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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9271545" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm a software developer and yeah, we think about this sort of stuff all the time.  My job is to take someone else's work, automate it, and ultimately reduce company costs by reducing labor costs.  That means if you hire me, you're planning on losing a number of positions greater than my salary.   I have designed a system a lot like the one you are describing.  The company was trying to do it using emails and excel spreadsheets and it was making annually six figure errors in the amount it paid out.  It was paying people the wrong amounts so that some people weren't getting what they deserved.  It was overpaying people greater than they were owed.   "Low value" is very different than "low salary".  You can have a very high salary and be a very low value employee.  Turns out that certain kinds of repetitive mathematical calculations that depend large numbers of factors are very likely to produce large amounts of human error and unnecessary waste, to say nothing of unnecessary costs and poor customer service.I don't feel bad when I fix problems like that.  I do however worry what is going to happen when we can do most jobs better with a machine than we can with a person.  Like I worried a lot more about the $10 an hour call center workers jobs when I was automating them away than I did about the guys with master's in business administration and finance.   Industrialization after the initial economic disruption was ultimately of great economic benefit to the lower class.  But the death of industrialization in developed nations has left no new economic prospects in its place, and I'm not sure this new round of automation is going to leave obvious answers for what a guy with 95 IQ is going to do either.  I will say this though.  From a purely computational perspective, a robot maid is a heck of a lot smarter than a robot artist.</blockquote>

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