Belle Taylor: The robotic bods are out to take our jobs

IN YEARS to come we will look back at 2017 as the year the takeover began in earnest. The newcomers will change our way of life, take our jobs and work for next to nothing. We have to fight back, we have to stop them.

We have to stop the robots.

Oh look, I’m not a robotist, not all robots are bad. In fact, some of my best friends are robots: the TV, the air-conditioner, the microwave — oh we’ve had some good times our little gang. This is about the new robots, the ones who want to steal our jobs.

If you don’t work in a factory or a supermarket you may have not yet experienced being replaced by a robot, but all that may be about to change. Huge leaps in artificial intelligence in recent years have started the rise of the white-collar robot, and suddenly your soft, lunch-eating, sick-day-taking, salary-demanding self is looking like a far less desirable employee.

This month, Japanese company Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is installing the IBM Watson Explorer, a single robot that is set to do the work of 34 people in the company’s insurance claims division. So when you break your leg and put a claim in for insurance, the bod reading your doctor’s report and assessing your ideal payout is not human, but Watson the robot.

It doesn’t stop there. Next month the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is trialling using robots to write answers for cabinet ministers that will then be used in cabinet meetings and parliament.

In the US, law firms have started employing ROSS, a robot who has never performed at the law school revue or sculled a pint at the tav between torts, but is happily doing the work of a lawyer, trawling through documents and writing contracts.

We soon won’t even need to get behind the wheel. This week in Paris, a three-month trial of driverless buses began, with the self-driving vehicles shuttling themselves between two train stations. Domino’s Australia plans to start using drones to deliver pizzas as of this year.

And I’m far from safe — The Associated Press has started using robot journalists to cover topics as diverse as minor league baseball and finance.

Can you imagine how terrible a world without lawyers, journalists and taxi drivers would be? Wait. Don’t answer that.

Researchers at Oxford University have predicted that in the next two decades 47 per cent of jobs in the US will be done by robots, while the Committee for Economic Development of Australia predicts 40 per cent of Aussie jobs will go the way of our robot overlords in the next 10 to 15 years. OK, maybe not their exact words, but the jobs are going.

So the question hanging over 2017 is not: Will Taylor Swift finally release a new album? But: If we get robots to do all the work, what on earth are we supposed to do?

The entire human race will be reduced to doing handicraft and lifestyle blogging. With robots on the rise; it might be time to organise the resistance.