I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector.
Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.
It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.
For a company the costs of raising and educating humans are only a fraction of their taxes, which they might mostly avoid anyway. The costs of employing a nurse (robotic or human) for a year are much more relevant. And there I am skeptical current robotics can hold a candle to (relative) cheap human labor.
> Real robots work behind barriers because they are strong enough to be dangerous. But that hasn't got a sci-fi narrative for the public to latch on to.
Wait till they are controlled by ASI - there is your sci-fi for real.
It is just so that the CEO can claim they are an "AI first" company and the shareholders might believe that the company is not being eaten by AI but profits from it. Check the claims of the software vendors whose stocks have fallen by some 30% in the last few months, without any reason in the fundamentals.
> Actual product support is killed, and instead user supported forums are promoted. Useful idiots do the work unpaid for a mere digital badge.
Wow, that is a misanthropic take if I have ever seen one. People helping out other people for free are called "useful idiots".
While it might be an ethically bad move of the company, it certainly should not be used to disparage helpers. Otherwise, would you classify all unpaid FOSS work the work of "useful idiots"?
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