Soft, flexible fingers are extended to delicately remove the Apple from the shelf and gently place them in the basket. The task is then repeated with lemons, then with pepper. Fingers never complain and never tire of. More and more companies are turning to smart cars to save on slow and costly work in the face of people. Automation. What is it? What does it mean for your work?
The prototype of the manipulator described above is the hand of the development of Ocado, the British online supermarket. The irregular shape and thin skin of those mediocre products say that they are usually Packed with people on the Ocado warehouse. But the company uses robotic technology to help these people not only safely handle products, but also to do it faster and cheaper for the company.
Ocado is not the only company who prefer automated work. The same is happening in hospitals, law firms on the stock market. A list of going long.
The question is how this affects working people. For you, for example, how might this affect?
We often hear about how grim the future robots stealing our jobs, but is it? Who is at risk? How will your workplace in five years?
The answers may surprise you.
At risk — the middle class
Research suggests that 47% of people working in the U.S., can be replaced by machines, and in the UK under threat can be about 35% of jobs in developing countries, the threat level even higher, because two-thirds of jobs can be automated.
But the machines are stealing jobs is not new. “Automation has already happened before,” says bhagwan Chaudhry, Professor of Finance at the University of California in Los Angeles. Chaudhry points to the shifts that have occurred in factories during the industrial revolution, when automated looms and other machines took over the work of weaving from the people.
What has changed in this time? “It will affect not only blue collar, but many white people,” says Chaudhry. Under the “blue collar” refers to the working class, under the white — civil servants, bureaucrats, administrators, managers.
We often believe that the lowest paid jobs with low skills at risk more than others. For example, warehouse workers or cashiers. However, automation can also affect people with average income, such as clerks, cooks, office workers, security guards, clerks, inspectors.
It is clear that being in the line of fire people are concerned. “The concerns relate not only to the transition period,” says Carl Benedikt Frey, co-founder of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment. “Most of the jobs that will be automated, require different skills, unlike the newly created. It will be important to ensure that unemployed people could find a job”.
So, should companies that seek to automate, bear the moral responsibility to assist their staff to learn new skills?
Check future
The answer may affect not only the company — the answer may begin with a school.
Our modern structured education, can lose meaning in a world where technology is changing so quickly.
“The concern is that we do not update our educational, educational and political institutions to keep up,” says Eric Brynjolfsson, Director of the Initiative on the digital economy Massachusetts Institute of technology. “We can ultimately leave many people”.
Brynjolffson, and Paul Clarke, CTO of Ocado, agree that education in schools and colleges should better prepare students for a world in which artificial intelligence and robotics will be widely disseminated.
Workplaces of employees also will be required to upgrade skills instead of using the same throughout his career.
“The difference between work and learning may be vague,” says Chaudhry. “Currently, we are accustomed to separation, when working no need to learn, and those who are learning, not working. We need to think about how to move away from the traditional five-day working week to one where I spend 60% of their time doing their work and 40% on continuous training”.
For most of us it may be a decisive factor in thinking.
A study of management consultants McKinsey and Company showed that less than 5% of the professions can be fully automated with existing technology. Just because our jobs are too diverse and changeable, so that the robots could perform all the tasks.
Instead, they predicted that about 60% of occupations will be automated by a third. So, most of us will be able to cling to their jobs, but will change the process of our work.
Robots will complement, not replace
Learning how to work side by side with robots, it will be extremely important.
“There are times when the machines take over part of the repetitive work to liberate people so they can perform other, more useful aspects of his work,” explains James Munnik, a senior partner at McKinsey, who spent most of his research in the area of influence of automation. “It can significantly change the determination process of wages, because the machine will do all the hard work. It also follows that more people will be able to do this job with the help of technologies, so the competition will increase.”
There are also wider problems. With a decrease in the income of the middle class, the government can deal with such fundamental issues as loss of taxes and a dissatisfied electorate.
Fortunately, there are many cases that machines still do not.
One good example was the work of researchers from Singapore, who are trying to teach two Autonomous robotic manipulator to assemble flat chairs from IKEA. Despite the use of modern equipment, machines cannot cope with the simplest tasks.
Even the isolation of the different objects from the chaotic mix of parts is a complex task for robots. In recent tests the two robots took more than six minutes to successfully insert a piece of pile in one of the legs of the chair.
And this is only one part of the piece of furniture. “The real problems start when you want the robot has collected several pieces of furniture. The robot could collect the chest of drawers IKEA, but will not be able to collect a wardrobe from the same series, since the details will be different, even if some of the Assembly steps remain the same. People have no such problem”.
The advantage of the person
From increased flexibility to the best personal qualities will always be things that we are better than robots.
“As we automate repetitive work, we see a growing demand for creative skills,” says Brynjolfsson. “We also see a growing demand for people with social skills, interpersonal communication skills, which nurture, heal, teach, impose their beliefs, have negotiation skills and good selling.”
Frey believes there are several areas in which people have the advantage.
“The first is social interaction,” says Frey. “If you think about the diversity of complex social interactions that we encounter every day when negotiating or trying to convince people to help others or to take care of customers… We manage the teams and all that. It’s amazing what computers can substitute for workers who do all this”.
Another — creativity. Computers are perfectly cope with the problems and not bored doing repetitive actions. However people find this tedious monotonous work.
Initiative Massachusetts Institute of technology set the goal for $ 1 million, aims to encourage businesses to use these “human traits” along with the technology.
“The amount that we currently paid to nurses and caregivers for the elderly, very low,” says Manyika from McKinsey. “Similarly, there are many artistic and creative works that are never paid. The challenge is how to pay for and appreciate the creative work on the merits, because the machine will never be capable of it fully”.
Alex Harvey, scientific Director at Ocado Technology, which develops software and technology for the retail division of the company, said that the world was designed and built for people, and force the robots to operate in this challenging natural environment is a serious technical task.
One of the projects Ocado is the robot assistant maintenance called SecondHands. It shows how people and robots could work together.
“For example, he has the ability to raise things to a higher altitude than humans,” explains Harvey. “It’s a pretty simple robot, in terms of its behavioral repertoire, but it can form a great team, in which man technician will be the leader and they will be able to use the muscle strength of the robot”.
But the closer people and machines will work together, the darker will be the ethical side.
Ethical issues
About 1.7 million robots are already being used worldwide, but most often in industrial environments, where people are virtually off-limits. Numbers are rising, and the roles performed by the robots, too. It turns out, people will have to work with them side by side, and the risk will rise correspondingly.
“There should be more transparency so we can understand how these things do what they do and how they behave,” says MADI Delvaux, Vice-Chairman of the Committee on legal Affairs of the European Parliament.
Recently called for Parliament to create rules that robotics and artificial intelligence.
In a report prepared for the European Parliament, stressed the urgent need for new legislation on liability in case of accidents. The same liability issues arise if the robot takes actions that violate the law. The artificial intelligence algorithm, for example, may miss a series of financial transactions to bypass the complicated network of rules governing the sector.
Delvaux and her colleagues also call for the establishment of a code of ethics that will regulate our relationship with robots.
“Must be items that require respect, like the autonomy of the person and privacy,” says Delvaux.
All this brings to the fore another issue that bothers many developers of artificial intelligence: prejudice. Machine learning systems only as good as good data, that they are to study. Recent studies have shown that artificial intelligence can develop sexist and racist tendencies.
Meanwhile, bill gates has recently proposed to impose a robot tax to offset the lost fees from the income of employees. Others suggested that as robots take on more and more tasks, there may be a need for a universal basic income, to receive state benefits.
The cars are moving forward
For example, furniture from IKEA, it becomes obvious that the AI still takes a long time to develop.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing machine learning and artificial intelligence is understanding how to operate their algorithms. “Things like artificial intelligence and machine learning remain largely black boxes”, says Manyika. “We can’t open them to see how they got the answer that I received”.
This creates a number of problems. Machine learning systems, and modern AI are usually trained using large sets of images or data that is fed to the system to learn to recognize patterns and trends. Then they are used to identify similar patterns when entering new data.
It can be good, if we want to find CT scans showing signs of illness. But if we use a similar system to identify a suspect out of a piece of real-time imagery, we need to understand the algorithm to provide irrefutable evidence.
Even in the field of Autonomous vehicles this ability to generalize remains a serious problem.
Takeo Canada, Professor of robotics at Carnegie — Mellon, is an expert in the field of self-driving cars and computer vision. He says that giving robots a “genuine understanding” of the world around them remains a technical problem to be overcome.
“It’s not only in identifying the location of objects,” he explains. “Technology needs to understand what makes the world around her. For example, whether a person wants to cross the road or not?”.
Expert opinion: the world after automation?
Ilya Hel