In the heart of Kyoto, Japan, sits the more than 400-year-old Kodai-ji Temple, graced with ornate cherry blossoms, traditional maki-e art—and now a robot priest made from aluminum and silicone.
“Mindar,” a robot priest designed to resemble the Buddhist goddess of mercy, is part of a growing robotic workforce that is exacerbating job insecurity across industries. Robots have even infiltrated fields that once seemed immune to automation such as journalism and psychotherapy. Now people are debating whether robots and artificial intelligence systems can replace priests and monks. Would it be naive to think these occupations are safe? Is there anything robots cannot do?
We think that some jobs will never succumb to robot overlords. Years of studying the psychology of automation has have shown us that such machines still lack one quality: credibility.
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