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Microsoft 'to replace journalists with robots'
Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report. The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists. Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times.
Microsoft said it was part of an evaluation of its business. The US tech giant said in a statement: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."
[...] Around 50 contract news producers will lose their jobs at the end of June, the Seattle Times reports, but a team of full-time journalists will remain.
Microsoft sacks journalists to replace them with robots
One staff member who worked on the team said: "I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am – AI has taken my job."
Also at Business Insider, The Verge, GeekWire, and MSPoweruser.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Monday June 01 2020, @03:57PM
While you make good points on what will be replaced, it's increasingly true that:
* algorithms can help one person create more stuff than they could without them (including evolutionary algorithms and "robot scientists" which explore every possibility within an area)
* algorithms can help discover notable stuff a few humans have created and distribute it to everyone, diminishing the value of novelty creation by most people
* a hoard of people unemployed for other reasons will depress wages for even creative types through competition
So, things are a bit more problematical for even creators than what you outline. Perhaps more like Marshall Brain's "Manna" story where even supposedly "creative" jobs can be broken down into independent tasks that are supervised by automation?
From the article: "I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am – AI has taken my job."
Things I've helped create years ago to to try to help find solutions:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
https://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html [pdfernhout.net]
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?"
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA [youtube.com]
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY [youtube.com]
Among much other stuff I've written to address these issues.
Ultimately though, culture can be slow to change...
But hopefully it will change before it is too late...
The USA is currently in the midst of some ongoing riots by frustrated people over racial issues --but perhaps amped-up by general frustration about coronavirus lockdowns and job/income/healthcare loss and related precarity and uncertainty,:
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/nouriel-roubini-dr-doom-economist-predicted-riots-months-ago-protests-2020-6-1029268529 [businessinsider.com]
Something I wrote a decade ago to reconsider in today's uncertain social context:
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3214849&cid=41812573 [slashdot.org]
"As I suggested a dozen years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm [kurtz-fernhout.com]
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
* Autonomous military robots out of control
* Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
* Ethnically targeted virus ..."
See also though the root cause misperception: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ..."
Think of the unknowns surrounding DNA like a lock that kept us safe from ourselves. Removing those unknowns is like telling everyone how to open all the locks on the planet (including digital locks protecting nuclear weapons). That implies our culture needs to change if we are to survive. On my website I talk about some of that. Here is another good one: http://anwot.org/ [anwot.org] "
And what I say there about advanced biotech is also true for any sort of advanced tech -- nuclear, robotics, AI, internet communications, nanotech, and even just plain old bureaucracy. There is almost no job one can take in modern society that does not have some aspect of this issue because the issue is interwoven throughout our society in so many ways.
And many people have previously brought up aspects of this -- Mumford, Einstein, Fuller, King, and many more...
We -- as a society -- desperately need to figure out overall how to do much more good and healthful things with all this high technology (and wealth we can produce with it) instead of doing much more bad and unhealthy things with all that...
As if all the previous social challenge was not enough, there is now increasing knowledge among thousands of scientists about what makes the new coronavirus so contagious and so deadly. And the new virus has been recently shown to be create-able from scratch in the lab in yeast starting from just a genetic sequence (which presumably could then be altered by knowledgeable scientists in nefarious ways): https://onezero.medium.com/swiss-scientists-have-recreated-the-coronavirus-in-a-lab-d12816bfdbe3 [medium.com]
That possibility of tailored bioweapons has all sorts of implications for social organization that we as a society have not yet come to grips with. And then those concerns may be even deeper in the context of possible massive permanent job loss to AI, Robotics, other automation, voluntary social networks, cheaper energy, better design, and so on...
As Bucky Fuller said, humanity is getting its final exam in the universe...
See also my earlier post here on Isaac Asimov's "Silly Asses" story (which probably put me in the mood for writing this one):
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=37775&page=1&cid=1001713#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.