Category Archives: Automation

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Is automation actually a job killer? fox5sandiego.com Hundreds of automated machines roving around the fulfillment center can transport a vertical shelf of items up to 750 pounds. They roam the gigantic building on a pre-calculated route, using floor sensors. It's artificial assistance, that has ...

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Is automation actually a job killer? - fox5sandiego.com

Harvest Automation is growing and to facilitate that growth, it has moved to a larger facility in Billerica. Above, co-founder and CEO Charles Grinnell displays the HV100, which automates the movement of plants for the nursery and greenhouse industry. SUN/JOHN LOVE

BILLERICA -- Millions of container plants spread out across hundreds of acres.

Moving them and spacing them appropriately is physically demanding labor, to say the least.

Thanks to a company on Rangeway Road, robots can now perform these low-level tasks, helping growers around the country run more efficient operations.

Harvest Automation is growing because of increased demand from these farms, according to company officials. As a result, the business has moved to a larger facility; Harvest now has more space for research and development, manufacturing and staff.

"We've come a long way from the back of my house in Groton," said co-founder and CEO Charlie Grinnell in his 3,200-square-foot facility at 85 Rangeway Road. "It's the classic start-up tale.

"We've been growing and moved over here, across from where we used to be in this campus," he added.

Harvest has been selling its HV-100 robot since 2013; the product lugs around potted plants in commercial nurseries and greenhouses.

About 150 of its robots are spread across 30 growers. Each robot costs about $30,000.

The HV-100 has gone through five iterations, gradually getting refined.

"It's a $15 billion industry with these plants, which relies on workers moving plants and spacing them out," Grinnell said. "It's a gigantic labor task, and relies on a huge amount of manual labor.

"Workers have to rest, but not the robot," he added.

Joe Jones, the inventor of iRobot's Roomba, is credited with inventing Harvest's robot. He was at an agriculture trade show, and heard about the need to move millions of plotted plants. Harvest took off from there.

The robots work safely alongside people and require minimal training to operate, while reducing production costs and improving productivity. It has a quick-swap rechargeable battery, which lasts 4 to 6 hours.

The robots' peak throughput is 240 pots per hour.

Moving forward, Grinnell said the business is working on a new product to help with food crops. He wouldn't reveal the specific food quite yet.

"A different agriculture market," he said.

Follow Rick Sobey on Twitter @rsobeyLSun.

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Billerica's Harvest Automation makes farmers' life less demanding (SLIDESHOW) - Lowell Sun

Its fashionable and, in a way, understandable to fear that robots and algorithms are primed to take away too many jobs to laugh off. Machines, the logic goes, are becoming so much better than humans at churning out products, even the kind that require skilled labor, that soon itll be a liability to employ people. Todays trendy despair will certainly ensure we wont be surprised if bots really take over the world. But the lack of creative and classical thinking about humans myriad advantages is now so pronounced that its hard to credit the pessimists.

Amid our many signs of an uncomfortable transition toward more automated labor, dire predictions have reached an unreasonable and over-emotional pitch. Respondents to a new report from the Pew Research Center, the Washington Post recently noted, all but rent their hair and gnashed their teeth in answer to simple questions about future job prospects.

Seriously? Youre asking about the workforce of the future? an anonymous science editor lamented. As if theres going to be one? Slightly more stable judgments still veered wildly into unnecessarily post-humanist sci-fi. Barring a neuroscience advance that enables us to embed knowledge and skills directly into brain tissue and muscle formation, there will be no quantum leap in our ability to up-skill people, according to an IT consultant. The unexamined assumption behind funereal statements like these is that people need to somehow transform in order to stay useful in a world transformed by technology.

Of course, theres a narrow argument to make that we ought to devote some resources to a transformational project in order to hedge against extraordinary risk. Just in case technology spirals completely out of control or bots stage some kind of Skynet-like coup, it might be helpful for at least some humans to be pre-integrated into digital networks to a degree that allows them to wrest back control or even prevent a robo-revolution in the first place. Something like this is the idea behind Elon Musks investment in Neuralink, a scheme aimed at merging human brain activity with artificial intelligence. But even Musk is inclined to believe, or to say, that something like Neuralink is more than a wise hedge against a dramatic but unlikely risk. On his view, the great likelihood is that humans will be aced out by machines unless we act now.

But even if we stipulate that unproven claim, its hard to imagine the best response is strictly limited to fusing our brains with the bots. What if we have more natural resources than we think?

Circle back to the jobs problem. A big part of the hopelessness emanating from the business leaders and tech analysts polled by Pew arises from their certainty or strong suspicion that people just wont be educated well enough to head the machines off at the cognitive and commercial pass.

Nearly a third of business leaders and technology analysts express no confidence that education and job training in the United States will evolve rapidly enough to match the next decades labor market demands, the Post observed.

In one way, you could imagine this skepticism being strongly justified. Our public schools and universities have lots of problems at turning out the kinds of diligent and striving high performers that analysts and officials sometimes jealously identify overseas. At a different level of analysis, a critic could caution that even well-intentioned education reform spread ably throughout the system would face a Titanic problem of being unable to turn quickly enough before (or after) hitting the iceberg of automated jobs transformation.

At its extreme, this counsel of despair would emphasize how a real quantum leap in human processing power would face a problem more akin to the Tower of Babel trying to lift humanity up to a godlike level that can never be attained.

But what about the more optimistic case, that humans should look to the talents and abilities that could go very quickly and effectively from the background to the foreground of the automation debate? For all the moaning and groaning over a deepening skills deficit, we already know that much of the skills that will be first to suffer from automation are the least complex and least interesting ones and not, importantly, the easiest ones.

Think of someone like a waiter. Waiting tables poorly is easy. Waiting tables in a way that brings great pleasure and comfort is not easy, but it is complex and interesting. Robot waitstaff may have a novelty appeal, but novelty as Apple is beginning to learn painfully is not a business model, much less a threat to the division of labor on Earth as we know it. Robo-waiters may also have a status appeal, like (for now) an Apple watch. Or, in a sort of reverse status move, they could end up so cheap that people who dont want or cant afford a complex and interesting pleasant encounter with a human waiter will opt for a bot experience.

Of course there are marginal cost-cutting scenarios in between where some businesses will be pressed to consider replacing their not very good human waiters with not particularly thrilling bots. Still, the appeal of reasonably high-quality human interaction, even in casual or trivial settings, will be very hard to beat out of our human character.

Therefore, it stands to reason, we ought to consider how the automation game would be changed by focusing education more around utilizing and cultivating complex and interesting capabilities on the emotional and the intellectual side. Tact, cunning, care, confidence, initiative and judgment would rank among these especially human and especially valuable virtues, just to name a few. Worries about educational struggles pivoting to these traits should be ameliorated by recognizing that labor markets will naturally begin incentivizing and therefore developing them also, then, incentivizing markets for swift, effective and formal training.

We wont find any panaceas in the deep human capabilities that make being human together enjoyable, but we ought to consider more carefully that we will find plenty of jobs.

James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.

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Human qualities could produce jobs as automation intensifies - OCRegister

Forbes

The Future Of AI And Automation In The Workforce Forbes Many captains of technology are openly predicting the demise of humankind from advancements in automation and artificial intelligence (AI). The Luddites -- 19th-century textile workers who believed weaving machinery threatened their jobs -- said much ...

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The Future Of AI And Automation In The Workforce - Forbes

By Adele Peters 05.05.17 | 4:00 pm

If you live in Las Vegas, El Paso, or Louisville, theres a particularly good chance that your job could be taken by a robot in the next two decades.

Using data from a 2013 Oxford study that found that nearly half of American jobs are at risk from automationfrom truck driving and telemarketing to legal assistantsa new study maps out which cities are likely to lose the most jobs. (The next phase of the research will look at how the risk affects people differently based on age, race, educational level, and other demographic factors, and will break down data further by ZIP code).

Researchers at the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at the University of Redlands wanted to make the risk tangible and understandable through the new study.

If I tell you that 50% of the jobs in the United States are at risk from automation right now, thats a very different idea than saying, Hey, here in San Bernardino, were facing x-percent automation risk, Johannes Moenius, the institutes director, tells Fast Company. People know the social fabric, they know the types of jobs that exist here. Then it hits home, and people understand we need to do something. We cant just wait for this to happen.

While the last wave of automation took away some middle-class workparticularly factory and mining jobsthe current wave of automation will hit lower-income jobs hardest. Robots are already beginning to brew coffee, flip burgers, and bake pizza. Agricultural robots can pick strawberries and weed carrot fields. As many as 1.7 million truck driver could be replaced by self-driving trucks, as one of theearly casualties of new automation.

What were seeing is this wave of automation is going to specifically affect the less educated, Moenius says. There are lots and lots of them. Possibilities that weve thought about in recent years are now hitting the range where they become economically feasible. Its just so incredibly fast, and its affecting so many jobs at a time.

Just because the technology exists doesnt guarantee that it will be adopted, but the map looks at what is possible. We have to be very clear, being at risk of automation doesnt mean that a job necessarily gets automated, he says. I cant imagine that we suddenly have all poker dealers or all waiters suddenly replaced by robots. High-end restaurants will still have waiters because thats part of the experience. But this tells you whats the technical possibility. And specifically on the lower end of the food chain, whatevers going to be possible to get automated, will get automated.

The study maps the Oxford research about which jobs are most at risk onto employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 100 metropolitan areas in the U.S.Bubbles that are more red indicate a higher share of jobs at risk; the size of each bubble indicates how many workers were employed in 2016. In the Las Vegas metropolitan area, 65.2% of jobs are at risk. El Paso follows at 63.9%.

Three categories of jobs make up around half of the possible losses in the largest metropolitan areas: office and administrative support, food preparation and serving, and sales-related jobs. In certain areas, such as Riverside, California and Louisville, transportationjobs also make upa large portion of the losses.

Fighting automation wont work, Moenius says. If we dont automate, China will do it for us, and well have wage-reversal. Instead, governments, industries, and educational institutions should be thinking about how to prepare, including retraining programs.

I dont think there is a one-size-fits-all solution to this, he says. We really believe that each city will have to find its own way. As cities rethink employment, they will also likely have to rethink land use. Moenius points out that in his own area, Southern Californias Inland Empire, people live next to the warehouses and freeways that support a logistics economy; as work shifts, that layout should also change.

If your own job is at risk (this handy calculator will help you understand), you can work on learning new skills. Initiatives that try to foster stem education really go in the right direction, because if you speak math then you can learn how to deal with problems that we dont even know are problems yet, he says. Problem-solving, spatial thinking, having an understanding of multidisciplinary issuesthese are things that everyone who has to make a decision of what I should be educated in now [should think about].

Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world's largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley.

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Do You Live On The Front Lines Of Automation? - Fast Company - Fast Company

Forbes

Marketing Automation Can Help Build Trusted Relationships Forbes It is human nature to trust people who we feel know and understand us. A study published in The Journal of Neuroscience may offer a clue as to why. The study involved an experiment where participants were given a dollar that they could keep or invest ...

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Marketing Automation Can Help Build Trusted Relationships - Forbes

BOSTON -- There's talk, as DevOps takes hold, about IT operations obsolescence, but enterprise shops that use IT automation software in production say they depend on ops teams more than ever.

As DevOps is slowly taking over the IT landscape, its vital that IT pros understand it before jumping right into the movement. In this complimentary guide, discover an expert breakdown of how DevOps impacts day-to-day operations management in modern IT environments.

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Large enterprises have seen an ops-led revolution brought about by IT automation, in fact, rather than ops extinction. The transition to full automation at most enterprises will be lengthy, and ops people will be the ones who actually make it happen, these companies report.

Automated systems are great until something goes wrong, said Sean Morse, software engineer at printing services company Vistaprint in Lexington, Mass.

"Developers aren't trained on operating systems and things like that," Morse said. "There are still two mindsets, and no one person can know everything."

Vistaprint has merged its dev and ops teams into one group, but the first part of this transition was to make sure developers understood their effect on operations. Then the company trained the whole team on different software frameworks so that everyone could learn new skills, Morse said.

Walt Disney Studios' ops team has been far from eliminated by the company's deployment of Red Hat's container application platform OpenShift. In fact, the company's ops pros have found IT automation makes their ability to secure and network the infrastructure more crucial than before.

For example, an ops team figured out how to assign granular permissions to containers in OpenShift's Kubernetes layer by designing firewall pods that act as gateways to file storage. They also use egress pods to wall off the OpenShift system from the open internet.

"It allows me to go back and be an infrastructure engineer again," said Thomas Haynes, Linux systems engineer for Disney, in a presentation at Red Hat Summit here this week.

With an automated Jenkins-based application delivery pipeline, Haynes said he is freed from having to repeatedly set up underlying systems for developers or deploy applications on their behalf.

IT ops still has as much work as it can handle in IT automation environments, other OpenShift users said.

"You're doing less on your own command line and taking on more of an orchestration role," said Richie McDonald, IT operations manager for a financial organization in the public sector. "There are some Unix guys who don't care for that very much, but we have no concerns about job security."

IT ops pros will be the ones to figure out how to do packet capture on inter-container networks, and add security to virtual networks such as the Open vSwitch system that underpins OpenShift, said an infrastructure architect in the financial sector, who spoke on condition of anonymity and whose company is in the early stages of deploying IT automation software.

The relative immaturity of software-defined infrastructure products, particularly in networking, will make his job both harder and more critical, the network engineer said.

"If you're not prepared to talk about containers, you're going to have a bad time," the architect said. "Organizations can't afford to keep buying legacy systems because that's what you're comfortable with."

Still, "eventually someone has to plug a WAN [wide-area network] circuit into a router, and that's not going to be a developer," he said.

Products such as OpenShift depend on operations teams' skills in Linux administration, said Jamie Duncan, a cloud engineer in the public sector for Red Hat, in a presentation on OpenShift for ops at the conference.

Containers are a form of Linux that must be manipulated differently from traditional operating systems, but the same fundamental concepts and operational command line interface tools apply to troubleshoot problems, Duncan said.

OpenShift also doesn't have its own mechanism to build a new server node -- for that, IT ops must connect an elastically scalable virtual infrastructure using products such as VMware ESXi or OpenStack, he said.

"The container revolution started on a developer's laptop, but today it's being sold to ops professionals," Duncan said. "It's just another layer of density, like VMs -- you have to sweat your hardware more and automate everything, and that's the only way you're going to survive."

Another attendee at Summit compared IT ops pros' resistance to new IT automation systems to those who wondered in the 20th century: if automobiles become safe enough for everyone to drive, who will shoe the horses?

"I would rather be a solutions architect," said Nathanael Duke, senior customer support analyst at OCLC, a global library cooperative based in Dublin, Ohio. "I would rather be selling automobiles."

Selling is exactly what IT ops pros at U.K.-based banking company Barclays had to do, said Simon Cashmore, lead engineer and solutions architect for the firm.

Barclay's platform as a service team had to view developers as consumers of the automated system ops has created rather than a foreign species of IT person, Cashmore said. Barclays has shifted people into new roles including a "front man" to monitor chat channels and involve the right people in service requests.

"It's been a massive cultural change for my engineering team from being heads-down creating stuff to being out there working with people," he said.

And ops teams aren't the only ones who have to figure out new approaches to solving problems, Cashmore said.

Developers at Barclays have required extensive help from the ops team to teach them how to handle new infrastructure responsibilities. The company has instituted a "bring your own image" policy for developers, for example, but IT ops maintains pre-configured container images for developers to use if they struggle.

Beth Pariseau is senior news writer for TechTarget's Data Center and Virtualization Media Group. Write to her at bpariseau@techtarget.com or follow @PariseauTT on Twitter.

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Enterprise ops pros lead charge toward IT automation software - TechTarget

Forbes

This Is How Mark Cuban Thinks Humans Could Trump The Rise Of Automation Forbes More and more people's jobs are coming under attack from machine-learning, artificially-intelligent robots. That much is clear, at least based on a growing number of business leaders, labor experts, and tech industry insiders ringing bells to let ... and more »

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This Is How Mark Cuban Thinks Humans Could Trump The Rise Of Automation - Forbes

Economists expect that millions of American jobs are going to be replaced by automation in the coming decades. But where will those job losses take place? Which areas will be hardest hit?

Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation.

A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt. It predicts that areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales will be most affectedplaces such as Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area may be the most vulnerable to automation in upcoming years, with 65 percent of jobs in Las Vegas and 63 percent of jobs in Riverside predicted to be automatable by 2025. Other areas especially vulnerable to automation are El Paso, Orlando, and Louisville.

Still, the authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades. We felt it was really stunning, since we are underestimating the probability of automation, said Johannes Moenius, the director of the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at the University of Redlands, which prepared the report.

Moenius and colleagues used a widely cited 2013 study from Oxford University predicting which of roughly 700 common jobs are most susceptible to automation, and then mapped out which metropolitan areas have a high share of those jobs. That study, by the economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, suggested that 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk of automation over the next decade or two; they found that telemarketers, insurance underwriters and appraisers, tax preparers, and cashiers were some of the most likely to see their jobs threatened by automation, while the livelihoods of mental-health and substance-abuse social workers, oral surgeons, choreographers, and physicians were more protected.

Frey and Osbornes estimates cover about 138 million Americans jobs. Moenius and his colleagues found that Las Vegas, Riverside, and El Paso all had high numbers of office and administrative-support jobs, food-preparation and -serving jobs, and sales jobs, and thus had the most vulnerability to automation. Moenius estimates that 65.2 percent of jobs in Las Vegas, 63.9 percent in El Paso, and 62.6 percent of jobs in Riverside are susceptible to automation in the next two decades. The automation of transportation and material-moving jobs also contributed to the potential job loss in these places, as well as in Greensboro, North Carolina, where 62.5 percent of jobs are susceptible to automation.

The jobs that the Redlands analysis places new focus on are slightly different from the types of jobs academics once thought would be easily automatable. Thats because before the Frey and Osborne study, scholars had predicted that routine jobs were the most likely to be automated, but Frey and Osborne suggested that advances in computerization have made it likely that non-routine jobs will be automated, too. The power of machine learning means that programmers with large data sets can use them to make machines smarter, allowing them to do non-routine tasks; for example, oncologists are using data from medical journals and patient records to automatically create treatment plans for cancer patients. It is largely already technologically possible to automate almost any task, provided that sufficient amounts of data are gathered for pattern recognition, the authors write.

Of course, the Rust Belt will not be immune to automation in coming decades. Metropolitan areas like Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh could still see more than half of their jobs computerized, the study suggests. But because so many manufacturing jobs centered in the Midwest have already been automated, those regions are not at the top of the list of the places that currently stand to lose the highest share of jobs. Instead, the brunt of the next automation wave will come in cities with a different type of low-skill job.

Whats particularly striking about the new Redlands report is that the regions that are susceptible to automation are those that already have a high share of low-wage jobs. Previously, automation had hurt middle-class jobs such as those in manufacturing. Now, its coming for the lower-income jobs. When those jobs disappear, an entire group of less-educated workers who already werent making very much money will be out of work. Moenius worries about the possibility of entire regions in which low earners are competing for increasingly scarce jobs. I wasnt in L.A. when the riots happened, but are we worried about this from a social perspective? he said. Not for tomorrow, but for 10 years from now? Its quite frankly frightening.

There were, however, a few regions of the country where jobs were not as likely to be automated. They included Silicon Valley, North Carolinas Research Triangle and the Boston area, where a high share of the jobs require more creative and social intelligence, and are thus more difficult to automate.

These areas are currently relatively prosperous, and the Redlands analysis also suggests that Americas growing regional divergence will only continue to worsen. As the Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti wrote in his 2012 book The New Geography of Jobs, high-tech job centers like Silicon Valley are attracting more and more educated and talented people, and are pulling away from the rest of the country. This has implications not only for employment, he wrote, but also for socioeconomic outcomes such as health, family stability, and crime. He put it this way:

A handful of cities with the right industries and a solid base of human capital keep attracting good employers and offering high wages, while at the other extreme, cities with the wrong industries and a limited human capital base, are stuck with dead-end jobs and average wages.

The work by Moenius and his colleagues suggests that this divergence will only continue. While a handful of cities with good jobs and highly educated workers will continue to thrive, other areas are going to see more and more jobs disappear as automated technologies become ever better. This may have much wider implications, politically and socially. People in Americas struggling regions feel left behind economically, as the 2016 election indicated. But the anger that motivated many voters in November may pale in comparison to what comes next, if some regions see two-thirds of their jobs disappear while other areas continue to thrive.

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The Parts of America Most Susceptible to Automation - The Atlantic

Automating simple tasks such as opening emails, collecting social media statistics and conducting repetitive calculations could save the federal government billions of dollars annually, a report shows.

The federal government stands to save a minimum of $3.3 billionand 96.7 federal work hours by creating bots that can free up human workers to do more complex tasks, according to a Deloitte study. Deloitte advises federal customers on how to incorporate bots into organizations.

At the higher end of Deloitte's estimate is that the federal government could save up to 1.2 billion hours and $41.1 billion. Though "large government job losses are unlikely, automated technologywhich might include more advanced forms of artificial intelligencecould leave up to 25 percent of current workers available for other tasks, the report said.

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Some agencies are already starting to take advantage of automation. For instance, the Homeland Security Departments Customs and Immigration Services uses a natural-language processing virtual assistant named EMMA that processes about 500,000 typed questions a month. DHS incorporates user feedback about how helpful EMMA was to improve the chatbot.

Other agencies might begin by automating tasks involving speech recognition and simple decisions based on the "if/then" framework, the report said. Document searches might be another easily automated task. Deloitte concluded electronic document discovery could identify about 95 percent of relevant documents in a specific case, compared to just 50 percent for human searchers.

Consumers appear to be on board. About 63 percent of consumers and business decision-makers think artificial intelligence could help society, and 59 percent said it might help people live "more fulfilling lives," according to a recent PwCreportsurveying 2,500 people. On the venture capital side, there have been about 605 venture investments over the last two years, totaling about $5 billion over 605 deals.

About 46 percent think AI would take away jobs, and 23 percent thought automation could have "serious, negative implications.

In fact, the majority of consumers thought it would be more important to access better services than to preserve those jobs. For instance, about 80 percent of respondents thought it was worth getting better legal advice, even from a bot, than to keep lawyers around. About 66 percent thought the same for transportation professionals and customer service representatives.

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Automation Could Boost Federal ProductivityAnd Save $41B a Year - Nextgov