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Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

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Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#61

Post by ryanx435 »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #57
dclowd9901 wrote: post #55

With AI starting to actually supplant jobs, something sad has just occurred to me: I foresee our (the US) government (and probably others) restricting the development and deployment of AI systems that would supplant human jobs, merely for the sake of ensuring people are employed. I think it's sad because it would present a real opportunity to advance our society significantly.

Based on our past history it seems unlikely to happen. Any country which institutes such policies risks falling behind. Also who wants to be branded a Luddite?

The lesson you should be taking away from the luddites is not just that they didn't foresee that there were long term benefits to the technology, but that they violently opposed the progress. The potential for violence is the lesson. Get rI'd of large portions of the popukation's means of making a living by replacing their jobs with ai and there will be violence.

The process of replacing jobs with ai needs to go slow enough that the risk of large scale violence is minimized

Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#63

Post by monkmartinez »

mysterydip wrote: post #50
Spooky23 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the most trivial form of term life insurance that you're referring to. What table would you consult to come up with a rate for E&O and liability insurance for the CEO of Uber? Remember your goal is to make money.

That's a great point. Even if it was say 99% accurate, that 1% would likely be the outliers that make or cost the most.

Agreed that 1% could cost or make the most... now do you trust a human or computer to make the final decision? My guess: Humans will end up costing more.

Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#64

Post by monkmartinez »

ecopoesis wrote: post #41
viewer5 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it does not know enough to be accurate, so she has to always adjust it What kind of stuff does it miss?

Market stuff, like how the companies entire book is doing (what losses they've had so far that year), regional balancing, past payouts to the insured, raising or lowering the overall risk of the book, and just plain sales (sometimes you have to take on more risk then you'd like to meet a sales quota, but you can balance that by making other lower risk clients pay more). It's also complicated because it's hard to mode…

Why would it matter on the how the entire book is doing? Why can't the AI system take all of this into account assuming it has access to said data? Further, why should the AI system be used to run the entire company like you suggest. That is, it doesn't need to take into account every aspect of the business to replace a large portion of the workforce.

> This building burnt down because the solar panels on the roof caught fire, which spread across all the panel over the entire roof. The sprinklers never got a chance to go off because the roof collapsed.

Type 3 construction that burned to the ground? It doesn't take a human to realize or intuit that even type 1 buildings burn eventually (ask a firefighter!). If there is a way to truly model every possible variable when insuring a building, I will put money on humans doing a worse job than expert AI systems. You're asking the AI to not only predict but _know_ the future, and not asking that of the human... seems silly.

Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#65

Post by georgemcbay »

ecopoesis wrote: post #21
rasz_pl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non story because insurance (and banking) replaced human workers with expert systems a looong time ago.

That's just not true. Source: my sister is a commercial underwriter at a large US insurance company. And while they do have software that gives a suggestion for a premium, it does not know enough to be accurate, so she has to always adjust it. This is definitely an industry where more automation could easily be done, but the big insurers are a conservative, risk adverse group.

I don't dispute your retort because the post you are replying to was worded to sound very absolute, but...

AI doesn't have to replace 100% of all humans to have a huge impact on unemployment. If you introduce a system allowing 4 people to do the job 5 used to do you're setting the stage for 20% unemployment, which is a huge deal at scale, and also the 4-to-5 ratio is very conservative for a lot of modern automation projects.

Are there many fields where AI/robots will be doing 100% of the work in the near future? No... next to none, I'd think... but there are LOTS of fields where they will be doing a huge amount of the work while being supervised by a relatively skeleton crew of humans sanity checking their work.

Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#66

Post by notahacker »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #56
avz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suppose right now, we have 1 doctor, 1 nurse, and 3 lab techs per 50 patients per day. I think technology generally lets us do the same job with just 2 nurses and 1 lab tech. So we lose 40% of the jobs from the higher paying side and probably more like 50-75% of the pay. You're making the extreme assumption that the amount of medical care demanded remains constant despite the fall in prices (e.g. employees: 5->3, p…

I agree automation increases availability. I never implied it didn't have benefits -- just that we're likely to see the disappearance of middle class jobs because we'll be able to fill new ones with computers faster than with people. Even if it increases employment and availability (4 nurses, 2 techs, 100 customers), we're seeing a decrease in income provided -- 1 doctor and 1 tech for 3 nurses. Less spread across mo…

Unless we're positing a singularity, I don't think the public's demand for better treatment is remotely close to satiation point, or that computerised efficiency and accuracy will reduce the demand for nice, qualified middle-class people to explain what the computer is recommending for them. That's even before we've started considering whole new classes of middle class job that mass adoption of technologies like gene sequencing could entail, or the largely-justifiable layers of regulation and respect that give medical professionals a lot more power to keep their jobs relevant than the average union member

I don't think "surplus of trained doctors" is a real problem I'm likely to see in my lifetime, never mind a likely consequence of the foreseeable future improvements in medical data collection and diagnosis.

Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#67

Post by goda90 »

My wife was working for an insurance company until September. Despite being one of the most efficient workers, and having full time coworkers retire, she remained a temp her whole time there. In fact, they stopped hiring full time for many positions because new software systems were in the works. Software devs occasionally came and shadowed my wife to see how things worked. I secretly hope their profits have been hurt by treating employees like they're disposable, but I doubt it...

Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#69

Post by richmarr »

ecopoesis wrote: post #21
rasz_pl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non story because insurance (and banking) replaced human workers with expert systems a looong time ago.

That's just not true. Source: my sister is a commercial underwriter at a large US insurance company. And while they do have software that gives a suggestion for a premium, it does not know enough to be accurate, so she has to always adjust it. This is definitely an industry where more automation could easily be done, but the big insurers are a conservative, risk adverse group.

This is true, in the UK at least. Insurance is the most trailing-edge industry I've worked in... incumbent firms are full of servers under desks, proprietary bloatware with no APIs, spreadsheets-as-databases. In my experience tech could make large swathes of the insurance sector redundant without even needing to resort to AI.

Insurance doesn't suffer the same degree of competition as other parts of the economy... it has a triple-walled garden of hefty regulation, significant capital requirements, and the chicken & egg problem that you already need to have relationships and experience in the insurance sector to do business there... or spend time and money buying them in. Even the banks white-label their insurance products from insurers.

Re: Insurance firm to replace human workers with AI system

#70

Post by charlieflowers »

halflings wrote: post #37
charlieflowers wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only skimmed, but it indicated that 34% of a pool of ("primarily") 47 workers would be replaced. So ... 16 employees. I suppose that's interesting, but it's not as big as the headline made me believe.

That's not what the article is saying. It says 34 employees (not 34%) primarily from a pool of 47 workers on 5-year contracts will be "made redundant". (the rest may not have their contracts renewed) That's more than 30% of the 131 employees. The article also cites other companies doing the same thing, even if no staff cuts are involved for now.

You are correct -- I misread it.
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