Robots Compilation Dr. Thomas Lairson
Office 2021: Why robots won’t end drudgery or steal our jobs
Download 5.27 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Mobile services
Office 2021: Why robots won’t end drudgery or steal our jobs0 Posted by Kathryn Cave on March 29 2016 When it comes to robots and automation, there are two core extremes of view. The first does a gleeful happy-dance about how all our beautiful mechanical friends will liberate us from the grinding tedium of repetitive drudgery. The second warns bleakly that machines will enslave humanity and lead to mass unending unemployment. And possibly a slow and painful death. Yet even this divisive two-part picture is skewed. As Jonathan Wilkins, marketing director of European Automation points out: “History has shown that when economic times are good, machines are celebrated as wonders of progress that will improve our lives. But when times are tough, they become objects of fear.” So, is there any kind of sensible middle way? Well, a new book, Service Automation: Robots and the Future of Work 2016, by two academics – LSE Professor Leslie Willcocks and Dr. Mary C. Lacity of University of Missouri-St. Louis – strives to provide some balance. This contains new research, a number of case studies along with insight into managing the automation process. Through this Willcocks and Lacity suggest that a lot of jobs may change their structure rather than being lost altogether. The next five years will be a time of transition, rather than depletion. And many companies will look to redeploy workers rather than lay them off. They also point out that the process of automation itself will require a lot of human management. Overall they take the personal view that although there will, of course, be significant redundancies because of automation there will also be parallel new developments. “When companies automate, you can expect more jobs, not fewer,” says Wilkins of European Automation. “Take Apple, for example. The multibillion dollar company automates rigorously and yet constantly provides new possibilities for jobs. It produces software that does things humans used to do and at the same time employs more engineers, designers and staff who package, market and sell new products.” Interestingly, this view of the future is supported by historic data from the last century. Back in August, three Deloitte analysts published a new paper “Technology and people: The great job-creating machine” [PDF]. This examined statistics from UK censuses since 1871 along with Labour Force Surveys (LFS) since 1992. The piece, which was shortlisted for the Society of Business Economists’ Rybczynski Prize, cleverly used the data to show how technology didn’t destroy jobs but instead changed the nature of employment. History shows a “dynamic process” in which “technologies become obsolete and are supplanted” over time, it explained. Take for example telephone and telegraph operators. These rose by a factor of 40 in the 100 years to 1971. But since then have receded to be replaced by other roles. In the automated scheme of events there is less use for manual labour but a greater need for knowledge-intense sectors – like health and education. Also, as everyday essentials become cheaper, there is an increased demand for service roles like bar staff and hairdressers. Deloitte showed in 1871 there was one hairdresser or barber for every 1,793 citizens. Now there is one for every 287. The report argued UK employment has more doubled in the last century and a half. And as machines take on more repetitive and laborious tasks they still seem “no closer to eliminating the need for human labour than at any time in the last 150 years”. To take a step back though, one point that gets argued over and over by businesses keen to push automation is that when basic drudge work is taken care of it frees employees up for more “sophisticated tasks”. The trouble is, this can be hard to quantify in a large enterprise. One area where there are never enough people though, is healthcare. And in Kenya, IBM Research Africa is looking to use AI as a way to counteract a dearth of local trained doctors. While, in Scotland Genfour supplied a process automation system to the NHS which freed up existing nurses from admin so they could be deployed back onto frontline activities. Then there are the jobs that would never have existed. At the high end in Forbes’ 10 most promising roles for 2016 Data Scientist is listed first. While also security takes a front seat – the importance of expert knowledge in this arena and a CISO to translate it to the people that hold the purse strings is becoming increasingly crucial. At the less skilled end there are an awful lot of people needed to man the coffee shops that tech startups live in as well as all the other 24/7 service roles thrown up by flexible professional working. The thing is, you only have to look at the emphasis placed on the global skills gap to see that lack of jobs is not really the issue - finding the right people to fill them is. And while personally, I do think it is a myth that machines will save humanity from boring work. There will always be tedious things that humans do better or cheaper than machines. The types of work available at every level of the spectrum are clearly changing and will continue to do so. Professor Leslie Willcocks and Dr Mary Lacity believe that this will be very apparent in five years’ time when work teams will consist of both robots and humans collaborating together. This makes sense as any good team combines different strengths and human and artificial intelligence together make a good pairing. In fact, this is already happening to a limited extent in contact centres where simple queries are tackled by virtual agents and more complex queries escalated to human beings. While Afiniti offers a really unique AI solution that uses big data and a sophisticated algorithm to couple human agents with human callers for the best quality outcome. “The fact remains that automation still has its limits,” says Gajen Kandiah, Executive Vice President of Business Process Services at Cognizant. “There are some things that robots just cannot do like medical management, underwriting, case reviews, speak or comprehend colloquial slang, understand people’s emotions and think on their feet.” This is hard to argue with. And perhaps helps to add a bit of perspective to all the silly polarised opinions on robots and automation. Because for hundreds of years, man has been predicting brilliant or terrible outcomes for employment via technology. And while some of it inevitably comes true, most tasks actually take bit of boredom, a bit of drudgery, a bit of miscommunication and a lot of human effort to run properly. So, why should the adding robots to the team make a jot of difference? The Economist Mobile servicesBots, the next frontierThe market for apps is maturing. Now one for text-based services, or chatbots, looks poised to take offApr 9th 2016 | From the print edition 
 App exterminators
“YOU are a developer and you’ve just spent two weeks writing this amazing app. What is your dream? Your dream is to get it in front of every iPhone user.” That was how Steve Jobs, then Apple’s boss, introduced an online shop for smartphone apps eight years ago. At first few paid it much heed, but it launched one of the fastest-growing software markets ever. Since then over 100 billion apps have been downloaded, generating $40 billion in revenues for developers and billions more in subscriptions and other fees. At a conference on April 12th in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, is expected to make a similar announcement. He will probably unveil an online shop and coding tools for “chatbots”. These are text-based services which let users complete tasks such as checking news, organising meetings, ordering food or booking a flight by sending short messages. Bots are usually powered by artificial intelligence (hence the name, as in “robot”), but may also rely on humans. Many in the technology industry hope that Facebook’s event will mark the beginning of another fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar software economy. Are bots the new apps? The timing looks right, because smartphone software is in flux. Download numbers are still growing, but the app economy is clearly maturing. “The dream of the independent developer building a business in the app store is over,” suggests Activate, a consultancy. The 20 most successful developers grab nearly half of all revenues on Apple’s app store. Building apps and promoting them is getting more costly. Meanwhile, users’ enthusiasm is waning, as they find downloading apps and navigating between them a hassle. A quarter of all downloaded apps are abandoned after a single use.
Only instant messaging bucks the trend. Over 2.5 billion people have at least one messaging app installed, with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, leading the pack (see chart). Within a couple of years, says Activate, that will reach 3.6 billion, about half of humanity. Many teenagers now spend more time on smartphones sending instant messages than perusing social networks. WhatsApp users average nearly 200 minutes each week using the service. Talking out of your bot As services based on artificial intelligence improve, they need a way to talk to real people. Chatbots are one option. At a conference on March 30th Microsoft showed off several prototypes. It will be a while before anyone trusts such services, however. A few days earlier one of Microsoft’s bots, “Tay”, designed to impersonate a millennial, started parroting racist language it had learned from users on Twitter. “Tay” had to be sent to her digital room. As a result of these various developments, a new software ecosystem has started to emerge. Text-based services have been around since the dawn of internet time, but the birth of the bot economy can be dated to June last year, when Telegram, a messaging app with Russian origins and more than 100m users, launched a bot platform and a “bot store”. It now counts thousands of bots, such as news alerts from media organisations, or feeds that link to football videos or porn. A few dozens startups exist. Some provide tools: Chatfuel is a web-based offering that lets users build bots for Telegram. Others offer specialised services: Digit allows users to interact with their bank accounts and find ways to save money; Pana is an online travel agency that takes text messages and turns them into bookings. MeeKan sets up meetings for users of Slack, a popular corporate-messaging service (now valued at nearly $4 billion). Then there are firms which want to be the foundation for other services. Assist aims to be the equivalent of Google’s search box—to find bots. Another firm, Operator, hopes to become the Amazon of bot-commerce: when a shopper requests, for example, certain sports shoes, its system can contact a salesperson in a nearby shop or get one of its own “experts” to handle the order. Robin Chan, Operator’s boss, talks of creating a virtuous cycle of more buyers attracting more businesses, which will in turn draw in more buyers. The app economy grew quickly only after Apple and then Google became enthusiastic champions. The bot economy will also need industry leaders, and Microsoft and Facebook look eager to play the role. Most smartphones are powered by operating systems controlled either by Apple or Google. The bot market, by contrast, is unconquered territory. At its conference, Microsoft also introduced tools to create clever new services. Facebook is expected to open its messaging platform to all sorts of bots (users can already chat with a selected few, including one impersonating Miss Piggy of the Muppets) and launch an online shop which will list the services. Given the drawbacks of apps, there should be plenty of demand for bots, says Michael Vakulenko of VisionMobile, a market-research firm. Much like web pages, they live on servers, not a user’s device, meaning they are easier to create and update. This is likely to make them attractive to businesses which have shied away from developing their own apps, such as restaurants and shops. Users should find bots smoother to use, which explains another of their monikers: “invisible apps”. Installation takes seconds; switching between bots does not involve tapping on another app icon; and talking to bots may be more appealing than dealing with a customer-support agent of a bank or airline, for example. No guarantee exists, however, that the bot economy will be as successful as the app one, which has created 3.3m jobs just in America and Europe, according to the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. The economics for developers are not obviously attractive: if bots are easier to develop, that means more competition. Consumers could, again, be overwhelmed by the cornucopia of services and ways of interacting with them. And designing good text-based interfaces can be tricky. After launching the first version for Slack, Matty Mariansky, a co-founder of MeeKan, was surprised by the many different ways users tried to communicate with his bot. He has since hired dedicated script writers, who have come up with more than 2,000 sentences to handle a meeting request. The popularity of messaging apps suggests people will happily talk to bots. But much will depend on “killer bots”—hugely popular services that work best in the form of bots. Toby Coppel of Mosaic Ventures, a venture-capital firm, sees health care as a promising market. Bots could deal with routine ailments and send difficult ones to a doctor. Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, another messaging app, which launched a “bot shop” on April 5th, expects “instant interaction” to dominate. He predicts businesses won’t just have phone numbers and web pages, but bots too. Restaurants could take orders via instant message—as some do already in China. As with apps, bots will need much experimentation to find their place. That will, in turn, depend on how well providers manage their platforms. Telegram lets developers do pretty much what they want (although it has shut down chat channels related to Islamic State). Microsoft has promised to be as open as possible. Developers and investors have their doubts about Facebook, given its chequered history: it made life difficult for developers of applications for its website. There will still be an app for that Microsoft, Facebook and others will also have to deal with Apple and Google, both of which are laggards in messaging and bots. They could try to get ahead, for instance by attracting developers with their widely used payment systems. Or they might try something entirely new, says Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz, another venture-capital firm. One possibility would be to allow bots to show up on a smartphone’s notification panel. Still, there will soon be “a bot for that”, to paraphrase Apple’s iconic slogan which suggests that an app exists for everything. Yet bots, unlike the Daleks of Dr Who fame (pictured), won’t try to take over the world. They will be happy to co-exist on people’s smartphones with websites, apps and other things yet to be invented. The mobile world will keep changing, but will always be a mixed affair. Yahoo Finance
Directory: tlairson -> ibtech tlairson -> The South China Sea Is the Future of Conflict tlairson -> Nyt amid Tension, China Blocks Crucial Exports to Japan By keith bradsher published: September 22, 2010 tlairson -> China Alters Its Strategy in Diplomatic Crisis With Japan By jane perlez tlairson -> The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11, Issue 21, No. 3, May 27, 2013. Much Ado over Small Islands: The Sino-Japanese Confrontation over Senkaku/Diaoyu tlairson -> Chapter 5 The Political Economy of Global Production and Exchange tlairson -> Chapter IX power, Wealth and Interdependence in an Era of Advanced Globalization tlairson -> Nyt india's Future Rests With the Markets By manu joseph published: March 27, 2013 tlairson -> Developmental State tlairson -> The Economist Singapore The Singapore exception To continue to flourish in its second half-century, South-East Asia’s miracle city-state will need to change its ways, argues Simon Long ibtech -> History of the Microprocessor and the Personal Computer, Part 2 Download 5.27 Mb. Share with your friends:
|