“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

Re:“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they... by rayiner on Sunday March 22, 2015 @10:11AM (#9246772)

> If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry?

This is naive techno-optimism.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1425; "The title text mentions The Summer Vision Project and Marvin Minsky of MIT. In the summer of 1966, he asked his undergraduate student Gerald Jay Sussman to 'spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw' ([1]).... The project schedule allocated one summer for the completion of this task. The required time was obviously significantly underestimated, since dozens of research groups around the world are still working on this topic today."

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Re:“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they... by toomuchtodo on Sunday March 22, 2015 @08:14PM (#9248802)

The DARPA Grand Challenge started in 2004 [1], and now we have autonomous vehicles on the road in select locations. While still not fully unmanned, we've gone from nothing to a great deal of automation in ~11 years.

Spacex was founded in 2002 [2], and is expected to have a successful first stage powered vehicle recovery this year. 13 years from incorporation to revolution.

IBM's Watson diagnoses cancer better than a human doctor [3].

Keep you skepticism sir. I'll bet on the future; its winning.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

[3] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-me...

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Re:“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they... by bruceboughton on Monday March 23, 2015 @08:44AM (#9250545)

The 80/20 rule will be in full force when it comes to driverless cars.

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