De geautomatiseerde maatschappij #2

1 Million Robots To Replace 1 Million Human Jobs? First Robots Have Arrived At Foxconn.

Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer that builds numerous mobile devices and gaming consoles, has been in the media lately because of labor issues, complaints over working conditions, rumored riots, and even suicides, all occurring in the past few years as demand for smartphones and tablets is skyrocketing.

While consumers began to complain in response to media coverage over working conditions, prompting Apple to hire an audit of the factories, Foxconn’s President Terry Gou had another idea for dealing with labor concerns: replace people with robots. In fact, last year Gou said that the company would be aiming to replace 1 million Foxconn workers with robots within 3 years.

It appears as if Gou has started the ball in motion. Since the announcement, a first batch of 10,000 robots — aptly named Foxbots — appear to have made its way into at least one factory, and by the end of 2012, another 20,000 more will be installed.

Though little is really known about these new bots, the rate of robot installation thus far is much lower than Gou’s original claim; however, the evidence suggests that it is difficult to know exactly what is going on in the factories and what is coming down the pipe. On top of that, these robots are manufactured in house, meaning that little information about them needs to be shared with the outside world in marketing reports, for example.

The FoxBots that have been installed apparently are designed for simple, yet precise repetitive actions common for simple manufacturing robots (lifting, selecting, placement). When it comes to automated factories, robots that can perform these tasks aren’t really anything new. But one look at the photo of the robot and it’s clear this isn’t just a simple machine, but a similar type of robotic arm to those used in assembly lines of automotive manufacturers.

That means more sophistication might be possible with these bots alone or in tandem.



According to a translated page from the Chinese site Techweb, each robot costs between $20,000 to $25,000, which is over three times the average salary of one worker. However, amid international pressure, Foxconn continues to increase worker salaries with a 25 percent bump occurring earlier this year.

It’s worth noting that you can see automation is already part of the manufacturing process at Foxconn, but the new Foxbots are aimed to not merely complement factor workers, but replace them. As the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics, this move wouldn’t be happening unless the robots were ultimately cheaper than human beings.

If Foxconn ramps up the robot rollout, it’ll be interesting to see what the worldwide response is. While there are those who worry that the rise of robots will bring about the end of work as we know it, others see the Foxconn working conditions as violating human rights, and therefore, might welcome robotic replacements, if it means that conditions for the remaining human workforce could improve.

Because Foxconn employs 1.2 million workers, robot replacements both solve worker problems and create them. It should come as no surprise then that many manufacturers are watching the situation at the company closely.

It would be too easy to criticize Foxconn for a move like this, but the company is not alone – Canon reportedly aims to do the same thing.

An important statistic from the International Federation of Robotics is that the number of operational robots in China increased by 42 percent from 2010 to 2011 (close to 75,000 robots), an unprecedented growth in the 50-year history of robots. At that rate of adoption, it would be 2019 before there were 1 million robots in all of China, but odds are that the use of robots is only going to increase as the pendulum that led to the economic boom in China swings back in the other direction.

In the end, we all know that the future of manufacturing is all about robots. It’s a question now of how fast the transition will occur and whether governments, businesses, and organizations will be able to adjust with the shifting workforce and economies.

During this time of flux, many are looking for leaders to take the lead. Whether Foxconn proves it can correct its current problems with robots or digs an even deeper hole by its displacement of a large workforce will play out in the immediate future.

Regardless, it means bots are here to stay.

http://singularityhub.com(...)robots-have-arrived/

How a Robot Will Steal Your Job

On a visit to Standard Motor Products' fuel-injector assembly line in South Carolina, Atlantic writer Adam Davidson asked why a worker there, Maddie, was welding caps onto the injectors herself. Why not use a machine? That's how a lot of the factory's other tasks were performed. Maddie's supervisor, Tony, had a bracing, direct answer: "Maddie is cheaper than a machine."

Davidson's complex, poignant story, Making It in America, revealed some chilling data about where American manufacturing is headed. It's a matter of simple math. Maddie makes less in two years than a $100,000 machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now.

Elsewhere in America, robots are getting cheaper and more sophisticated, and they're landing better, more advanced jobs. They are driving cars, writing newspaper articles, and filling prescriptions, displacing people with years of schooling and training under their belts. It sounds like a classic sci-fi story, but that disconcerting future isn't in the future. It's here today.

What are the odds your job—your career—will be the next one that can be done better by a machine? Alarmingly high.

***

If you're an average sports fan, you may have heard about Narrative Science. But if you're someone who writes about sports for a living, you've definitely heard of it—you probably already know it's coming after your career.

Part of a joint research project between Northwestern University's schools of engineering and journalism, Narrative Science was officially founded in 2010. It's now led by a small hodgepodge of computer scientists, journalists, and businesspeople whose goal is to use data to create stories via the company's artificial intelligence platform, Quill. Quill takes data fed into it—a football game's stats, for instance—and in seconds pumps out stories. They won't win any Pulitzers, but they're occasionally better than what humans produce.

The sports site Deadspin, last year, challenged Narrative Science to write a better baseball article than one they'd found in a local paper. In the story, the reporter buried the lead—that the pitcher had thrown a perfect game—near the bottom of the story. Narrative Science entered the box scores into Quill and, lo and behold, it came up with an article that announced the perfect game right up top.

Pablo S. Torre is a former staff writer for Sports Illustrated and a current senior writer at ESPN magazine and ESPN.com. He says that while longform feature and profile writers are probably years away from having to worry about a computer taking their jobs, thanks to the nuance required of them, wire service sports writers are not as lucky.

"My sense is that an increasing number of casual readers are skipping right to the box score," Torre told me over Gchat. "If they are reading a game recap, they're trying to identify the biggest or most interesting moments in a game as part of the general trend towards quick summary and bullet-point highlights. So if a robot can approximate that with any semblance of human intelligence, then that's something to be feared."

Torre believes that as society moves more toward a "just the facts, ma'am" terseness, it's going to be deadline-driven Associated Press reporters and the like who struggle to compete with programs that can put together a quick game recap based on just a batch of stats.

"It's not because the AP doesn't do a tremendous job—they do, and are continually underrated," says Torre. "But because what's often desired, post-game and in a pinch, isn't a well-constructed narrative."

***

Like journalists, pharmacists are another group of well-educated professionals whose jobs are now in jeopardy because of robotics. Last year, Slate journalist Farhad Manjoo, whose father is a pharmacist, looked at PillPick, a robot that's been installed to fill prescriptions at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center. PillPick is huge and expensive, but the machine, made by a company called Swisslog, is also extraordinarily efficient and more precise than a human being. You might want that quality on a job doling out potentially toxic medications: Experts estimate that more than a million people are injured and 7,000 killed due to so-called "medication errors" each year.

Here's PillPick in action:


The robot may look colder and uglier than your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, but does that matter if it's great at what it does?

Before installing the robot, UCSF needed about half of its more than 100 on-staff pharmacists to administer and check the drugs going out to patients on the floor. Now, nearly all have been reassigned to different parts of the hospital, where they make IVs, help adjust patients' drug regimens, and perform other tasks that had been neglected when they were simply filling prescriptions. The robotic pharmacy cost $7 million to install—less than one year's salary for all those pharmacists—and when it's running at full capacity, it can dispense more than 10,000 doses a day. After it became operational last year, the robot filled 350,000 prescriptions without making a single error. (The first error it did encounter was a printer problem, and that was quickly caught by its human operators.)

With society becoming more reliant on an ever-broadening range of drugs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the need for pharmacists to grow by 25 percent between now and 2020. And with their median annual wage sitting at more than $111,000, human pharmacists are relatively expensive to employ. With this in mind, it's not surprising that more and more hospitals are choosing PillPick to replace their pharmaceutical staffs. Earlier this year, Benxi Central Hospital, one of the largest facilities in China, ordered a PillPick robot. Then, in July, Singapore's largest hospital group ordered five PillPicks.

The Singapore sales were a "tipping point," said Stephan Sonderegger, Swisslog's head of healthcare solutions in Asia, in a press release. In other words, in case the smart students studying pharmacology are thinking of transferring, perhaps it's time to consider the fantastic robotics program at MIT.

***

With robots now taking both high-skill and low-skill jobs, you'd have to be a fool to think that a robot could never come for your career. What's more, robots are becoming far more cost effective than they once were. It still costs millions to equip a pharmacy with PillPick, but a new robot from Boston-based company Rethink Robotics Inc., Baxter, was just put on the market for $22,000. That's about how much a human assembly line worker might earn annually. Except that Baxter will never ask for a bathroom break, health insurance, or vacation time.

"This robot is never going to build an iPhone," Rethink Robotics founder and CTO Rodney Brooks told an audience at a robotics tradeshow in Pittsburgh this week. But Baxter can do things that require less dexterity, like picking parts up from a conveyor belt and putting them elsewhere, or sorting and packaging products for shipment. And with more than $60 million in venture capital funding keeping Rethink Robotics afloat, it probably won't be long before Baxter's successors can, in fact, build iPhones.

It was just this week that Foxconn, the Chinese company that manufactures so many of America's favorite gadgets, initiated a plan to buy 1 million robots to replace human workers. When that day comes, thousands of men and women working at Apple's Chinese manufacturing plants will be unemployed. You'll have to wonder—in spite of notorious labor abuses at Foxconn—were those jobs better than none?

***

In Terminator, the robots rose up and slaughtered the world's humans. This Skynet scenario was scary, but a more plausible future is pretty frightening as well. The robots don't exterminate us directly—they just slowly push us out of work, impoverishing the world's laborers until we're slaughtering each other to stay alive.

Writing for io9 earlier this year, computer scientist and futurist Federico Pistono imagined the horror:

Without a backup plan to adjust to a new paradigm, we can expect the worst. Civil unrest, riots, police brutality, and general distress of the population will continue to rise until critical levels are reached, at which point the whole socioeconomic system will crumble upon itself. This has negative repercussions across the whole spectrum of the population, and it is against the interest of everyone on this planet, even of the richest and wealthiest people.

Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, agrees with Pistano. Nourbakhsh, author of the forthcoming book Robot Futures, says that the "chronic underemployment" robots could create has to the potential to be "very, very bad." But he also told me it's not too late to turn around.

When people want to build a new factory, the government makes them do an environmental impact study to assess what impact the factory is going to have on the world around it. They look at what's going to happen to biodiversity and, if they give off toxic material, they figure out how they're going to remediate that. What's odd to me is that we have nothing like that for employment.

Nourbakhsh says that he'd like to see the introduction of "employment impact assessments." These would require companies transitioning to automated workers to calculate—and then try to mitigate—the damage they'd be doing to the human job market. "We need to have these kinds of controls," he says, "because the captains of industry will do whatever they need to make more money, and replacing humans with robots will always make them more money."

The responsibility to prevent a world overrun with mechanized labor isn't just on CEOs and industry titans. Nourbakhsh says consumers have to begin asking ourselves what we want out of society. Perfect service from robots? Or the gentler qualities only humans can offer?

"Google is creating robot drivers for cars, but the robotic limo driver won't have a really great recommendation about the best bagel spot in New York City," he says. "We lose those kinds of nuanced, fun things with robots. We have to start putting a real value on them, the way we put a real value on labor costs—because they matter."

http://gizmodo.com/5960261/how-a-robot-will-steal-your-job

En nog een artikel. Beginnen we dan eindelijk wakker te worden en te zien wat er aan de hand is in de wereld?

Robots, automation to blame for ‘jobless’ economic recovery: economists

The economy may go through boom and bust cycles on a regular basis, but don’t expect job growth to be part of the upswings any more. Future recoveries from recession will likely be “jobless” because technological advances now enable troubled firms to shed middle-income jobs in favor of machines and automation. If these jobs are not recouped during subsequent economic recovery, future recoveries may well remain jobless.

That’s the dour view of economists Henry Siu (University of British Columbia) and Nir Jaimovich (Duke University), who point out in a recent article that “a jobless recovery is not simply an ‘economy-wide‘ delay in firms hiring again. Instead, it can be traced to a lack of recovery in a subset of occupations; those that focus on routine or repetitive tasks that are increasingly being performed by machines.”

This has been the case in the last three recessions, from 1990-91 to 2000-01 to 2008-09, they add. Previously, hiring would surge as businesses began to gear up again from a slowdown. Following each of the 1991, 2001, and 2009 recessions, per capita employment in routine occupations fell and never recovered, they point out.

The reason for this structural change in labor markets is the rise of automation, Siu and Jaimovich explain:

“Automation and the adoption of computing technology is leading to the decline of middle-wage jobs of many stripes, both blue-collar jobs in production and maintenance occupations and white-collar jobs in office and administrative support. It is affecting both male- and female-dominated professions and it is happening broadly across industries –manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial services, and even public administration.”

While Siu and Jaimovich may be right on target with their analysis of what is happening to existing traditional jobs, they fail to account for the wide range of entrepreneurial and new work opportunities that the same technology is creating. In today’s DIY (”do it yourself”) economy, there is an abundance of online resources for developing, testing and marketing new business ideas. Cloud computing makes enterprise-class compute power and applications available for pennies at the touch of a button. Mobile frees up users from the constraints of physical offices and workplaces. Social media opens up markets at virtually no cost. 3D printing enables customized mass production of everything from food to houses at any location.

This levels the playing field for new players. Plus, larger companies are in critical need of people with the skills to put these technologies into practice. Automation is causing a painful retrenchment of many traditional jobs. At the same time, it is creating new ways of working that have yet to appear on economists’ radar screens.

http://www.smartplanet.co(...)very-economists/5537

En nog eentje:

Techonomy: Can a Robot Steal Your Job?

In a Techonomy panel titled "Where's My Robot?" moderator John Markoff of The New York Times started by suggesting that a better question might be "Where isn't my robot?" In this session, Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics talked about the next generation of robotics, while MIT's Andrew McAfee discussed worries that robotics would take jobs from people.

Markoff noted that Google's self-driving car has already gone 300,000 miles, Volvo has said it will have a driverless car in the market by 2014, robots in the form of drones are in the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan, and robots are used routinely in surgery. He's seen a variety of "lights-out" factories even using the previous generation of robotics.

Brooks, who founded both iRobot and Rethink Robotics described the difference between the two companies. With iRobot, the focus was on a single-purpose robot, the Roomba. In contrast, Rethink Robotics' Baxter is a more general robot designed to work in manufacturing, programmable quickly by a line worker. Baxter has a face so you can know what it is up to without special icons; it glances at something before it reaches for it, and it looks confused when it doesn't know what to do.

Markoff noted that robotics today work better for things like razors that don't change much than for things like iPhones that change every year, and Brooks said that's because of the complexity of programming the robots, which he is trying to change. Brooks said Baxter will be available this year and cost about $25,000.

Also on the panel was MIT's McAfee, who co-wrote Race Against the Machine with Erik Brynjolfsson.

He thinks we are at a tipping point where robots are becoming able to do more and that may have a very positive impact on the economy, but could also have a large negative impact on unskilled workers. Economists have been warning about displaced labor by new technology for years, and it has never happened, but McAfee said he thinks it might this time because robots can do things that we think of as the province of what humans do.



There will be new companies, new industries, and new economic activity coming, he said, but that people aren't developing new skills.

Evidence suggests that automation has hurt employment in the current recession, but there is disagreement as to whether this is a temporary trend (as it has been in the past) or something more permanent. History is on the side of the job optimists, he said, but he is worried that this time is different.

Brooks said Baxter was designed to complement workers, not replace them, but McAfee is skeptical, noting that manufacturing output grows every good year, but employment is going down —not only in the United States but also in China. (He did say, though, that Baxter is very impressive.)

Markoff asked how this might affect where products are manufactured, and both McAfee and Brooks suggested robotics might make it more effective to build products closer to where they are needed, so it might bring manufacturing back to the country. Brooks said Baxter costs about $4 an hour to run, less than low-cost labor in emerging markets.

McAfee said that might be true, but that it wouldn't bring back many jobs because the robots would be doing just the job. "Outsourcing is a weigh station on the way to automation," he said. Brooks said that computers replaced some of the tasks office workers used to do (such as adding up long columns of numbers) but the total number of office workers grew. McAfee argued that the boundary between augmenting and replacing workers was a narrow one now because of the productivity gains.

Robots don't yet have the dexterity of humans because there hasn't yet been the platform for developing this, as there was for mobility (which led to the Google car), Brooks said. He was hopeful that Baxter might be this, and suggested applications letting older people live more autonomous lives for longer.

Asked about the kinds of new jobs this technology might enable, Brooks explained that this technology might enable jobs for much more customized manufacturing, facilitated by 3D printers and the like, calling out MFG for manufacturing.

Both were very optimistic about self-driving cars, saying it goes from being very exciting to very boring very quickly. An audience member asked if the problem in manufacturing was that most people don't want such jobs and that becomes a problem as current manufacturing people retired. Brooks agreed, noting that even in Spain, where unemployment is over 20 percent, about a quarter of the vacuums sold are robotic because people don't want to clean houses.

Within 10 years, we will have humanoid-looking robots, Brooks predicted. He is skeptical of Ray Kurzweil's belief that by 2029 computers will be as intelligent as people, but McAfee said that if Kurzweil is right, there will be no jobs for humans.

For more, read about DARPA's robotics challenge.

http://forwardthinking.pc(...)robot-steal-your-job

De manier waarop je een robot kunt programmeren wordt hier ontzettend simpel gemaakt

Enabling End-Users to Program New Robot Skills


Mobile manipulators like the PR2 have the physical capability to do a range of useful tasks for humans, however their actual capabilities are limited by the software applications written by highly specialized programmers. Instead, Maya Cakmak from Georgia Tech, envisions robots that can be programmed by their end-users for their own specific needs. This past summer, Maya worked on developing a spoken dialog interface that allows a user to program new skills by physically moving PR2’s two arms and using simple speech commands.

Imagine purchasing a brand new “programmable” robot. How would you know what to do, to make the robot do something? This is not a problem for many of our daily appliances as they considerably limit possible user actions. For functionality like robot programming with a verbal dialog interface, however, it is important to guide the user with appropriate feedback from the robot and provide supplementary materials such as user manuals, tutorials, or instructional videos. Maya conducted a user study that replicates the described scenario. Participants in this study (15 men and 15 women, ages 19-70) with no prior knowledge of how to program the robot were left alone with the robot and a combination of supplementary materials. They had to figure out on their own how to program different skills such as picking up medicine from a cabinet or folding a towel.

The study revealed that information presented in the user manual easily gets overlooked and instructional videos are most useful in jump starting the interaction. In addition, trial-and-error plays a crucial role especially for achieving a certain proficiency level.

User studies like Maya’s, provide important insights into how the interface and the supplementary material should be designed to improve the learnability of end-user programmable robots. Check out the video for sample interactions and look for Maya and Leila Takayama’s upcoming publication for more details.

http://www.zeitnews.org/a(...)ram-new-robot-skills

This Burger Was Made Entirely by a Robot

Earlier this year, news permeated the Internet of a machine that had the capabilities of creating a hamburger entirely on its own. The machine, in essence, would take raw ingredients like tomatoes, pickles, onions, lettuce, buns and your choice of meat, and out the other end would emerge a fully-cooked, ready-to-eat "gourmet" hamburger.

The implications of this machine, at the time, were heavy. Why do we need a machine like this? Are our chain restaurants not serving you a burger fast enough? Are we interfacing with too many humans as it is (note: sarcasm)? The new machine, which still remains unnamed, is capable of producing approximately 360 burgers an hour in a 24-square foot area. When the news of this machine surfaced earlier this year, no one knew where the robot's creators (Momentum Machines) would take their product. Would they sell to a burger restaurant chain and let them utilize their machine to streamline their kitchen? Almost 11 months later, the creators have expressed plans to create their own "smart restaurant" chain to strut the capabilities of their burger-making robot.

No word on how it tastes just yet, but here's what a burger made by machine looks like:







The question arises, what constitutes a "gourmet" burger? Yeah, in theory, with this machine, you can plug in quality ingredients like locally sourced tomatoes, quality-grade beef and freshly baked bread, but it's made by a robot, in mass amounts. Isn't this a step backwards in an age where folks are seemingly expressing a quiet revolt against the mundane and a shift towards chef-driven, quality menus?

A step forward for cool technology advancements and potential restaurateurs, but does this advance the consumer experience in any notable way? Unless the price of a gourmet burger suddenly drops to $0.99 and the robot is coined a "Burger ATM", it will be a curious sell to the consumer beyond the novelty of being served by a machine.

What do you think? Where do we go from here with a machine that will make a burger from raw materials? Even scarier thought, what if this machine produced burgers that tasted good? You know that awkward moment when you realize a robot might be making your burgers in the future?

That moment is here.

http://www.huffingtonpost(...)robot_b_2160251.html

Hmmm... investeringen en andere zaken groeien weer door na de crisis maar de werkgelegenheid is gedaald. Het gevolg van automatisering om kosten te besparen in economisch moeilijke tijden?

quote:

Op woensdag 21 november 2012 20:15 schreef Erasmo het volgende:
Maarruh, pcp wat wil je dan? Dat de spijkers weer met de hand gesmeed worden?

Nee dat het overgrote deel van het werk voor ons wordt gedaan door machines, zodat de mens bevrijd kan worden van het werk waar hij niet bepaald gelukkig van wordt.

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2012 11:22 schreef Digi2 het volgende:
Onderzoek naar potentieel gevaar kunstmatige intelligentie

AMSTERDAM - De vooraanstaande Cambridge University gaat onderzoek doen naar de potentiële gevaren van kunstmatige intelligentie.

Dat meldt AP.

De universiteit richt een Center for the Study of Existential Risk op en gaat onder meer het mogelijke gevaar van kunstmatige intelligentie onderzoeken.

"Het is een aannemelijke voorspelling dat ergens in deze of de komende eeuw intelligentie zal ontsnappen aan de huidige biologische beperkingen", aldus Huw Price, filosofieprofessor aan Cambridge. "Dan is de mens niet langer het slimste ding op aarde."

Kwaadaardig

Price benadrukt dat het niet gaat om kwaadaardige machines, maar om machines die zich niet interesseren voor onze belangen.

Als voorbeeld noemt de professor het bestaan van intelligente machines die niet geven om duurzaamheid. Hij vergelijkt het risico met de manier waarop mensen het bestaan van diverse dieren bedreigen of hebben bedreigd.

"Mensen zien het gevaar van kunstmatige intelligentie als een verwaarloosbare zorg, maar we weten niet hoe serieus het risico is. We weten niet in welk tijdsbestek het zich gaat ontwikkelen en zorgen wegwuiven is gevaarlijk", aldus Price.

Nu

Ach, als AI zich verder ontwikkelt dan zullen verschillende AI's ook verschillende persoonlijkheden krijgen met verschillende opvattingen. Sommigen zullen dan de mens verdedigen en anderen niet. Beetje als de Transformers zeg maar

Ook zal de mens zich steeds meer mengen met technologie en zullen we misschien wel een soort van cyborgs worden of met genetic engineering passen we ons biologische lichaam aan om slimmer te worden en mee te groeien met AI.