Showing posts with label Watson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Watson. Show all posts
Friday 18 November 2022
Thursday 5 January 2017
Japanese company replaces office workers with artificial intelligence
Justin McCurry in The Guardian
A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.
Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. The firm said it would save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m) AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen (£100k) a year.
The move is unlikely to be welcomed, however, by 34 employees who will be made redundant by the end of March.
The system is based on IBM’s Watson Explorer, which, according to the tech firm, possesses “cognitive technology that can think like a human”, enabling it to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video”.
The technology will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.
While the use of AI will drastically reduce the time needed to calculate Fukoku Mutual’s payouts – which reportedly totalled 132,000 during the current financial year – the sums will not be paid until they have been approved by a member of staff, the newspaper said.
Japan’s shrinking, ageing population, coupled with its prowess in robot technology, makes it a prime testing ground for AI.
According to a 2015 report by the Nomura Research Institute, nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035.
Dai-Ichi Life Insurance has already introduced a Watson-based system to assess payments - although it has not cut staff numbers - and Japan Post Insurance is interested in introducing a similar setup, the Mainichi said.
AI could soon be playing a role in the country’s politics. Next month, the economy, trade and industry ministry will introduce AI on a trial basis to help civil servants draft answers for ministers during cabinet meetings and parliamentary sessions.
The ministry hopes AI will help reduce the punishingly long hours bureaucrats spend preparing written answers for ministers.
If the experiment is a success, it could be adopted by other government agencies, according the Jiji news agency.
If, for example a question is asked about energy-saving policies, the AI system will provide civil servants with the relevant data and a list of pertinent debating points based on past answers to similar questions.
The march of Japan’s AI robots hasn’t been entirely glitch-free, however. At the end of last year a team of researchers abandoned an attempt to develop a robot intelligent enough to pass the entrance exam for the prestigious Tokyo University.
“AI is not good at answering the type of questions that require an ability to grasp meanings across a broad spectrum,” Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics, told Kyodo news agency.
A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.
Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. The firm said it would save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m) AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen (£100k) a year.
The move is unlikely to be welcomed, however, by 34 employees who will be made redundant by the end of March.
The system is based on IBM’s Watson Explorer, which, according to the tech firm, possesses “cognitive technology that can think like a human”, enabling it to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video”.
The technology will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.
While the use of AI will drastically reduce the time needed to calculate Fukoku Mutual’s payouts – which reportedly totalled 132,000 during the current financial year – the sums will not be paid until they have been approved by a member of staff, the newspaper said.
Japan’s shrinking, ageing population, coupled with its prowess in robot technology, makes it a prime testing ground for AI.
According to a 2015 report by the Nomura Research Institute, nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035.
Dai-Ichi Life Insurance has already introduced a Watson-based system to assess payments - although it has not cut staff numbers - and Japan Post Insurance is interested in introducing a similar setup, the Mainichi said.
AI could soon be playing a role in the country’s politics. Next month, the economy, trade and industry ministry will introduce AI on a trial basis to help civil servants draft answers for ministers during cabinet meetings and parliamentary sessions.
The ministry hopes AI will help reduce the punishingly long hours bureaucrats spend preparing written answers for ministers.
If the experiment is a success, it could be adopted by other government agencies, according the Jiji news agency.
If, for example a question is asked about energy-saving policies, the AI system will provide civil servants with the relevant data and a list of pertinent debating points based on past answers to similar questions.
The march of Japan’s AI robots hasn’t been entirely glitch-free, however. At the end of last year a team of researchers abandoned an attempt to develop a robot intelligent enough to pass the entrance exam for the prestigious Tokyo University.
“AI is not good at answering the type of questions that require an ability to grasp meanings across a broad spectrum,” Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics, told Kyodo news agency.
Thursday 12 May 2016
Emma Watson campaigned on one social issue - she's not a hypocrite if she has offshore accounts
Because she is outspoken on one social issue, we expect Watson to be a model activist in every other political arena, a whiter-than-white every woman who stands up for us us all. That’s a standard that’s impossible for anyone to live up to.
Hannah Fearn in The Independent
Emma Watson, eh? Who would have thought it? All that moralising on the world stage, standing up for the rights of women, speaking out about the devastating economic and social effects of gender inequality. And it turns out that she’s been part of the global elite all along, a one percenter happily squirrelling away her millions in an offshore tax haven in the British Virgin Isles.
Of course, her people explain that the arrangements are purely to protect her privacy. But blow me down with a feather. What will the supporters of the HeForShe campaign make of it?
The answer to that should be: absolutely nothing. The fact that a woman who has a public position on one matter – gender equality– bears no relation to the fact that she has later found herself entangled in an another altogether different political question of tax evasion. But that hasn’t stopped her critics.
When the news that Watson, reportedly worth $70m, had used a company registered offshore to purchase a home, out came the angry rants. “I thought you're the most honest actress in the world! Wrong,” posted one fan – perhaps a former fan – on Twitter. “After being named in the Panama Paper scandal do you think you should be demanding a statue of anything?” another oddly added, referring to her campaigning for Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of London, to erect a statue of a figure from the Suffragettes in Parliament Square.
Then came the snarky puns: Harry Potter and the Deathly Havens; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Taxaban; Harry Potter and the Half-blood Principal Investor. There’s a lot more where that came from.
The aforementioned spokesperson for Watson claimed that the actor had not used an offshore haven to avoid tax or any of her other financial responsibilities as a British citizen, but instead to protect her privacy, given her celebrity status. Reassuring for her disappointed fans perhaps, but it makes no material difference whatsoever.
Even if the young film star had deliberately hidden her assets away in an attempt to legally avoid tax, she is no hypocrite and she does not deserve to be treated like one. You may morally object to tax havens, but there’s no reason to be any more angered by Watson’s financial affairs than those of the Cameron family, Sarah Ferguson, Michel Platini, Simon Cowell or Heather Mills.
What is driving the disproportionate reaction to Watson’s British Virgin Islands connection is a bizarre sense that our public figures represent whatever we think they ought to, rather than what they want to, and what they actually do. Because she is outspoken on one social issue, we expect Watson to be a model activist in every other political arena, a whiter-than-white every woman who stands up for us us all. That’s a standard that’s impossible for anyone to live up to.
It’s a sentiment we see echoed when gay and ethnic minority figures, or even bohemians such as the artist Tracy Emin, express their support for the Conservatives. Surely they should be on the political left, where they ‘ought’ to belong?
The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has prompted similarly pointless soul-searching. Why have rap stars such as Drake and Jay Z – leading black figures in US popular culture – remained so quiet on the matter in their music? Writing in The Atlantic, the journalist Jeff Baird expressed concern that figures such as these were selling music that didn’t reflect the often difficult experience of being black in America and instead concerned itself with feelgood lyrics (“as if their success should be regarded as proof that the American Dream is in fact alive and well”) and great pop tunes instead. Well, why shouldn’t they? It’s their stock-in-trade.
READ MORE
Emma Watson's most influential quotes about feminism and sexuality
What we struggle to cope with is the idea of pop stars, actors or other national figures behaving in ways other than what we might expect from their PR-designed public persona. It’s a position that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Each and every one of us has friends or relatives who are passionate about one social issue but ambivalent about another. The environmental activist who is aiming to produce zero waste may have no view whatsoever on the closure of domestic violence services for women; the Hillsborough campaigner who spent 27 years fighting for justice for the 96 may have never thought twice about cuts to disability benefit for those unable to work. So what? The latter does not take away from the significance of their efforts on the former.
Emma Watson is a wealthy young actor who has used her not inconsiderable global influence to start an important conversation about the position of women in the world. For that, she is rightly celebrated. She is not, and has never been, a tax justice campaigner.
I don’t like the idea of any wealthy individual finding ways around paying their due – and there is no suggestion that this is what Watson has done. But the idea that her efforts on behalf of all women have been undermined by the furore sparked by the latest Panama Papers revelations is dismissive and naïve in the extreme.
Hannah Fearn in The Independent
Emma Watson, eh? Who would have thought it? All that moralising on the world stage, standing up for the rights of women, speaking out about the devastating economic and social effects of gender inequality. And it turns out that she’s been part of the global elite all along, a one percenter happily squirrelling away her millions in an offshore tax haven in the British Virgin Isles.
Of course, her people explain that the arrangements are purely to protect her privacy. But blow me down with a feather. What will the supporters of the HeForShe campaign make of it?
The answer to that should be: absolutely nothing. The fact that a woman who has a public position on one matter – gender equality– bears no relation to the fact that she has later found herself entangled in an another altogether different political question of tax evasion. But that hasn’t stopped her critics.
When the news that Watson, reportedly worth $70m, had used a company registered offshore to purchase a home, out came the angry rants. “I thought you're the most honest actress in the world! Wrong,” posted one fan – perhaps a former fan – on Twitter. “After being named in the Panama Paper scandal do you think you should be demanding a statue of anything?” another oddly added, referring to her campaigning for Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of London, to erect a statue of a figure from the Suffragettes in Parliament Square.
Then came the snarky puns: Harry Potter and the Deathly Havens; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Taxaban; Harry Potter and the Half-blood Principal Investor. There’s a lot more where that came from.
The aforementioned spokesperson for Watson claimed that the actor had not used an offshore haven to avoid tax or any of her other financial responsibilities as a British citizen, but instead to protect her privacy, given her celebrity status. Reassuring for her disappointed fans perhaps, but it makes no material difference whatsoever.
Even if the young film star had deliberately hidden her assets away in an attempt to legally avoid tax, she is no hypocrite and she does not deserve to be treated like one. You may morally object to tax havens, but there’s no reason to be any more angered by Watson’s financial affairs than those of the Cameron family, Sarah Ferguson, Michel Platini, Simon Cowell or Heather Mills.
What is driving the disproportionate reaction to Watson’s British Virgin Islands connection is a bizarre sense that our public figures represent whatever we think they ought to, rather than what they want to, and what they actually do. Because she is outspoken on one social issue, we expect Watson to be a model activist in every other political arena, a whiter-than-white every woman who stands up for us us all. That’s a standard that’s impossible for anyone to live up to.
It’s a sentiment we see echoed when gay and ethnic minority figures, or even bohemians such as the artist Tracy Emin, express their support for the Conservatives. Surely they should be on the political left, where they ‘ought’ to belong?
The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has prompted similarly pointless soul-searching. Why have rap stars such as Drake and Jay Z – leading black figures in US popular culture – remained so quiet on the matter in their music? Writing in The Atlantic, the journalist Jeff Baird expressed concern that figures such as these were selling music that didn’t reflect the often difficult experience of being black in America and instead concerned itself with feelgood lyrics (“as if their success should be regarded as proof that the American Dream is in fact alive and well”) and great pop tunes instead. Well, why shouldn’t they? It’s their stock-in-trade.
READ MORE
Emma Watson's most influential quotes about feminism and sexuality
What we struggle to cope with is the idea of pop stars, actors or other national figures behaving in ways other than what we might expect from their PR-designed public persona. It’s a position that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Each and every one of us has friends or relatives who are passionate about one social issue but ambivalent about another. The environmental activist who is aiming to produce zero waste may have no view whatsoever on the closure of domestic violence services for women; the Hillsborough campaigner who spent 27 years fighting for justice for the 96 may have never thought twice about cuts to disability benefit for those unable to work. So what? The latter does not take away from the significance of their efforts on the former.
Emma Watson is a wealthy young actor who has used her not inconsiderable global influence to start an important conversation about the position of women in the world. For that, she is rightly celebrated. She is not, and has never been, a tax justice campaigner.
I don’t like the idea of any wealthy individual finding ways around paying their due – and there is no suggestion that this is what Watson has done. But the idea that her efforts on behalf of all women have been undermined by the furore sparked by the latest Panama Papers revelations is dismissive and naïve in the extreme.
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