Monday, September 4, 2017

The Robots are Taking Over!

Good article, Wired, 25.09 Sept 2017, P064.Robopocalypse, talking about robots taking over, forecasts of people being out of work:
History suggests that the process is much more uneven than that.  The ATM, for example, is a textbook example of a machine that was designed to replace human labor.  First introduced around 1970, ATMs hit widespread adoption in the late 1990s.  Today, there are more than 400,000 ATMs in the US.  But, as economist James Bessen has shown, the number of bank tellers actually rose between 2000 and 2010.  That's because even though the average number of tellers per branch fell, ATMs made it cheaper to open branches, so banks opened more of them. ...  Taking a wider view, Bessen found that of the 271 occupations listed on the 1950 census only one - elevator operator - had been rendered obsolete by automation by 2010.