Bots Will Unemploy You

In a recently-posted interview at http://alicebot.org, Richard Wallace makes the startling claim that bots such as his A.L.I.C.E. will put people in service professions out of work.

"People who concern themselves too much with hypothetical moral problems have a somewhat distorted sense of priorities," says Wallace. He castigates Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy for proposing regulation on a business that is "relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things."

But at the same time, says Wallace, there is one realistic possible outcome of current work in natural language technologies: unemployment for millions of service professionals. "The concept that AI will put call centers out of business is not far-fetched. Many more people in service professions could potentially be automated out of a job by chat robots," says Wallace.