Help! Watson is running after your job -- or mine!
For the past few weeks we've been blogging about independent agency education requirements and the possibility of agents being replaced by a supercomputer. Today I'll be sharing some comments from our readers on these subjects.
One of the most interesting responses I've gotten to "Are you smarter than a supercomputer?" is from Larry McSpadden, senior vice president of Beauchamp & McSpadden Inc.
Larry cites Moore's Law as a way to project how quickly technology like Watson will render all of us obsolete:
As a hobby for years I've read science journals and news feeds, and can see no reason to suppose that Moore's Law won't continue for at least another 15 or 20 generations—and at that point the assistive power of the computers themselves in making further leaps would suggest many more "doublings" past that.
If you're like me—your scientific reading centers on Ray Bradbury and you think "Moore's Law" was a detective show from the '60s—an explanation: Moore's Law projects that the quantity of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will continue to double every 2 years.
Larry continues:
Of course, having 2 to the 20th power more computing power available...doesn't guarantee the "cracking," at any particular point, through the barriers of natural language (which just arrived, much later than many would have predicted 15 years ago), or intuitive insight, or poetic or emotive ability, or moral judgment, or seasoned and experienced underwriting or account production abilities.
But at someplace along the curve (to use Kurzweil's imagery), machines will render a considerably large quantity of what insurance agents do today as obsolete--and most of the rest will be taken care of with a few additional doublings of machine capabilities. My guess is that the horizon for some of these changes is closer than many think: BIG changes by 2025, HUGE changes by 2030. Certainly these event horizons are close enough for those just beginning their insurance careers to ponder over and start preparing for.
First of all, Larry is living proof that an insurance agent is indeed smarter than a (fill in the blank). Secondly, for uninformed editors like me, Kurzweil didn't write the songs for "The Threepenny Opera"; he's Ray Kurzweil, whose "curve" theory of accelerating returns projects uninterrupted growth—in this case, of technological capabilities. And finally, that last sentence is very scary for an industry that's spent a lot of time and effort trying to recruit young people.
Larry concludes:
In my estimation, I agree that 5 years out, we'll have more great help from machine and network intelligence. Ten years out, wired connections will be an indispensible sidekick. Fifteen years, and we'll start to see the move to having only very high-level and very low-level jobs in insurance (and I have an easier time imagining what the high-level jobs might be than I do the low-level positions). Fun times!
Fun, indeed—and from the case Larry makes, inevitable.
Another reader made the interesting observation that in the brave new world of "accelerated intelligence," Watsons, assisted by CSRs, will rule the agency of the future:
The information service industry's carbon-based employees will be replaced in 10 years or so. They will be replaced in the same way phone operators have been. CSRs will need to be trained to support the AI-based assistant, not the other way around. Can your CSR use a wrench or fix a hard drive? Start cross training now!
One interesting aspect that hasn't been addressed in this conversation is agent as salesperson. With the ongoing emphasis of agents as trusted advisors, the simple role of sales is sometimes given the back seat. This begs the question of whether AI devices will be able to fill that role as well as the current carbon-based model. What do you think?
And, for that matter, could Watson take over the role of smart-alek editors?
Don't answer that.
