Why robot workers can’t fill the labour gap
If you’ve been to an airport, GPs office or emergency room lately, or have read the widespread reports of worker shortages across a range of industries, you may wonder why we’re not looking into using robots or AIs to fill the gap.Robots are perfectly suited for factory work, where conditions never change.
“What we forget is that our abilities [of sense and dexterity] are the product of millions of years of evolution, and 1000s of generations of human evolution. And that’s not going to happen overnight with computers.”It’s a problem that was perfectly exhibited in Moscow last month by a robot designed to play chess against humans. Machines play chess at superhuman levels; it’s one of the first things we taught AI to do.
And that also means you’re unlikely to have a robot giving you injections any time soon, for better or worse. “Having this drug warehouse with a giant robot arm and lots of drawers means that you dispense with the errors. You dispense the drugs and dispense with the errors.” The situation is somewhat different with AI doing tasks that don’t require physical robot parts. Eric Swift, managing director for cloud computing company ServiceNow, said the average Australian already interacts with AI more than 100 times a day, and that in the future this would be practically constant.
But integrating AI into more sensitive processes like assessment or diagnostics comes with many risks, like the potential to amplify existing biases.“There’s a lot of research on racial and sexist biases in medicine, and which patients are believed about their pain and how their symptoms are recorded,” said Dr Rachel Thomas, founder of non-profit research group Fast AI.
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