The polite young Japanese woman behind the hotel reception desk checks you in, speaking impeccable English. She has almond eyes, shining hair, a slightly flirtatious smile and a neat figure in a tightly fitting uniform. But you’d better not spill any water on her, or she might implode. Because this receptionist is a robot – one of dozens running a hotel near Nagasaki, Japan.

There’s a cloakroom robot, room-service robot, robots to clean, and no doubt robots to place little chocolates on your pillow. The aptly named Strange Hotel, which opened this summer, is part of a robot revolution sweeping workplaces worldwide.

And it will have a profound effect on Britain’s economy and society.

This week, analysts Deloitte published a stark new prediction: 35 per cent of today’s UK jobs are at ‘high risk’ of being automated in the next ten to 20 years. In certain parts of the country, the risk is much higher — with 60 per cent of jobs in the North East and Wales at ‘medium to high risk’ of being trampled under the march of the machines.


Guests check in via a completely automated system including a humanoid robot at the Henna Hotel (Weird Hotel) in Huis Ten Bosch, Netherlands themed amusement park in Sasebo, Japan
Top of the at-risk list are repetitive roles such as telephone sales staff, typists and bank clerks. If you’re in admin, watch out: R2D2 could be coming for your 9 to 5.

Should we be worried? Many experts say no. In the ‘calm down, dear’ corner are those who think this is just the latest move in a long dance between man and machine, one that stretches back through the internal combustion engine, the spinning jenny in textile mills, the plough, the wheel — each innovation relieving human beings of dirty, back-breaking, boring jobs.

In 1871 almost a million farm workers toiled on the land; now there are fewer than 50,000, but the number of accountants increased twentyfold over the same period.

This, many argue, is the circle of life in the workplace: brainy roles replace brawny ones; lower-skilled jobs die out and new, highly skilled jobs spring up to replace them.

Why? Because having a robot army to do the laborious work lowers the cost of production, pushing down prices and leaving us with more disposable cash for leisure.

Then a whole load of new careers spring up to fill that leisure time: dog groomers, personal trainers, bikini waxers, masseurs, even people who retrieve lost golf balls.

Then there are all those jobs created by the new technology itself. A decade ago it would have been hard to predict a market for social media managers and app developers. Now the job vacancy lists are full of them. Since 1990 the number of IT managers has tripled.

But there are doom-mongers, too. If the future’s so rosy, why has Google chairman Eric Schmidt, a man who knows his onions, warned of ‘a race between computers and people, and people need to win’?

Because the sheer pace of technological change is unlike anything we have seen before. Computers aren’t just doing the blue-collar jobs of welding cars, squeezing toothpaste into tubes and telling us about ‘unexpected items in the bagging area’ at supermarkets.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, they are now marching into white-collar jobs previously thought safe from automation.

Paralegals train for years to do vital work such as collecting evidence — now software can comb through thousands of documents and do the job in a jiffy. Financial advisers can be replaced by ‘robo-advisers’ using algorithms to suggest investments.
Even doctors now have robots breathing down their necks. The multi-national IBM has a super-computer which has proved far superior at diagnosing lung cancer — 90 per cent success, against 50 per cent by the poor old humanoids.

In Japan, the Prime Minister has even splashed millions of yen on robots to help care for the elderly.

And journalists? These words were not written by a computer, but soon they might be. A Chicago company has developed software called Quill which can produce business and sports reports without any need for a middle man with a leaky Biro in his shirt pocket. Quill’s developers even have their sights set on a Pulitzer Prize.
It’s easy to see why employers love automation. Robots don’t get sick, they don’t need lunch breaks, they don’t sleep or gripe or strike. There are no Len McCluskey-style trade union androids to make life difficult. Labour costs can be slashed and profit margins increased.

But for the rest of us, this revolution raises profound and troubling questions. Will we face mass unemployment if software does all the work? If the robots can think and analyse and work like metal trojans, what’s left for the humans? Futurist Martin Ford has written a book called Rise Of The Robots: Technology And The Threat Of A Jobless Future. The title says it all — he argues that no job will be immune; that even the creative work of making art and music will soon be done by computers.

This has already happened — several computers at the University of Malaga in Spain composed a work called Transits — Into An Abyss, which was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Ford’s conclusion is drastic: in the future, if far fewer people are working, then every adult should be paid a minimum basic income or ‘Citizen’s Dividend’.

If technology continue growing at this pace, we might end up wrestling jobs with machines. How will Nigerians cope with this trend?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3234592/Will-ROBOT-steal-JOB-Believe-not-receptionist-robot-worrying-trend-change-lives.html

CC: lalasticlala

OK

Ok

New jobs will be invented.

Teempakguy:
New jobs will be invented.

new jobs invented? Don't you think these new jobs would require high technological know how? Can Nigeria boost of that? Will the "new jobs " cater for all?

OBSEQUIOUS:
new jobs invented? Don't you think these new jobs would require high technological know how? Can Nigeria boost of that? Will the "new jobs " cater for all?

calm yourself.

Nigeria can't afford the robots anyway.

Teempakguy:
calm yourself.

Nigeria can't afford the robots anyway.

lmao, someday we will Bro

OBSEQUIOUS:
lmao, someday we will Bro

by then, many Nigerians will have technological know-hows then,

Teempakguy:
by then, many Nigerians will have technological know-hows then,

we only can hope

Just here to see pictures.

Ok nah