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Replaced by A.I. ?


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I have just read an interesting article, not specifically about 'AI', but somewhat related given the 'automation' side of things.

Several companies in the food industry, have been replacing cashiers with self-service kiosks, and online ordering apps, have had to increase their staff by around 8% overall to meet the increase in demand. A similar trend happened with the introduction of ATMs.

Just goes to show, that if you automate the right part of an industry, and remove a bottleneck, they end up being more productive, and need more staff than before.

 

It'll be interesting to see if these advances in machine learning will have similar results in other industries where a human is replaced.

I'd imagine that the number of hardware and network specialists has gone up dramatically to look after the ever growing data centres, so hopefully we'll see similar trends in occupations dealing with the output from the 'AI'.

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JAV,

I'd like to ditto JHCC's request.

On a semi-related note, I read about an interesting approach to the restaurant business.  A commercial kitchen is set up in an industrial district where rent is cheap.  The "restaurant" exists exclusively online as deliver-only.  One individual kitchen might do the cooking for several online "restaurants" which allows them to cater to multiple cuisines in a single location.  Any "restaurants" that prove to be unpopular can be quickly taken down and new ones can be launched quickly.  Since there's no dining room wait staff, parking lot, etc, the startup costs are greatly reduced.

By locating themselves in industrial parks, these kitchens can be positioned so their delivery radius covers more than one or two cities.  Some of them set up the kitchen as a shared resource between different companies.  For example, one company would make breakfast and cater corporate luncheons during the day, whereas the other company would only be "open" during lunch and dinner.   They also multiplied their buying power with vendors because of how many "restaurants" were in a single location.

I can definitely see how increasing quality, offering greater variety, and reducing cost for prepared food by bypassing the "bottleneck" of a "brick and mortar" restaurant could generate a boom.  

Especially as it'd be a strong counter-point to the "Baked here" nonsense that Frosty mentioned.  

It would be interesting to consider how things might change if this idea became more common.  Eventually, the place you go to eat might actually be a third party to the client and the kitchen.  Restaurateurs might even circle back to making the dining experience pleasant.  The noise level at most of the "nice" places near me is way too high.  I've had OSHA show up on construction sites throughout my career, yet I've never heard of OSHA citing a restaurant for noise.  When I was in Vegas, I wasn't able to hear my wife shouting into my ear 50' away from the entrance to several restaurants. 

 

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AI and automation is going to have a severe impact on life in the near term. For instance a study that came out a few months back from the McKinsey Global Institute shows that around 800 Million jobs globally will be lost to automation by 2030, and 75 Million of that just in the U.S. That is 33% of American jobs in the next 12 years gone. I really think the impact is going to be much worse then people think. I had to do a large research project on AI and what we are seeing now is just a tiny bit of what will be happening very soon. The big part of all this is not actual intelligence in a human way, but in a much more superior way through neural networks and machine learning that will make machines have the ability to out pace us in everything.

Machine learning and neural networking are the kicker in all of this. You DO NOT have to program the program, as it can train itself. So it basically operates outside of the parameters of its base program and learns just like you and I but it can do it a million times faster. No longer is the machine only able to just execute a program, it can do virtually anything just by looking at data and by actual physical interactions with the world through robotics. Combine that with big data and quantum computing and you have a system that can grow and learn faster then we could have ever thought.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here, and we stand on the precipice of a brave new world that will soon to be unlike anything we have know before.

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Lets not overlook that Google's AI program just created its own "AI Child" without human input that is far superior to any AI written by humans.  In a short time the "AI Child" will reproduce itself, and do this over and over and become so much more advanced is a short period of time. Things are going to change fast. It is exciting and frightening at the same time. :D

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