Robots and Human Unemployment

Hopefully we and our children will not experience the dystopian future of the Sci-fi movie 'Elysium', where Matt Damon's robot doctor has the bed side manners of an industrial drone.

When thinking about automated physicians, does the first thing that comes up in your mind is if your copay to see your 'doctor' be lower? At androctor, the Online Doctor Anna will ask you questions and will recognize rude words typed in. In one juvenile sophomore attempt to point to symptoms of hemorrhoids, Doctor Anna said I had pin-worm.

Vinod Khosla has predicted that algorithms and machines will replace 80% of doctors within a single generation. A Socially Situated Robot is defined as, "if it acquires information about its environment solely through its sensors in interaction with the environment. A situated agent interacts with the world on its own, without an intervening human. It has the potential to acquire its own history, if equipped with appropriate learning mechanisms” (Pfiefer & Scheier, 1999: 656).

Are you hoping that these predictions are just wishful thinking? "Ever since the Industrial Revolution erupted, people feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment." - Yuval Harari

Yes, a large permanently unemployed population, dystopia or utopia?