labor Relations Board after allegedly firing six freelancers who spoke out publicly about frustrations with workplace conditions. The workers were later reinstated.

Appen wrote in Monday’s filing that it will focus on managing costs, turning the business around and providing customers with quality AI data.

“Appen will immediately adjust its strategic priorities following the notification of the Google contract termination and provide further details in its FY23 full year results on 27 February 2024,” the company wrote.

 

[bnew]

AI is still too expensive to replace humans in most jobs, MIT study finds

Less than 1 in 4 humans could be effectively replaced in terms of dollar wages, researchers concluded.

fortune.com

AI far too expensive to replace humans in most jobs, MIT study finds​

BY SARITHA RAI AND BLOOMBERG

January 22, 2024 at 6:05 PM EST

Bettina Martin (SPD), the Minister of Science and European Affairs of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany, is greeted by the Pepper robot during a visit to the Center for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Rostock.
JENS BÜTTNER—DPA/GETTY IMAGES

Artificial intelligence can’t replace the majority of jobs right now in cost-effective ways, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a study that sought to address fears about AI replacing humans in a swath of industries.

In one of the first in-depth probes of the viability of AI displacing labor, researchers modeled the cost attractiveness of automating various tasks in the US, concentrating on jobs where computer vision was employed — for instance, teachers and property appraisers. They found only 23% of workers, measured in terms of dollar wages, could be effectively supplanted. In other cases, because AI-assisted visual recognition is expensive to install and operate, humans did the job more economically.

The adoption of AI across industries accelerated last year after OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative tools showed the technology’s potential. Tech firms from Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. in the U.S. to Baidu Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. in China rolled out new AI services and ramped up development plans — at a pace that some industry leaders cautioned was recklessly fast. Fears about AI’s impact on jobs have long been a central concern.

“‘Machines will steal our jobs’ is a sentiment frequently expressed during times of rapid technological change. Such anxiety has re-emerged with the creation of large language models,” the researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory said in the 45-page paper titled Beyond AI Exposure. “We find that only 23% of worker compensation ‘exposed’ to AI computer vision would be cost-effective for firms to automate because of the large upfront costs of AI systems.”

Computer vision is a field of AI that enables machines to derive meaningful information from digital images and other visual inputs, with its most ubiquitous applications showing up in object detection systems for autonomous driving or in helping categorize photos on smartphones.

The cost-benefit ratio of computer vision is most favorable in segments like retail, transportation and warehousing, all areas where Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are prominent. It’s also feasible in the health-care context, MIT’s paper said. A more aggressive AI rollout, especially via AI-as-a-service subscription offerings, could scale up other uses and make them more viable, the authors said.

The study was funded by the MIT- IBM Watson AI Lab and used online surveys to collect data on about 1,000 visually-assisted tasks across 800 occupations. Only 3% of such tasks can be automated cost-effectively today, but that could rise to 40% by 2030 if data costs fall and accuracy improves, the researchers said.

The sophistication of ChatGPT and rivals like Google’s Bard has rekindled concern about AI plundering jobs, as the new chatbots show proficiency in tasks previously only humans were capable of performing. The International Monetary Fund said last week that almost 40% of jobs globally would be impacted and that policymakers would need to carefully balance AI’s potential with the negative fallout.

At the World Economic Forum at Davos last week, many discussions focused on AI displacing the workforce. The co-founder of Inflection AI and Google’s DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman, said that AI systems are “fundamentally labor-replacing tools.”

One case study in the paper looked at a hypothetical bakery. Bakers visually inspect ingredients for quality control on a daily basis, but that comprises only 6% of their duties, the researchers said. The saving in time and wages from implementing cameras and an AI system is still far from the cost of such a technological upgrade, they concluded.

“Our study examines the usage of computer vision across the economy, examining its applicability to each occupation across nearly every industry and sector,” said Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech Research Project at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. “We show that there will be more automation in retail and health-care, and less in areas like construction, mining or real estate,” he said via email.

 

[bnew]

Samsung builds entirely AI-powered chip factory; humans no longer needed

Copyright © BusinessAMBE 2023 Summary. Samsung Electronics plans to fully automate its semiconductor factories by 2030, where smart sensors will control the manufacturing process. The world's...

www.marketscreener.com

Samsung builds entirely AI-powered chip factory; humans no longer needed​

January 25, 2024 at 11:11 am EST

Copyright © Business AMBE 2023

Summary. Samsung Electronics plans to fully automate its semiconductor factories by 2030, where "smart sensors" will control the manufacturing process. The world's largest maker of memory chips wants to create an "artificial intelligence factory" that operates without human labor.

This innovation could revolutionize the semiconductor industry, potentially leading to increased efficiency and reduced costs. That transition also highlights ethical issues about AI's role in the industry.

In the news. Samsung is working on a "Smart Sensing System" to improve profitability and change factory dynamics.

• The company has plans to fully automate its manufacturing facilities by 2030.

Zoom in. Samsung has indicated since last summer that it wants to use AI to optimize integrated circuit (IC) design, material development, manufacturing, yield improvement and packaging.

• Identifying the cause of defects in the manufacturing process is also a top priority of the AI plan.
  
  
  • Smart sensors are being developed for this purpose. These measure plasma uniformity and detect defects in real time, which is essential for processes such as deposition, etching and cleaning.
    
• Samsung is also moving from dependence on foreign suppliers to in-house development, in its quest for technological independence.
  

Zoom out. Samsung's initiative is indicative of a broader trend toward automation and AI in the manufacturing sector.

• But the shift toward AI and automation raises questions about the future of employment and the role of human workers in an increasingly technological world.
• Several studies predict a labor market tsunami as more and more companies introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI). These predict the disappearance of 1 in 4 to even 1 in 3 jobs. Fortunately, a Deutsche Bank study counters this.
  

© The Content Exchange, source News

 

[bnew]

https://archive.is/72N4u

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

https://archive.is/72N4u

https://www.thecoli.com/threads/ai-is-going-to-ruin-the-internet.985703/

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ai-is-starting-to-threaten-white-collar-jobs-few-industries-are-immune-9cdbcb90

 

[re'up]

Lots of people I know are in that category. Men/women who are like 33-35, and have white collar jobs, mostly based on emails and zoom meetings, and scheduling. That transition from work from home to you are no longer needed, there's some connection there. I never had that kind of a job, but the fear to me would be that, if you can do this from home, do we need you at all? Are we paying you to send emails and sit at home in sweats?

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

Lots of people I know are in that category. Men/women who are like 33-35, and have white collar jobs, mostly based on emails and zoom meetings, and scheduling. That transition from work from home to you are no longer needed, there's some connection there. I never had that kind of a job, but the fear to me would be that, if you can do this from home, do we need you at all? Are we paying you to send emails and sit at home in sweats?

Yup. A LOT of fat to be cut.

Speaking of cuts...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/13/world/mira-robot-first-surgery-in-space-scn/index.html

 

[Gritsngravy]

https://archive.is/EWyaI

Amazon got more than 750.000 robots deployed.

Most people don’t realize how fast the robotics industry is scaling

Amazon is the perfect candidate.

10 years ago, robots were practically non-existent in their global warehouse and distribution network.

But this is the actual acceleration ramp-up.

2013: 1,000
2014: 15,000
2017: 100,000
2019: 200,000
2021: 350,000
2022: 520,000
2023: 750,000

Let’s zoom in on the two last jumps.

400,000 additional robotic units in roughly two years.

That results in thousand of new units deployed *every week*

It’s clear. Beyond doubt. That AI, robotics, computer vision, will and is replacing a lot of human labor. And will continue accelerating that progress in the next decade.

It’s important to note that this will also accelerate the need for more high-skilled work. Make industry safer.

The biggest challenge we will face is the grandeur of re-skilling and up-skilling that will be facing the workforce in a relative short period of time ahead.

We’ve entered the Era of Robotics and The Age of Intelligence all at once.

I been inside then Amazon factories, they can 100% automate majority of the work in there, most of the shyt is already done by machines to an extent anyway

But Amazon I think is the biggest employer, the ripple effect it would cause if they really transitioned mostly to robots would fukk the country up if a plan ant in olace