DailyDirt: Semi-Automatic Jobs
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Lots of jobs these days couldn't be done as efficiently or as well (or at all) without a little computer help. Computerized assistants (eg. Siri/Cortana/Alexa/GoogleNow) are even helping us with more and more everyday tasks. Increasingly skilled machines are able to perform jobs -- and may be destroying some tedious segments of the labor market. But it's not just manual labor that might be replaced by robots. Automation can help almost anyone become more productive in their work, and as the costs of machines come down with time, we might want to prepare for semi-automated jobs to become fully automated.- A "semi-automated mason" robot (aka SAM) can lay bricks faster than a human without getting tired, but it still needs a human bricklayer to clean up excess mortar and to do trickier spots like corners. One human and one SAM robot can do the job of four or more masons, and the ratios might favor the robots sooner than we think. [url]
- An unmanned air traffic control tower exists in northern Sweden at a remote airport. Humans are actually monitoring sensors and cameras at the Ornskoldsvik Airport, but they're about 90 miles away. A few of these remotely-operated control towers are being tested in several countries already, but it'll take some time before control towers without human traffic controllers are ready for large commercial airports. [url]
- The jobs that artificial intelligence and automation can't do are usually tasks that require creativity, emotional awareness or dexterity. However, software might be able to approach those tasks from a different angle to achieve human-level results. Chess was once deemed too challenging for computers, so perhaps we shouldn't underestimate the creativity of programmers (or emergent behavior). [url]
Filed Under: air traffic controller, artificial intelligence, automation, bricklayer, labor, robot, work
