A few months into my time as an insurance claims adjuster, a customer called and said he thought his house was breaking apart. He'd heard what sounded like wood beams snapping in the basement, so he went downstairs and crept into the crawl space to investigate. While he was lying in the dark surrounded by cement, he told me, he started to panic. It brought him back to years earlier when, as a firefighter with the New York City Fire Department, he served as a first responder on September 11, crawling through the giant blocks of brick and mortar that had collapsed hours earlier. This revelation came 10 or 15 minutes into our conversation, after I'd gathered his basic information and logged the details of the case.

In a move that sounds as though it was plucked straight out of a science fiction novel, a Japanese insurer has used AI insurance technology to replace 34 human staff members. The company in question is Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance. The employees were replaced by the insurance technology which is capable of calculating insurance payouts on its own. The insurer has stated that it feels productivity will increase by 30 percent as a result of the removal of the humans in favor of the AI. The system will be installed before January comes to a close.

A few months into my time as an insurance claims adjuster, a customer called and said he thought his house was breaking apart. He'd heard what sounded like wood beams snapping in the basement, so he went downstairs and crept into the crawl space to investigate. While he was lying in the dark surrounded by cement, he told me, he started to panic. It brought him back to years earlier when, as a firefighter with the New York City Fire Department, he served as a first responder on September 11, crawling through the giant blocks of brick and mortar that had collapsed hours earlier. This revelation came 10 or 15 minutes into our conversation, after I'd gathered his basic information and logged the details of the case.

It looks like the job automation trend is getting to Japan, bringing the country a step closer to a future of layoffs in favor of intelligent machines. Japanese firm Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co. is laying off more than 30 of its employees and is replacing them with artificial intelligence (AI) systems that will perform payout calculations for policyholders. For Fukoku Mutual, the move is seen as a practical and beneficial, with expected increase in productivity at 30 percent and a calculated return on investment in less than two years."The "Meanwhile, it's expected that Fukoku Mutual will save about 140 million yen per year by cutting the 34 staff." Understandably, the 34 employees whose jobs are set to be eliminated by March 2017 aren't going to be so happy.

Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work are also becoming increasingly competent. One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with "IBM Watson Explorer," starting by January 2017. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co. is planning to slash nearly 30 percent of its payment assessment department's human staff after it introduces an artificial intelligence (AI) system in January 2017 to improve operating efficiency. While concrete examples of AI systems making human workers redundant are currently rare, observers have pointed out that such cases are likely to increase. The insurance firm will introduce an AI system based on IBM Japan Ltd.'s Watson, which according to IBM is a "cognitive technology that can think like a human," and "can analyze and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video." The Watson-based system will be tasked with reading medical certificates written by doctors and other documents to collect information necessary for making payouts, such as medical histories, length of hospital stays, and surgical procedure names. In addition to determining payment amounts, the system will also be able to check customers' cases against their insurance contracts to find any special coverage clauses -- a measure expected to prevent payment oversights.