Category Archives: Automation

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In software development, the rise of automation tools has largely eliminated human involvement. ON one hand, it's easy to say that automation has further eliminated the need for QA but that's not the case. As experts have noted, QA is still essential, as is human intervention in some cases, to ensure a quality product is deployed.

"Test automation may largely eliminate the need for manual testing in some scenarios, but it will never eliminate the need for QA," said Chris Marsh, director of technology for AKQA. Test automation will be a part of QA engineers' toolboxes and will help focus testing efforts, he added, noting that unit tests are cheap to produce and run and therefore the most likely to be automated. Integration and UI tests, however, may be subject to more manual intervention.

The problem with traditional approaches like this is in trying to eliminate all defects before launching new software, which can prevent feedback from actual users as well as reducing ROI. No piece of software is truly defect-free, according to Marsh. QA engineers need to be involved in the build pipeline and consult on quality across the entire project lifecycle, he added.

Testing is as only as good as the test

Automation does make some aspects of QA easier, but if the test itself isn't up to snuff, it won't provide the desired result, according to Greg Hoffer, VP of engineering at Globalscape. "Because technology development is a complex, dynamic process, automated QA...is doomed to fail unless someone is able to make sure that the tests are current, or new bugs and vulnerabilities will not be detected," he said, citing the case of a serious security bug in the CryptKeeper app that wasn't found during the QA process.

Additionally, fully automated QA may result in perfectly accurate yet completely unusable software that doesn't meet any business needs, Hoffer said. Any automation in DevOps needs to be validated for usability to meet the needs of humans.

"Automated QA, continuous integration (CI), and continuous deployment (CD) are all great advances in the efficiency of DevOps. But we should not expect them to be perfect. It is still incumbent on the developer community to be vigilant," he said.

QA may actually become more important

As a result of automation, more QA work will move to the front end of the software development lifecycle, and CI tools will become more important for testing, according to Rupinder Singh, senior vice president, expert services at Software AG. "As confidence in CI and automation increases, there is a very likely scenario of customers using Continuous Delivery for selective parts of their applications, although it still is not something that is completely reliable," he said. However, the QA role may become more important in technical communities as automation takes over manual test cycles, Singh noted.

QA automated tests can prove whether known paths still work or identify new features or code that might have introduced issues, said Mark Doyle, software architect at Collabroscape. "However, it still takes ... human creativity and ingenuity to explore those paths, and then write automated tests against expected outputs," he said. "Companies must - and should - continue to employee QA teams, and they need to invest in training and software licenses for the automation platforms, but the benefit is still there."

More stable software systems is one such benefit, according to Doyle. First, running an automated test can validate the build to save time and energy on the QA personnel side before testing. Secondly, if the failed tests automatically entered issues into a defect tracking system, QA is able to come up with more comprehensive test plans, he said.

Ultimately, automation isn't a bad thing - it saves time and helps focus efforts on more human-intensive processes while removing the low-hanging fruit. It makes QA testing easier for routine tests. But it does need to be taken with a grain of salt to ensure that accurate, useless software isn't being deployed.

Also see: 80% of IoT apps not tested for vulnerabilities, report says 3 ways to prevent your app developers from blowing off QA testingHow to use scrum for app development QA testingHow to build a solid workflow for updating mobile apps

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Why automation doesn't necessarily remove the need for QA - TechRepublic

As we gear up for Robo Madness 2017: A.I. Gets Real, our annual robotics and artificial intelligence conference at Googles offices in Kendall Square, lets connect a few dots around the topic of automation.

In just the past day or two:

Uber has started testing self-driving cars in Tempe, AZ, after having its tests banned in San Francisco in December. (Of course, Uber has got bigger problems at the moment.)

UPS tested a rudimentary form of drone delivery in Lithia, FL. A drone carrying a package took off from the roof of a UPS truck, dropped the package at a destination, and returned to the truck.

Amazon is planning to sell beer and wine at its Go convenience store in Seattle, which will automatically bill customers on their way out (no cashiers). A human worker will be needed to check IDs, though.

The impact of automation on jobs and society is an increasingly hot topic, with debates going on about how and when human workers will be displaced by robots and A.I. systems.

Bill Gates said in a recent interview with Quartz that governments should tax companies use of automation technologies, to mitigate the impact of job losses. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things, Gates said. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, youd think that wed tax the robot at a similar level.

Gatess idea is that robot taxes can be put towards things like education, elder care, and other societal needs. But government, not businesses, would need to make that happen, he said. And thats what scares me.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com.

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Amazon, Uber, and Bill Gates's Robot Tax: An Automation Snapshot - Xconomy

Advancements in technology are not always welcome, particularly to a workforce fearing displacement. This is particularly true with the rise of automation, with the threat that companies could outsource labor to machines. And while experts say artificial intelligence and automation can provide a cheaper and better way to solve problems that previously took up valuable human time and effort, putting numbers to those changes is challenging.

Almost half of knowledge work activity can be automated, according to a recent McKinseystudy.Physical tasks "in highly structured and predictable environments, as well as data collection and processing" will be the first to be automated, according to the report. And because those types of jobs make up a little over half of activities in the economy, that equates to almost $2.7 trillion in wages.

McKinsey also acknowledges almost all occupations blue collar and white collar have potential for some automation, which could result in a savings of about $16 trillion in wages. Those are big numbers, certainly large enough to garner the attention of businesses looking to trim costs in a competitive environment.

Though it is often approached with fear, automation doesn't necessarily mean bad things for employees. When it comes to replacing workers altogether,McKinsey estimates that could only work in less than 5% of occupations.

Instead, automation is more likely to make employees more productive.

While some people express concerns about job losses due to automation, others focus on how the gradual displacement in the workforce through automation will aid the economy and drive growth. McKinsey estimates automation could raise productivity growth globally by 0.8% to 1.4% annually.

"Technology such as natural language generation (NLG) AI technology that can absorb vast quantities of big data and communicate key insights and conclusions into easily digestible reports will drive our workforce forward by streamlining processes, helping people to do their jobs more efficiently," said Sharon Daniels, CEO of Arria NLG. "The best and brightest will be free to innovate; the engineers to build, the doctors to heal, the scientists to discover."

Only 60%or less of actual work time today is spent productively, according to a report from Atlassian.If employees had access to tools and technology they need to automate their workflow, the amount of time spent on workflow disruptions could be drastically lowered.

Through technologies like AI and automation, "the best and brightest will be free to innovate; the engineers to build, the doctors to heal, the scientists to discover."

Sharon Daniels

CEO of Arria NLG

"Successful work will require humans and machines working together to better delight customers, better grow the top line, and better improve the bottom line," said Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact.

Workers will not only be happier, many are likely to see a bump in salary as well, Tyagarajan predicts. For example, a recent Deloitte study in the U.K. found that AI technology has replaced 800,000 lower-skilled jobs with 3.5 million new ones, which pay on average 10,000 ($12,500)more than the jobs they replaced. Those jobs include engineers and data analysts, who create the machines and analyze the data collected by the them.

"Essentially, as tasks and jobs become increasingly automated, that automation opens the door for employees to work more efficiently and creatively to solve problems in which human knowledge is intrinsically valuable," said Tyagarajan. "Machines are taking over more and more repetitive, time-consuming tasks, meaning humans will have more time to take on higher-skilled roles."

Daniels agreed. For example, in financial services and healthcare, the vast troves of data collected can change as fast as someone can analyze it.

"AI capabilities and the ability to automate reporting actually takes the time-consuming and repetitive mechanical tasks away from the human, freeing them to investigate new ideas and to create new solutions," said Daniels."We believe that AI will augment knowledge-workers, who will advance to a whole new level of expertise."

"Successful work will require humans and machines working together to better delight customers, better grow the top line, and better improve the bottom line."

Tiger Tyagarajan

CEO of Genpact

The tasks that are taken away by AI are often the time-consuming, repetitive, mundane tasks associated with preparing reports.

"The responsibility of actual reporting remains intact but now can be done more efficiently, in real-time and at scale," said Daniels. "This does not remove the job per se; it optimizes the dynamics of the task, allowing knowledge knowledge-workers and analysts to do more and know more, faster."

One question that remains unanswered: If automation is to take away jobs, will the CIO be responsible for making that decision?

While it's still unclear, experts say in some cases, it will likely be the CIO, but the chief data officer (CDO) may also play a role.

It will also depend on the area being automated. For example, financial services and healthcare sectors see a strong ROI from using AI technology."While the CIO has a responsibility for implementation, the benefits are delivered to multiple departments and stakeholders, so decision-making typically becomes a collective exercise of evaluating and redefining information-related roles," Daniels said.

Either way, experts say enterprise IT leaders need to begin preparing their workers to embrace robots as teammates, not adversaries. McKinsey predicts workers will have to adapt for automation and perhaps learn new, more complex skills that they then perform alongside machines. It will therefore be more a matter of better assisting machines rather than being replaced by them.

"While the CIO has a responsibility for implementation, the benefits are delivered to multiple departments and stakeholders, so decision-making typically becomes a collective exercise of evaluating and redefining information-related roles."

Sharon Daniels

CEO of Arria NLG

"I would advise CEOs and CIOs to stay focused on creating a company culture that equips employees with the tools to succeed in a workplace cohabited by robots," said Tyagarajan. "Pushback both internal and external is inevitable during times of transformation, especially at the beginning."

Leaders need to be transparent and accountable. This begins with keeping employees in the loop when it comes to how and when the company plans to apply AI and automated systems. Employees need to know that while the robots are coming for some jobs, it is possible to retrain and reskill to work alongside them.

"Developing reskilling and education programs is absolutely key to helping employees feel empowered rather than threatened by the rise of robots at work," said Tyagarajan. "[These] programs should focus on teaching human employees how to create, use and maintain the AI systems they will be working alongside."

Workers should also keep in mind there are many areas where humans still outperform machines such as any task requiring negotiation, judgment or creativity.

"By helping human employees build on these strengths, leaders will help employees accept machine teammates as valuable supplements to human talent, rather than insidious replacements," said Tyagarajan.

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Automation, employees and the bottom line - CIO Dive

Business mogul Mark Cuban found himself in a Twitter feud this week over how best to deal with future job losses caused by automation.

The tech investor, Shark Tank host and Dallas Mavericks owner tweeted earlier this week that we need to prepare for impending job losses due to robots and artificial intelligence, CNBC reports.

When asked by writer Scott Santens, an advocate of universal basic income (UBI), whether he would support the policy of governments providing a baseline income to all citizens regardless of their employment status, Cuban replied that it was one of the worst responses to the problem.

UBI advocates argue that giving citizens cash income is more effective than welfare programs in countries where it has been piloted, and that the policy may not, as detractors suggest, incentivize unemployment.

Countries such as Finland , Namibia and Liberia have experimented with the policy with varying results. Santens replied to Cuban with a picture of a fact sheet claiming that self-employment in Namibia rose 301% after implementing UBI, while in India recipients were found to be three times as likely to start their own businesses.

Cuban nonetheless rejected the argument, saying he had spent a lot of time looking at it and wasnt convinced, prodding Santens for more evidence and triggering a trailing back and forth between the two.

The billionaire investor has previously said little about how automation may impact jobs in the future. As a major investor in tech giants like Amazon ( amzn ) and Netflix ( nflx ) , Cuban is likely to reap benefits from AI where the average worker may see less desirable outcomes.

A number of other major figures in the tech industry, such as Tesla ( tsla ) CEO Elon Musk , have begun to back policies like UBI out of concern that a wave of unemployment could be created by automated labor.

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Mark Cuban Says Basic Income Would Be the 'Worst Response' to Automation - Fortune

We all think were less likely to be affected by misfortune than other people. This is such a phenomena that psychologists have a name for it: Unrealistic comparative optimism. Whether its saving a few bucks by not paying for the rental car insurance or putting off that visit to the doctor, humans do this all the time.

So its no surprise that when it comes to thinking about being replaced by robots, people behave no differently. When asked in an online survey by LivePerson, 65% of 2,000 respondents agreed that their job was safe from automation, but that people in other industries needed to be worried. By most reports, including the White Houses own study in 2016, this is unrealistic comparative optimism.

But there is a small minority thats bucking human psychology: the same survey found 35% of those in the transportation industry are already beginning to learn new skills for fear of being replaced by machines.

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Automation is coming for you too - Quartz

A recent episode of CBC Radios Day 6 featured an interview with David Levy, artificial intelligence expert and author of Love and Sex with Robots. Levy discussed a line of robotic sex dolls to be released in 2017 that can speak and respond to touch. He reaffirmed his 2007 prediction, in his book Love and Sex with Robots, that humans will be marrying robots by 2050. He suggests this will be a step forward.

There are millions of people out there who, for various reasons, dont have anyone to love or anyone who loves them. And for these people, I think robots are going to be the answer, he said.

I suspect that Levy sees this as a lucrative business opportunity for Intelligent Toys, Ltd, a company the article mentions he founded.

The profit potentials of automation are not limited to robot spouses.

Front and center is the issue of jobs. Donald Trump promised to bring back millions of jobs that globalization outsourced at the expense of U.S. workers. According to a 2014 MIT study recently cited by the New York Times, 2 million to 2.4 million jobs have been lost to China alone since 2000. People living in areas of the country most impacted by those job losses suffer long-term unemployment and reduced income for the rest of their lives. They are understandably angry and constitute an important segment of Trumps political base.

But, as former President Barack Obama noted in his farewell address, those jobs are gone forevernot because of globalization, but because of automation. The next wave of economic dislocation wont come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.

Gartner, an information technology consulting firm, estimated in 2014 that by 2025, a third of current U.S. jobs will be replaced by some form of automation. Indeed, China itself has become a world leader in automation, threatening both Chinese and U.S. workers.

Trump touted United Technologies as his first victory in convincing a corporation to keep a factory in the U.S. But UT has announced plans to use automation to do the jobs it would have moved. So, in the name of saving jobs, Trump is subsidizing with tax breaks their elimination by automation.

We are seeing a flood of predictions in business media from artificial intelligence experts that jobs at risk include pharmacists, cashiers, drivers, astronauts, soldiers, babysitters, elder care workers, sports writers, and news reportersamong others. On Wall Street, the jobs of most floor traders have already been automated, and the jobs of hedge fund managersand stock market analysts may soon be on the chopping block.

These predictions suggest we face the prospect of an economy with little need for humans. As with any technology, however, artificial intelligence is not inherently good or bad. The issue is how we choose to use it and who makes the choice.

The economy is a human creation. The only reason for its existence is to support peopleall people in securing material well-being sufficient for their good health and happiness. For most people, there is no happiness without relationships, a sense of being needed by others, and opportunities to express their creativity. That most always includes some form of work. Thus, while the automation of dirty, dangerous, and boring tasks can be a blessing for humanity, the need for meaningful work remains an imperative.

Our vision of how to deal with the coming workforce disruption must be guided by our common quest to actualize the fullness of our human possibility, not by the quest for corporate profits. The primary decisions regarding how to use artificial intelligence and how to distribute the benefits must be in the hands of self-governing human communities rather than profit-maximizing corporations.

The social isolation of which Levy speaks is realthe product of economic forces that undermine the family and community relationships that for millennia sustained our species and defined our humanity. Our need to relate to one another is foundational to our humanity.

Attempting to meet that need by turning to machines that look, feel, and act like humans would be a further step toward our dehumanization. If we want our children to learn to relate to humans and if we are more comfortable being treated by human doctorsthen let our primary care providers be humans aided by machines as appropriate. But let us not confuse the two. The creation of machines that look, feel, and act like humans should be prohibited. If it looks, feels, and acts like a human, it should be a human.

In our current political climate, everything is up for grabs. This is a timely moment to stretch our imaginations and envision the lives and the society we want. Let us be clear that a world in which we are distracted from our lonelinessby electronic games, animated videos, and robot sex is more appropriate as a horror movie plot than as a desirable vision for society.

Let us strive for an economy in which a primary goal and responsibility of business is to make work meaningful, build relationships of internal and external community, and heal the Earth. A combination of the appropriate use of automation and of worker and community ownership would make this possible. This might be a foundational element of a positive democratic vision for a living Earth economy, around which all people of good will can enthusiastically unite.

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For Automation to Benefit Society, It Must Serve Humans, Not Replace Them - YES! Magazine

Caterpillar(NYSE:CAT), the world's No.1 heavy machinery maker,is telling miners not to rest on their laurels now that the industry is finally coming back up from a brutal downturn that forced companies to cost cuts and closed down operations.

In a presentation at the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Explorations (SME) meeting 2017 this week, the Peoria, Illinois-based firm (soon to move to Chicago) showed how its Cat MineStar a comprehensive suite of mining technology products aimed atincreasing productivity and profit can help firms reap even more benefits from the current recovery in commodity prices.

Cats automation tools contained in MineStar enable miners to configure technologies to fit their needs, providing everything from material tracking to sophisticated real-time fleet management, machine health systems, autonomous equipment systems and more.

The package of solutions, designed to support and maximize returns and efficiency of mining operations, has already been adopted in 220 sites across the globe, Cat said in the presentation. The majority of its users, it noted, are based in the Asia-Pacific region and North America, but the company sees huge opportunities in other markets such as South America and Europe, especially now that miners have begun climbing out of one of the industry's most severe slumps.

In the past 12 months, as sales were stalled, Caterpillar focused on developing ways to improve current equipment performance.

Together with increasing the presence of company representatives at mine sites, whose mission is to help operators make the most out of their acquisitions, Cat has been heavily investing in research and development of digital solutions, the firms President for Resource Industries, Denise Johnson,recently told MINING.com.

The goal, though seems counterintuitive, is to reduce the amount of mining equipment needed at operations. That means that during a downturn, such as the one that wrecked the industry lately, Cat would keep onthriving in terms of salesbeyond those related toequipment.

Now that many are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, the company said it would continue to work on bringing mining customers improved operational decision-making capabilities.

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Caterpillar touts automation solutions as top miners swing back to profit - MINING.com

The world is going through what some people term the fourth industrial revolution, according to Data61 CEO Adrian Turner, led by the rise of automation and an increasingly connected world that relies on devices.

But rather than fearing the change brought about by automation in the workplace, Turner said Australian businesses and governments should focus on creating new jobs that embrace and adapt to these changes.

Speaking at the first day of the Garner 2017 APAC Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney on Monday, Turner said that although 40 percent of jobs won't exist in 15 years because of automation, this 40 percent will roll into new industries. As such, Australian businesses and the federal government should work together to make sure the nation is well prepared.

"The future is not certain and not known, and we have an opportunity to create it en lieu," Turner said. "We've got all the smarts, we got a sense of where it's all going, we have a tremendous opportunity to step up and create new industries that will create new jobs; there's no reason why we shouldn't do it."

Australia actually has a massive advantage over other western economies in implementing these changes through government, according to Turner, because of the nation's relatively small government, the size of its economy, and the quality of the universities.

"We think that Australia is in prime position to lead a whole bunch of new industries. If you think about trying to do some of these things in a market like the US or the EU, it's much more fragmented, it's harder to get everything lined up, whereas in Australia we can."

Turner particularly stressed "underemployment and not unemployment", and said that Australia should look to adapt to changes straight away in areas such as education.

"The reality is the education sector is changing. The challenge is that the market context is changing so quickly that in a four-year degree cycle, you have to think differently about how you teach. We need to do a better job of contextualising why technology matters for graduates and for kids," he said.

"In Israel, they teach kids from 14 years old cybersecurity and the fundamentals of cybersecurity; we don't right now. The government has a role to make sure there's a safety net for us as an economy to help transition."

Companies are adopting new technologies, automation, and data collection methods at an impressive rate, according to Turner, and not only because of operational efficiencies, but also because of the multiple types of natural bias that humans have that can affect the interpretation of data.

As a result, the increasing move towards automation is affecting industries that had previously never been thought of as being susceptible. For example, he said in law, through the application of machine learning and analytics, computers can understand any piece of regulation and break it down into machine-readable objects.

There will, however, be a counterbalance, Turner said, where more opportunities are created because of automation in areas such as in and around the arts, cultural activities, content production, precision medicine, and trading, as well as entertainment. Turner pointed to the US, where in the national security industry, data analysts are looking for a wide range of professionals to derive insight from data -- even artists and philosophers.

He pointed to the belief of Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales and Data61, who said that as well as being technically literate, creative thinkers will be fundamental for a systems-thinking point of view and knowing what questions to ask computer systems.

"It's not about this technology replacing jobs, but shifting the nature of jobs. New jobs will be created, make no mistake. It'll be jobs that require a lot of dexterity."

Turner also stressed that some industries will be less affected because there are certain types of jobs that systems and machines will have a hard time replicating. Even a simple manual job such as folding a towel, for example, will always take longer for a robot than for a human.

Australia now needs to recognise those areas where the technology can really make a difference, according to Turner, and past the obvious structural changes that are now necessary because of technology.

"If we take a step back and break it all down, there's actually enormous opportunities for new industries. The world's moving, the models are shifting, we're moving to more rapidly iterate more careers within our career. We shouldn't fear this change, we should embrace it. We should work with the technology.

"What we're moving to -- at a country level, a corporate level, an individual level -- it's really the survival of the digital fittest."

Last year, Gartner predicted virtual personal assistants to become the front-line interface between government and citizens, while government agencies will shift to autonomous business processes and business intelligence capabilities to help humans make better decisions based on context in real time.

"What you'll see as these machines become smarter, more data is fed into them, more real-world experience is extrapolated from them, what you'll see is fewer humans interacting with transactions," said Rick Howard, research vice president at Gartner.

Government CIOs must also adopt threat-aware, risk-based approaches that allow governments to make informed decisions about risks, according to the company, and those that are too slow to adopt technology innovations will increase business risk and cost, while compromising the mission of their organisations.

Gartner predicted worldwide government spending on technology products and services to reach $476.1 billion by 2020.

"By 2020, 30 percent of the transactions we engage in today will no longer exist," Howard said. "The focus is now on effectiveness and outcomes, and the contribution that technology makes to the operations of government."

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Automation must be embraced by government: Data61 - ZDNet

In a chat with ET Now, Anand Deshpande, MD & CEO, Persistent Systems, Kavi Arya, Pl, e-Yantra Project, IIT Bombay and Pari Natarajan, Co-founder &CEO, Zinnov, discuss the big picture in the IT Sector and how echnology trends are creating a disruption in the business model and the talent also have to keep up with it.

Edited excerpts

When someone says AI, I only have robots in my head. It is like a motion picture. What is AI all about? Deconstruct it for us because this is all jargon?

Traditionally when you looked at artificial intelligence, the idea was let us go figure out what the human being does and sees and if we can get a machine to replicate that. So there have been various techniques that people have used in the past to figure out how they would go about taking human intelligence and making it into a machine. People thought maybe we should create rules, we should figure out how people think and there was a lot of research going on.

In the last five to seven yearsm few things have changed; one change that happened was that technology became more freely available. The second thing is people are using data a lot more. It is not important for the machine to figure out exactly how the human thinks but it should enough answers. Let us say if you looked at cats and dogs and you wanted to separate the dogs from the cats, one can go about saying that here are the rules about dogs and here are the rules about cats and that is pretty hard to do.

You need dimensions?

Anand Deshpande: Dimensions, maybe colour, furs, whatever else, and how do you identify a dog from a cat? It is very hard to do. But what the new techniques allows is you just train the machine to see hundreds of cats and hundreds of dogs. These are the neural network algorithms that are available now. They are able to say if these are cats, then the next time when you ask it, is this is a cat, it can tell you with 90% probability that this is a cat.

You know its freaky. When you upload a picture on Facebook, Facebook knows who that friend is and asks you whether you want to tag this one? It is kind of freaky.

Anand Deshpande: Yes, absolutely. What has happened in the last few years has changed this thing. There are two-three things. One, we are leveraging a lot of this artificial intelligence on the basis of past data. You are giving it sample results and saying okay, can you compare this with what you already have and that makes it very compelling and much more efficient.

Second, the compute power, cloud all these things have made it very possible.

And the third thing which is I think equally important is that all the major players have released their products in the market. Google is freely available and then there is Microsoft and IBMs Watson products. It is all accessible and that is changing the way we are looking at things right now. So, people are deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning into every single problem that you can get your hands on.

So data and algos -- a combination of both?

Anand Deshpande : Yes.

What do you think impacts normal life and business the most? There are four or five key technology trends that are emerging. What is the top most to your mind?

Anand Deshpande: Clearly machine learning and machine intelligence is going to have an impact because it is changing how we can do automation. It can change a whole bunch of things in terms of how we respond to things. Definitely it is the key to getting this going in some sense but a lot of other technologies where large amounts of data are getting collected, Internet of Things is useful for trying to respond to activities and people are looking for actionable insights. So personal robots have started to emerge, personal information systems are starting to happen. A lot of different kinds of things like this are merging into each other.

There is so much of talk about 3-D printing, cloud, artificial intelligence, Block Chain. Technology is becoming a part of our daily life and if I look at the numbers, not only for Indian IT companies but for global IT companies also, they are struggling. A handful of Silicon Valley software companies are doing well. The start-up is where all the excitement is. The money also seems to be drying up because everyone is worried about profitability. So, technology will change our lives but are these new technology innovations really making money for investors and shareholders?

Anand Deshpande: They are playing a role in every industry right now. If you look at what is happening in the auto industry or the self-driven cars and Uber and all of the systems that you talk about, that would not have been possible without technology and without AI and some of the other techniques that we talk about. The whole view of IT industry as we look at it as Nasscoms top 10 companies needs to change, IT is sort of becoming prolific in every single industry and everything is IT now. Everyone wants to become a software driven business.

Is IT making money for companies?

Anand Deshpande: Absolutely. Those who are not becoming software driven businesses are going out of business. So essentially you have no choice. Software is driving business today and if you are going to make money it is going to be because you have the software.

I am not debating that the world around us is changing and the world around us will change. That is the natural migration of technology. I remember when in my school we had that big fat dot matrix printer and we had a floppy where we would put DOS and now in my i-phone I carry 50 GB Cloud which is virtual. We use technology but barring 10-15 start-ups which are in Silicon Valley and coming up with all the innovations, inventions and all the upgrades in technology, I do not see too many profitable ventures. Why is that? Suddenly everybody is talking technology, everybody is investing in technology but numbers are not there. Profit is what I am looking at. I am not looking at top line growth because the cloud business will grow, your technology, artificial intelligence will grow, real experience will grow but if I am an investor, whether it is a PE or minority shareholder ultimately I want profits and dividends?

Anand Deshpande: You have to look at profits not just for IT companies. IT company profits will improve for sure but all manufacturing companies are going to survive and have profits because of technology right now. Technology has become a more fundamental. It is like breathing air right now and you cannot avoid it. So you cannot just say profits are not going to depend only on technology but technology is going to play a big role in the profits.

What is that big game changing technology right now and the impact that it is having on businesses by and large?

Kavi Arya: I would say sum it up with an acronym that everybody seems to enjoy. I call it CAST. C is for cloud; A for automation; S for sustainability and T is for tools.

Cloud: Increasingly what is happening is that people are moving their computing services from a dabba on their table to somewhere in the cloud because the communication infrastructure has become so good. Many big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and so on are offering services where they are giving you this facility of storing your data and your enterprise data in the cloud but additionally they are also offering you data analytics and a service of actually being able to study your data to improve your competitiveness and I see more and more of this happening. In 2015, Alibabas revenue was almost one-fourth the GDP of India and now it sees itself not as an e-commerce company but as a company which is managing huge cloud, is doing data storage for you and is doing data analytics for you.

Automation: There will be more automation in whatever you do. All the low-end stuff is going to get done by automatic machines or robots, even software. A lot of the low end software work like testing and maintenance of large systems and things like that are going to get phased out and done by more and more intelligent software in the background.

Sustainability: It shows up in trends that you see nowadays like the Uberisation of the world where things that used to be a product in the past with a high maintenance and ownership cost, are being offered to you as a service. Cloud is also something that comes out of that. Instead of having a computer on your desk, you can hire as much space in cloud as you need. Instead of having a car parked in your garage, you can have as many taxies as you like. Sustainability is also smart. We are talking about smart cities, smart watches, smart consumables or what have you, everything is becoming smart. That is again a big consumer of a lot of IT infrastructure.

Tools: There are going to be more and more tools, high-end tools especially in software and so on which will make the lower end jobs more and more redundant and we will be having to move up skills ourselves in whatever we do. So that is if you like birds-eye view of what we see things as.

Everybody has heard about IoT. What is it doing to businesses?

Anand Deshpande: What is happening right now is that because of the technology abilities to put software into all kinds of devices and censors, today we can measure and activate censors all across the world. At the same time, you really can make significant business model changes because of that. One of the best examples is say for example Tesla. It has the ability to upgrade your car on the fly and as even after you bought the car you can upgrade it and you can get better features on your car.

If you look at washing machine that you buy once for the next 20 years. What would happen if you could upgrade your washing machine every so often because you have a better version of the product? We have been actually working on a lot of these areas and we find that the ability to bring data and respond in real time and change your business models to create the software driven business that you are looking at is really what IoT is making happen. This is real. Actually you will see impact of IoT in the next three years and it is going to be very significant and practically everything is going to have census and technology, data collecting, being collected in the cloud and response to it so definitely something to be watching out for all across.

The other one of course is blockchain and we hear that it is revolutionary?

Anand Deshpande: Blockchain started out to this concept around Bitcoins. The basic thing around blockchain is that it is a distributed transparent, tempered resistant auditable shared ledger that does not depend on a central agency. Let me explain what this means. What happens today is that if we had smart contracts, say a rental contract and we want to make sure that contract has not been tempered with by anybody. So we have a record. Let us say you have a contract that for your land or your parcel or whatever you have now and you want to make sure that contract that is in some central repository in the government. is not tempered with by anybody. You assume it has not been tempered with.

Like an e-locker.

Yes, but see all these lockers are all very central. When you have parties that do not trust each other, if I do not trust the government to be able to keep the data safe, then blockchain allows you to use the cloud in some sense, distributing copies of contracts all over the place to ensure that it cannot be tempered with. The copies are with everyone and so if you want a copy you can get a copy.

Like the Google doc?

Anand Deshpande: Well Google doc is still in one central place, Google doc is not replicated and if you were to edit Google doc and we had shared thing we would not know that it has not been changed. So with smart contracts especially when agencies are not partnering with each othe,r this becomes very handy. Another example, if we are transacting money, my bank will keep a ledger of all the activities. Your bank will keep its own ledgers. These ledgers are copied all over the place. What if we did not have to keep those copies and it was all available in one place so that you can just go to the central repository and look for that data and look for whatever you are looking for.

So this kind of a distributed architecture where you are able to copy these data sets and contracts all over the place and where you do not have to depend on one version of truth as it is distributed in the network is really what blockchain allows you to do. This came in from Bitcoins clearly but people have found good use for this across smart contracts and distributed things and especially when you are looking at international things when agencies do not necessarily want to talk to each other this becomes a very handy way. I expect this to be a bigger technology starting 2018. In 2017 there are certain issues around security and other things that will get sorted out.

So now we have understood these technologies the impact on various facets is what we want to discuss may be you have a question for Professor Arya.

Anand Deshpande: So let us ask Kavi who is a Professor at IIT in Mumbai, you are teaching all these technologies I am sure to your students how do students who are looking for jobs and technology situations right now, should be thinking about this in the future?

Kavi Arya: This is an age where students should be prepared to change their career at least five times in their life. We are talking about technology which has a life span of about two, three, five years and things like that things keep on changing. So they should be willing to continue learning all their life.

Second is that they should try and get the maximum degree or the highest level skill as they can before they leave the university ideally. It is interesting that an ACM survey the Association of Computing Machinery survey almost 20 years ago valued a B-Tech in the US at about $1 to $3 million over the life time of a person, it valued an M-Tech at between $2 to $3 million and it valued a PhD at $3 to $5 million. This is important both for companies and individuals nowadays because of the immense change that is happening in the world.

As India becomes a more developed economy and technology begins to take much more hold of the economy we will find this need much much more. There is a project which I am running at IIT Mumbai which is a Robotics Outreach Project called e-yantra where we are trying to reach out to a large number of students across colleges to actually equip them with these kind of skills that they need. We have discovered that you can really teach students through the medium of a competition pretty effectively and it is amazing how much talent there is out there in the country. Only a very small fraction of it comes to IIT Mumbai as we all know or the IIT system. I think there is a lot of talent out there which is not being used or capitalised upon which is what our project is trying to actually do.

Pari, what according to you would be the future five years hence of technology companies which are operating out of India?

Pari Natarajan: I will give you a few key trends based on the customer interaction we had. One, the level of automation is going to dramatically increase especially in some of the lower-end worker or managed services, infrastructure management, test automation. Customers are looking for a 15% reduction in overall cost of delivering some of these services, so that is one big trend.

Second, cloud becomes a key for how people manage their infrastructure. The number of people required to manage cloud infrastructure is reducing from 10 to 1 but when there is a major issue which happens in the cloud infrastructure, the skill of the person to solve this issue is going to be much higher. So you need a lot higher skilled person but not a lot of people. This is another big trend.

Third, large global enterprises are now moving from using lot of customised solutions to solutions which they can potentially configure, like moving into SaaS based cloud solutions. So when you move into a cloud solutions, you do not need a lot of system integration help. But that is how a lot of the Indian large IT services companies have built their business in integrating and customising Oracle, FAP and so on. That business is going to dramatically reduce as companies move into SaaS based solutions. These are some of the key trends which is going to have a disruption the traditional IT services business which our industry has built over the last 20 years.

Another thing the industry does not talk about quite is the talent issue. If you look at the talent pool which the industry hires from the industry over the last 10 years, the compensation has not really gone up for the IT industry. If you go to a university, most of the CEOs of large IT companies talk about how they do not need a lot of people to solve these issues going forward in IT. Now it creates a doubt in the students mind is this the right industry for me to get into because the salary has not increased and the CEOs talk about not needing a lot of people. Your picking order in universities is changing where university students could potentially prefer large Indian conglomerates and large Indian government institutions to join compared to the IT companies whereas IT companies were the key, the primary job creators.

So we have the technology trends are creating a disruption in the business model and also there is an issue they face around the talent which is coming in joining these companies.

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Cloud, automation, sustainability and tools are trends driving IT - Economic Times

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Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things, declared Gates. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, youd think that wed tax the robot at a similar level.

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There are many ways to take that extra productivity and generate more taxes. Exactly how youd do it, measure it, you know, its interesting for people to start talking about now, he continued. Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I dont think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. Its OK.

Gates added that you ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed of that adoption somewhat to figure out, OK, what about the communities where this has a particularly big impact? Which transition programs have worked and what type of funding do those require?'

You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once, Gates concluded. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, theres quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years, being thoughtful about that extra supply is a net benefit. Its important to have the policies to go with that.

Billionaire and entrepreneur Mark Cuban also claimed robots are going to cause unemployment, posting, Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it, to Twitter on Sunday.

Last week, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk warned that deep A.I. could potentially be dangerous to the human race, who he described as already part-cyborg.

One of the most troubling questions is artificial intelligence. I dont mean narrow A.I deep artificial intelligence, where you can have AI which is much smarter than the smartest human on earth, proclaimed Musk during the World Government Summit in Dubai. This is a dangerous situation.

Pay close attention to the development of artificial intelligence, he continued. Make sure researchers dont get carried away. Scientists get so engrossed in their work they dont realize what they are doing.

In November, Musk also predicted that automated robots would lead to mass unemployment, which he claimed could eventually create a universal wage from the government.

Charlie Nash is a reporterforBreitbart Tech. You can follow himon Twitter@MrNashingtonorlike his page at Facebook.

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Bill Gates Calls for Robot Tax to Offset Jobs Lost to Automation - Breitbart News