Artificial Intelligence Interns: already taking jobs from humans

Think about this: does the unskilled workforce become more desperate as their unskilled jobs disappear?  Yes.

Is their answer to seek employment in protected jobs?  There is no doubt that is the preferred answer. 

What are protected jobs?  Union and government jobs. 

Will politics invade job opportunities and fights emerge as to who gets union jobs or government jobs?  That already exists due to patronage and screening based on political preferences. 

Will dependency grow even greater on transfer programs because unskilled jobs will continue to shrink?  Of course it will.  PB
---- 

From NewScientist.com:

Forget Skynet.

Hypothetical world-ending artificial intelligence makes headlines, but the hype ignores what's happening right under our noses.

Cheap, fast AI is already taking our jobs, we just haven't noticed.

This isn't dumb automation that can rapidly repeat identical tasks.

It's software that can learn about and adapt to its environment, allowing it to do work that used to be the exclusive domain of humans, from customer services to answering legal queries.

These systems don't threaten to enslave humanity, but they do pose a challenge: if software that does the work of humans exists, what work will we do?

Humans used to manually move data between the relevant systems to complete these tasks, copying a phone number from one database to another, for instance. The user still has to call up and speak to a human, but now an AI does the actual work.

To train the AI, it watches and learns while humans do simple, repetitive database tasks. With enough training data, the AIs can then go to work on their own...

But what will the world be like as we increasingly find ourselves working alongside AIs?

David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says automation has tended to reduce drudgery in the past, and allowed people to do more interesting work.

"Old assembly line jobs were things like screwing caps on bottles," Autor says. "A lot of that stuff has been eliminated and that's good. Our working lives are safer and more interesting than they used to be."

The potential problem with new kinds of automation like Blue Prism and ROSS is that they are starting to perform the kinds of jobs which can be the first rung on the corporate ladders, which could result in deepening inequality.
----
Link: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630151.700-ai-interns-software-already-taking-jobs-from-humans.html