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Your Next Employee May Be a Robot

“Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work,” the New York Times reports.

ai-and-robotics-3252“And over the same 15-year period that digital technology has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of life, the job market has fallen into a long malaise. Even with the economy’s recent improvement, the share of working-age adults who are working is substantially lower than a decade ago — and lower than any point in the 1990s.”

“Economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology would create as many jobs as it destroyed. Now many are not so sure.”

A Harvard Business Review look at recent research on the topic certainly doesn’t indicate that people are wildly excited about robots in the workplace, “companies considering botsourcing are wise to — if possible — limit the practice to jobs that people deem suitable for robots: those that do not require emotional intelligence.”

“What all of this boils down to is the fact that the robots-and-jobs question isn’t merely an economic or macro-societal one; it’s also a fairly complicated management issue. And while groups like The Future of Life Institute are laying the groundwork for the ethical creation and use of robots, it seems like similar considerations should be considered when it comes to robots at work. The ethical management of robots, in other words, and how robots will ethically manage us.”