The AI Doctor Will See You Now
From shopping bots and workplace surveillance to courts, care homes and war, automation keeps pushing humans out of the picture.
Friend or foe?
Photographer: Bloomberg
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Last night I watched the seventh episode of the 11th season of the reboot of Doctor Who because, well, my life clearly took a wrong turn somewhere. Anyway, the plot involves an extraterrestrial shopping service called Kerblam! that delivers its packages via creepy, cartoonish humanoid drones. The company’s intelligent operational system has learned the habits and desires of its customers so well that it knows what they want before they do. Due to a recent popular rebellion, however, a token number of actual humans are employed in dead-end jobs and constantly monitored in its otherwise totally automated warehouse. Needless to say, things don’t end well.1