Artificial Intelligence is coming into its own, and one of the entities getting the most attention is Amelia, from IPsoft. Amelia, who won the 2017 Alconics Best Intelligent Assistant Innovation award, is a virtual assistant who is also billed as a ‘digital employee.’
Amelia has an outstanding conversational speaking ability, compared with Siri and Watson. Amelia also has the surprising ability to convey emotion and empathy, thanks to her unique contextual learning system, which helps Amelia come up with unique responses to unexpected statements and questions on the spot.
With the new award under her belt, Amelia is poised to start taking over the world – literally. IPsoft reports that Amelia improved the efficiency of one media company so much that they could reduce their staff by 44 people. That’s a lot of human work now being handled by a single AI. These kinds of numbers naturally draw a lot of concern among workers whose jobs can be easily replaced by Amelia.
The rise of AI in the workplace is being likened to the advent of the assembly line and the industrial revolution where new technology changed things so fundamentally, that an entirely new way of working, and a new kind of workplace – the factory – had to be invented in order to keep up with changing times. AI like Amelia are projected to usurp 20% of all online news writing jobs. Some AI are even working in government positions already.
Amelia is also paving the way for what are being termed Robobosses in the tech sector. AI managers are just a step up from digital employees, after all. How will humans respond to being told what to do by their computers? We already know that people don’t mind following directions dictated by their GPS devices. It may be only a matter of time before the only jobs humans do are the ones Amelia refuses to, because she doesn’t have enough time.
