Digitalisation, ai and Robotics in the New Workplace

Robots in China: labour market dominates

AI in a Japanese Insurance Company

• “A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders……The system is based on IBM’s Watson Explorer, which, according to the tech firm, possesses “cognitive technology that can think like a human”, enabling it to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video”. (Guardian, 5th January 2017)
• The technology will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, according to the Mainichi Shimbun…..While the use of AI will drastically reduce the time needed to calculate Fukoku Mutual’s payouts – which reportedly totalled 132,000 during the current financial year – the sums will not be paid until they have been approved by a member of staff, the newspaper said.
• “AI is not good at answering the type of questions that require an ability to grasp meanings across a broad spectrum,” Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics, told Kyodo news agency.

Some tentative conclusions

• Robots remain machines, and as such are subject to laws of value.
• Labour productivity increases initially, then levels off. Rate of return on capital outlay diminishes over time. Labour resistance probable.
• Technical limitations persist at level of mobility/flexibility and consciousness
• Supply and demand constrained by economic sociology
• The Ultraintelligent machine that will “surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever……..(so that) the intelligence of man would be left far behind” (I. John Good, 1965) remains remote
• The dream of singularity would, however, be faced with a simultaneous collapse of the underlying dynamic of capitalism. The only surviving ‘human’ industrial sectors might be defence and space exploration, to guard against terrorist or foreign hostile cyberattack, and against attack on humans by the super intelligent machine!