Robots may replace estate agents, car salesmen: Study

Estate agents, car salesmen and traffic wardens will soon be replaced by robots, according to Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a research fellow in University College London's Department of Science and Technology Studies, who predicts the care for the elderly and even children would be among the jobs to be replaced by artificially intelligent beings within the next 50 years.

According to her research, droids cold replace human workers across an array of service sectors and caring professions within our lifetimes.

She believes that with the rapid advances in technology achieved this century expected to continue at an astonishing rate, robots would be able to break free of science fiction and become part of our everyday life.

Dr Aderin-Pocock asked whether patients would prefer to be in the hands of an overworked, underpaid, disenfranchised worker doing long hours for minimum pay, or a therapeutic robot designed to respond to their every need and engaged with them intelligently no matter how many times patients asked the same question?

The robot could also have access to relevant information about an individual's past, so it could respond to and converse with the person; finding ways to simulate their thinking as also monitoring vital signs in order to flag changes early.

Part of Aderin-Pocock's research  involved asking 2,000 people which jobs they thought were the least desirable and therefore would be the first to be assigned to robots, netro.uk reported.

The people polled voted traffic wardens to be most preferred for replacement (65 per cent), estate agents came next (40 per cent), and finally car salespeople (33 per cent).

Dr Aderin-Pocock worked with an artist to reveal her vision of what role robots would play in the future. The images of the future of AI were commissioned to celebrate the launch of new TV series Extant, which would start today, 20 January at 9 pm on Syfy.

Dr Alderin-Pocock worked with artists to create visualisations of what the workforce of 2065 might look like, says it might seem the stuff of science fiction today, but actually when one looked more closely, science fiction had often led the way for technology development.

Despite scare scenarios of a potential robot-human war in the future created by media, Hollywood, etc, Dr Alderin-Pocock says the mechanisation of the workforce needed to be viewed as a positive thing.