Autonomous, With Strings Attached
Despite AI causing job losses, future automation could open up new jobs that look very different than what we have imagined.
“Money often costs too much” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
The single biggest cost to any business is the labor cost. In fact, it averages at 70% of all expenses in a given business. Automation has become a cornerstone to bring in efficiency and cut costs. In areas of predictable work, automation has completely replaced or fast replacing human labor. In areas where higher percentage of unpredictability is involved we currently see limited automation. The ultimate quest is fully autonomous robots which can safely replace human labor in almost all areas and under variety of real-world scenarios.
While areas like autonomous vehicles still face complex challenges , others like AI chatbots are almost on the verge of passing the Turing test . Once the goal of full automation is reached , such robots can operate 24x7 and at scale saving significant operating costs for the enterprises.
The full automation of complex tasks where there is some degree of unpredictability and working amongst the public, also raises several ethical challenges and may easily overwhelm the AI recommendations causing adverse consequences.
Who is responsible for a wrong advise or recommendation by a AI driven health support chatbot ?
Who is responsible for the accidents caused due to fully automated robots at our home and in public ?
If there is no driver who controls the vehicle, who is then responsible for the safety of its passengers and of those who travel or walk on the same roads?
These ethical challenges often leads to fear of AI, hence negatively impacting general acceptance of such autonomous robots in public.
One way of alleviating the fear of autonomous robots is introducing human oversight, whilst increasing the level of automation in performing complex tasks in public. But human oversight costs money and a of the proven way to reduce this cost is outsourcing.
Future AI powered robots in public could perform complex tasks autonomously most of the time. But when dealing with real world cases, exception scenarios could lead to adverse effects. Under such scenarios, if AI can raise exception events towards trained support personnel, it could bring in the element of human oversight at the right moment. One study predicts that truly autonomous cars may be impossible without helpful human touch.
With the outsourcing model, the human supervisors could be sitting tens of hundreds of miles away in an operations center monitoring tens of autonomous robots for any exception events using multiple visual aids. When an event occurs, just like how currently a priority 1 support incident is handled, a support personnel steps in and temporarily takes control of the autonomous robot guiding it through the complex decision making process in real-time.
An Autonomous Vehicle (AV) stops when they cannot figure out what to do under some real-world scenarios. Support personnel sitting tens of hundreds of miles away monitoring real-time video feeds from multiple AVs, sometimes with a steering wheel, steps in and gets the stuck robot drivers moving again in real-time.
A support personnel takes over a chatbot and steers the conversation with the customer in real-time until AI is reasonably confident to continue.
An autonomous robot is stuck at a public place or event and can’t decide the next action could alert the support personnel, who now can remotely guide the robot for sometime.
AI should be capable of identifying such cases and raise exceptions in real-time, especially when there is a low confidence level in its recommendations / actions. Also technology like 5G will play a crucial role in enabling such a real-time support to autonomous robots from hundreds of miles away in an efficient way.
Summary
Human touch alleviates the public fear about autonomous robots and reassures people that someone is supervising the robots in a worst case scenario. This leads to more acceptance of autonomous robots performing complex tasks and collaborating amongst us in the future. With outsourcing, such a human supervision becomes more affordable for the enterprises at scale and thousands of skilled workforce somewhere in the world will get an opportunity to improve their livelihood. The work itself may however look very different than what we currently imagine in a typical call center.
