Japanese insurance firm replaces 34 staff with AI
bbc.com
bbc.com
My comment then, and still is, that this isn't really much of a story:
The cynic in me thinks this is likely a total non-story/spin. I find it unlikely anyone would be so confident a AI system that they are "planning to introduce" that they'd schedule staff cuts.
What's more likely is that staff cuts were already planned. This puts a great spin on a (I would guess most likely free/cheap) experimental deployment of Watson.
With that statement I definitely agree with you. If they said they were replacing something like 20% of their call-center staff I would think it's a reasonable thing to do (AI voice recognition and comprehension these days is amazing), but not for important documents like surgery data.
True story: we sent a call out for ~10 summer interns this year, and got a big response, like over a thousand applicants total. My colleague, rather than spend two weeks sifting through their emailed-in grade transcripts and computing average grade (which we use as a first-stage coarse filter) spent one day writing a Python script that OCRs all the PDFs, extracts the grades, sums up and then gives us a shortlist of the best candidates.
I think it's reasonable to assume any company considering AI to replace people would do a lot of due diligence first. This is very likely a well tested and "proven" system, to whatever extent you can prove it. The plan to introduce it to the business, and make jobs redundant in the process, would only happen once that first due diligence stage is complete. To that end, I don't see this as a PR move to make redundancies look better, but a very early signal of what is likely to happen to many "knowledge worker" jobs in the long term.
"Fukoku Mutual has already begun staff reductions in preparation for the system's installation." ...
"The insurance firm will spend about 200 million yen to install the AI system, and maintenance is expected to cost about 15 million yen annually."
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20161230/p2a/00m/0na/005...
There's no information on the validation of the platform or its performance. If that was the case, this would be an interesting story.
Like you say though, the whole thing is light on details, so we can't really know what's happening in this specific case. I still believe this is the beginning of the destruction of a lot of medium-skill, data processing jobs though, or at least the de-skilling of them so low waged workers can do jobs that professionals do now.
Even if there has been testing. I find it unlikely that you'd make staff cuts without running the system in production on parallel for some time... That's just my guess though, but seems like there's a high probability they're putting positive spin on some staff cuts.
The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita.
The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.