Are there automation-resistant intelligences? The question we all want to ask is 'will my job be taken over by a robot?'

2019-08-21 16:24:48

"Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades."

Perception and manipulation tasks, creative intelligence tasks, and social intelligence tasks may be challenging for the rise of robots and machine learning. These are three areas where humans may still be useful. They are described by Frey and Osborne in their 2013 paper "The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation?"

The concept of social intelligence is particularly important in health care.

"While algorithms and robots can now reproduce some aspects of human social interaction, the real-time recognition of natural human emotion remains a challenging problem, and the ability to respond intelligently to such inputs is even more difficult. Even simplified versions of typical social tasks prove difficult for computers, as is the case in which social interaction is reduced to pure text."

Perhaps in medicine we should shift our efforts away from simply resisting the introduction of AI. We could focus our efforts instead on being involved in designing how we will interact with these tools (for they will be developed) and how they will be properly evaluated. Careful evaluation of AI tools is important and it should be led by those who will be working with them.

Also, our development as clinicians should perhaps focus more on social intelligences. Machines will beat us on knowledge, assessment of risks, pattern recognition and other cognitive skills in exactly the same way they have beaten us at board games. Sharing decision making with patients involves a strong and trusting social relationship and healthcare will be better for it.

So, we may not be replaced by a robot any time soon, but our job as healthcare professionals will certainly be changed by them.

Source: ox.ac.uk

social occupations tasks job intelligences intelligence employment interaction

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Are there automation-resistant intelligences? The question we all want to ask is 'will my job be taken over by a robot?'

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