Not Everything Can be Automated
Companies have always attempted to improve their profit margins.
It's not a new thing.
It's not like something new or a plan that emerged out of nowhere overnight.
They had all sorts of fantasies of how they can remove paid workers, replacing them with machines. Where it did not happen it just didn't work. These machines did not save money or did not meet expectations. In some cases, they infuriated customers and the fury cost business. In other words, the machines were a net negative, a loss.
Ask McDonalds what happened to those IBM terminals with so-called 'hey hi'. To be clear, chatbots are not a new thing, they are 50+ years old, so the only new thing is the hype level - the false attribution of alleged capabilities owing to brute force (loss of money, waste of energy).
Similarly, we now have 'autonomous vehicles' (false marketing) that are actually driven by humans (in other words, they are not autonomous at all, they can barely distinguish between a dog and a paper bag) and after many decades of trying to replace dispensers with robotics (robotics is not new at all and has absolutely nothing to do with Machines Learning) they still cannot do things right, there are many edge cases, and humans need to double-check everything, hence no time is actually saved and serious mistakes that no sane and sober human would ever make are more likely to happen, putting at risk the life of patients.
When nurses are "replaced" by "remote workers" those are not nurses because they cannot carry out any physical jobs and when the media calls it "hey hi" it actually refers to robotics - limited, impersonal and nothing new (repeatedly failed for many good reasons).
The media should be shamed of itself.
The media needs to quit pushing this narrative of machines or "hey hi" replacing workers because it is relaying a lot of wishful thinking propaganda for sleazy companies. It tries to compel us to magically - or foolishly (out of ignorance or misplaced trust in media) - assume that robotics has just arrived at the scene. What next? Non-stop media frenzy about "the era of robotics", "the robotics arms race", and "fourth industrial revolution"? Heck, even battleground robotics is hardly new, it was habitually mentioned in the media when I was a kid.
A lot of these issues boil down to misleading media that dramatises things, causing people to panic, feel growing anxiety, sometimes suffer trauma based on false promises and utterly false premises.
Very few jobs are being replaced by chatbots; it's just some false narrative we hear from companies that have severe commercial issues and mounting debt, putting their corporate existence at risk.
If some technology isn't really new, yet some media insists it'll revolutionise everything (all of a sudden), be very sceptical. █
Image source: Top view of a white printed circuit trace layer. Motherboard is not visible.