Will AI lead to fewer jobs ? Good or bad for business?

 

I’ve been asked many times recently to comment on how the rise of AI will impact the jobs and the economy, particularly in customer service and contact centers. I’ve seen wildly differing forecasts, from the dire predictions of Elon Musk to the optimistic predictions of Accenture. According to Forrester’s recently released ‘The Future of Jobs’ report, robots will take 24.7 million jobs by 2027, but create 14.9 million new jobs in the same period. There is no doubt that AI will impact jobs globally more than any other technology in our lifetime. The key question is “what should we do about it?”

The answers depend on your point of view and whether you’re a government leader, a business leader or a worker thinking about your own future. Should we tax robots, as Bill Gates suggests? Should we adopt universal basic income as Musk suggests? “Ultimately,” said Musk, “I think there will need to be some sort of improved symbiosis with digital superintelligence, but that’s a pretty involved discussion.”

There are huge societal questions that I won’t attempt to answer here. Instead, I tend to approach the topic of AI and jobs in the same way that I approach the question “how do you eat an elephant?” (Answer: one bite at a time). There are several near-term challenges and opportunities for businesses, and the best thing that business leaders can do is understand what those are.

While some see a bleak future, I see a future where AI and machine learning will create new categories of work, and amplify human intelligence. Computers bring incredible processing power and memory, and can mine vast amounts of information in a short period of time, while humans bring the emotional intelligence and problem-solving skills to handle unexpected or uncommon situations. In the next few years, I see AI becoming integral to the productivity of the workforce. 

Understand and embrace the changes

As leaders think about how AI will impact their businesses in the next few years, there are several key questions they should consider:

1. How can AI (specifically chatbots) reduce labor costs and improve customer experience? 
2. What can businesses do to reduce the risk of automation on the workforce?
3. What new jobs can be created because of automation?
4. What are the macro-economic global ramifications of further automation?

One of the most obvious areas that AI will impact jobs in the next few years is in customer service and sales, especially in the contact center. Chatbots have the potential to help businesses significantly cut labor costs, which increases profits, but has a human impact. Improvements in AI have enabled chatbots to create effective automated responses that helps businesses generate sales and boost consumer satisfaction. According to a study by Oracle, nearly 80 percent businesses have already implemented, or are planning to adopt, AI as a customer service solution by 2020. 

According to McKinsey, 29 percent of customer service 36 percent of sales representative positions in the US could be automated through chatbots and other tech. BI Intelligence estimates that equates to savings of $23 billion annually in customer service salaries, and $15 billion annually in sales salaries. 

Those are compelling numbers, and it’s clear why so many companies are exploring this. Because of advances in AI, businesses can use artificially intelligent chatbots as virtual agents that replicate the effectiveness of their best human agents. This has the potential to reduce customer frustration and wait times. 

However, it is essential to remember chatbots are still an outward facing extension of the brand, and even though they are not human, consumer expectations around their performance will be high. Moreover, a robot does not have the empathy to handle a frustrated customer, or the creativity to drum up a solution to a particularly unique issue. These uniquely human capabilities shouldn’t be underestimated – they’re essential to the workforce of the future, particularly the customer experience of the future. And if companies are incentivized to invest in the platform development and training to empower humans and machines to work together, automation can be less of a risk, and more an opportunity.

What should businesses think about?

• Which types of jobs are most easily automated and what level of human involvement will be needed after you do so?
• What kinds of jobs that are possible when a human has access to incredible processing power? Prepare to develop and train your employees for those jobs.
• How do chatbots differ, and what are the requirements for business?
• How can we design conversations using AI? Right now the focus is just on the call, and that’s where it ends. How can we re-think the experience across all touchpoints? 
• How can we use AI to anticipate what the customer needs and do it on their behalf?

Bots have the power to create, not just destroy jobs. In the near future AI and chatbots will free human workers from many repetitive, mundane tasks. This will cost some jobs but it will also create new positions – some not even invented yet. (Think stables and blacksmiths vs. parking garages and mechanics a hundred years ago.) 

Let’s take a contact center today and consider how it might evolve for tomorrow. Today, there’s little distinction between someone designing conversations vs. handling customer queries, but in the near future, many of the routine activity that agents handle will go away. In the next few years, I believe that 80 percent of contact center operations will be automated. The other 20 percent will be highly paid customer service jobs, including agents with the capability to train machines to become smarter. The agent of future will be more educated, more sophisticated and apply principles of psychology to handle high-value, complex conversations with customers

This will have a greater impact on countries such as Colombia, Guatemala, India and the Philippines, which have a much higher population of contact center agents than the United States. I envision something similar to what happened in the 90s when all the maintenance work started moving there. Over time, those jobs transitioned into actual development, and now many of the largest software companies including Adobe and Microsoft create new products there. 

Automation will affect every industry, but the vital role of humans working behind the veil of AI should not be underestimated. The notion of fully autonomous AI is still a thing of fantasy for now. For the foreseeable future, businesses will need humans to teach machines to work smarter, and bridge the gap where AI falls short – particularly when it comes to the complexities of human emotion.  Human labor remains a key component of the AI loop, and as we’ve seen with just about every other major technological advancement, some jobs will be lost but many more will be created to fit this new reality. 

Written by

PV KannanCEO at [24]7 Inc.

Self Driving trucks - the pleasure and the pain

 

Self-driving trucks are no longer the future. They are the present. They are here! 

There will be a reduction of accidents of the road. In 2012 in the US, 330,000 large trucks were involved in crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people, most of them in passenger cars. About 90 percent of those were caused by driver error.  Robot trucks will kill far fewer people, if any, because machines don’t get tired or distracted. Machines don’t look at phones instead of the road. Machines don’t drink alcohol or do any kind of drugs or involve any number of things that somehow contribute to the total number of accidents every year involving trucks.

 

Robot trucks also don’t need salaries. No more need for health insurance either. Self-driving trucks will also never need to stop to rest, for any reason. Routes will take less time to complete.

BUT!!!!!

What does this mean for the 3.5 million truck drivers in America? Will they have jobs ? What will this mean to the local economies dependent on truckers and he othe 5.2 million people employed in the industry. (Insurance , Restaurants, Diners , Motels etc)

Add the development of the hypeloop being able to deliver freight from NY to LA in under 4 hours, and you have an interesting cocktail of cataclysmic unemployment and decimation of industries and in turn small towns dependent on their custom. . 

 

 

Will these small rural towns close and people move to the cities and find jobs there?

One further important detail to consider is that truck drivers are well-paid. They provide a middle class income of about $40,000 per year. That’s higher than 46% of all tax filers. Truck driving is just about the last job in the country to provide a solid middle class salary without requiring a post-secondary degree.

 

If we look at the big national picture, we are potentially looking at well over 10 million American workers and their families whose incomes depend entirely or at least partially on the incomes of truck drivers, who are, by the way, extremely well paid and a major contributor to the Tax System! 

 

The replacement of truckers is inevitable. It is not a matter of “if”, it’s only a matter of “when.”  No one should be asking what we’re going to do when computers take our jobs.  We should all be asking what we get to do once freed from them. 

 

Partial source Huffington Post and Bob Pritchard 

AI

 

Australian startup Immersive Robotics are poised to deliver what they claim is a truly universal wireless solution for PC VR headsets that delivers tether-free virtual reality with minimal compromises in quality and extremely low latency.

I’ve always found it fascinating to observe how the advent a new technology can accelerate the development of another. The push for rapid advances in smartphone specifications for example accelerated the development of mobile, high resolution displays and low-cost IMU components without which today’s first generation consumer VR headsets could simply not have existed. Likewise, now that consumer VR is finally here, the demand for a solution to those ever more anachronistic, presence-sapping cables is driving innovation and rapid advancement in wireless video systems.

We’ve seen an explosion of stories centering around companies looking to take the (until now) slowly evolving sphere of wireless video broadcasting and give it a good shot in the arm. Most recently we’ve seen HTC partner with TPCast to deliver a wireless add-on solution for their SteamVR powered Vive VR system. But prior to that we’d already heard how Valve was investing a “significant amount” in wireless video streaming for VR by way of Nitero, a specialist in the field with Quark VR and Serious Simulations on the scene still earlier than that. However, when it comes to pushing the boundaries of cutting edge technology, you can never have too many people racing to the finish line.

Immersive Robotics (IMR) are an Australian startup who have developed a wireless VR streaming and inline compression system designed from the very start to be used with PC VR headsets, offering a claimed sub 2-3ms latency, with minimal compromises to image quality and works over existing WiFi standards you’re very likely to have in your home right now. IMR call their system the Mach-2K and from what they’ve we’ve seen so far, it shows some considerable promise. In truth, IMR’s project is far from new as the founders have been developing their technology since 2015, with working proof of concept running first on an early OSVR headset before securing a government grant to fund further development.

IMR was co-founded by Tim Lucas and Dr Daniel Fitzgerald. Lucas has a background in unmanned vehicle design having worked on multiple “prominent” UAV designs but has also worked with VR and LiDAR powered Photogrammetry, having built what he describes as “the first Virtual Reality simulation of a 3D scanned environment from an aircraft”. Lucas’ co-founder Fitzgerald hails from aerospace avionics engineering with a PhD focusing on the then emerging unmanned drone industry. Fitzgerald has built auto-piloting software for said drones, an occupation which let him practice his talent for algorithm software development.

With the virtual reality industry now growing rapidly, the duo have set about designing a system built around proprietary software algorithms that delivers imagery to VR headsets wirelessly. “Basically from an early point in modern VR history, my business partner Dr Daniel Fitzgerald and I decided to tackle the problem of making a HMD wireless,” Fitzgerald tells us, “Our original area of expertise was in designing high-end drones and we initially envisioned it as an interface for that area.” The team quickly realised that with the advent of consumer level cost, room-scale VR, there were some significant opportunities to capitalise. “Soon after looking into it, we realized that logically pretty soon everyone using tethered HMD’s would probably just want to get rid of the wires anyway and that the potential in this growing market was significant,” Lucas tells us, “We designed a video compression algorithm from the ground up that could compress data down to acceptable rates for current wireless technology but at the same time eliminating the flaws of current compression technology that make it unsuitable for VR such as high added latency.”

“What we ended up with was a compression and decompression algorithm running on individual boards, which is able to plug into HTC Vive compress it’s data down by around 95% with less than 1ms additional latency. Most of all there is no visible degradation to what the user normally sees with the cables.”

http://www.roadtovr.com/imr-building-wireless-video-system-power-4k-per-eye-vr-headsets/

Written by

Lisa FletcherCEO at Matrix International Exchange

Our story in 2 minutes .... boom!!!

Coca Cola using AI to replace its creatives... Artificial Advertising for an Artificial Product!

Another Bob Pritchard Insight

We have been considering the potential for employment loss of up to 60% in just the next few years through the combination of robots, AI and machine learning.  We have discussed how robots are replacing up to 90% of staff at Insurance companies, manufacturing plants and even news stories in the media.

Coca-Cola spends about $5 billion a year on advertising and a lot of advertising agencies and creative directors have created extraordinary campaigns and made countless millions creating messages that have fueled massive sales, generation after generation, despite the rather pathetic attempts of legislators and nutritionists to slow this growth.


 

 As part of a recent restructuring to make Coke a digital business, the brand hired its first chief digital marketing officer.  That digital transformation includes four focus areas: 

• Customer and consumer experience, 
• operations, 
• new businesses and 
• culture. 

Within the customer and consumer segment, Coke is interested in using artificial intelligence to improve content, media and commerce, particularly when it makes the creative process more effective.

In theory, Coke believes AI could be used for everything from creating music for ads, writing scripts, posting a spot on social media and buying media. It doesn’t need anyone else to do that but a robot, coupled with AI and machine learning.

Coke isn’t alone in envisioning human-less creative. AI is already being used to create commercial music and jingles and publishers like the AP are experimenting with using robots to write copy.  In terms of Coca-Cola’s interest in AI for media buying, Coke already buys ads programmatically but it is currently less than half of its media budget into programmatic. Still, with $4 billion in advertising, that is still a huge chunk of change that advertising agencies are no longer getting.

Coca-Cola is also looking for ways to use programmatic technology to fulfill ecommerce sales through tactics like subscriptions.   Coca-Cola thinks AI could be used for everything from creating music for ads, writing scripts, posting a spot on social media and buying media.

Souped-up vending machines are particularly interesting in countries like Japan, where mobile adoption and vending machine sales are high. Coke has a Japanese app called Coke On that lets consumers pay for drinks. Once the company has that, then they can use beacons so that they know when people are passing by the machines and you can understand habit of consumption, location and time.

At the same time, marketers need to keep in mind privacy concerns with the Internet of Things and need to find the right balance of using consumer data to provide better services that consumers appreciate without crossing the line.

That includes devices like Amazon Echo and also Coke’s own packaging, bottles and trucks. For example, Coke is testing beacons in Belgium in retail stores that pull in live data as shoppers move around the store.  You can follow them in real-time and then they have historical data that helps them predict behavior.
 Coca-Cola is now evaluating whether an AI bot can replace these flesh and blood creative teams. Mariano Bosaz, the brand’s global senior digital director, said that he’s evaluating how brands can use artificial intelligence because he’s interested in replacing those creative  people with robots.  Content creation is something that Coke have been doing for a very long time, they brief creative agencies and then the agencies come up with stories that they audio visualize. Coke wants to start experimenting with automated narratives.

How are robots, AI and machine learning going to affect your industry?  No matter what industry you are in, it will, and dramatically.

The Milleniall's Malaise

by Heidi Kaye 

Commuting from inner city to central, strong soy caps in hand.

Fresh salaries filtered through banks.

Inevitably addicted to social media, it helps one stay connected.

In touch. 
Aware and awake.

Scraping for rent in a concrete jungle.

Sometimes distracted by animated bursts of gratitude: Entertained, appeased, inspired.

Liking pages such as “end colonial mentality”, “Our Planet” “Embodied Philosophy” “Healthy Crate” “Magic Nature” “Humanitarian Institute” “Warrior Essence” “Enlightened Society”.

We are grateful Our newsfeeds are inundated with calls for social change, to answer personal calls beyond that of our smart phones, tuning into frequencies other then those omitted from television.

Quotes and images. Articles and videos. Protests to attend. Outcries updated via status.

So much earth on our screens its beautiful.

This newsfeed tastes like a healthy on-the-go snack bar,

flavoured and packaged to be consumed at our convenience.

Temporarily hitting that spot as we satisfy a hunger to connect to something larger then ourselves.

To hear the echo chamber singing ‘good morning you beautiful individual.

You are a conscious consumer.

You are doing the right thing.

You are a compassionate social activist.

You hold the power for change.

You spread light’.

Naturally, such a psychological response is addictive.

Our greatest achievement and irony is our addiction to these snack bars and the righteously sweet taste of alignment of ethics to practice.

Our greatest achievement and irony is our addiction to these snack bars and the righteously sweet taste of alignment of ethics to practice.

Somehow it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and I do not feel satisfied.

It is truly a significant time to bear witness.

The irony, hypocrisies, double standards of our leaders, parents and teachers is louder then ever.

Somehow it feels easier then ever to feel unsatisfied with ourselves as we make informed choices, still reluctantly following their lead. 

As we come of age, commuting to work, values of individualism embedded in our privileged upbringing are starting to beg the question:

Is this ethical?

Can I justify my footprint?

How can social media be a past time and social change my way of life?

Is there a case of actively not advancing towards Artificial Intelligence?

Heik A Daye shared Sári Komlós's post

Most epic combination of words conjurabubble. Thank you Sári Komlós 🙏

    

In this cauldron is our potion. To our flesh we offer the gifts of the Great Mother who, with the help of our blue Father Sky, gave us all we need to thrive. So that our spirits may eternally swim through celestial pools of enchantment. Landing on intricate revelations and gathering in our strong arms the fallen branches of the tree of wisdom. Reassembling these woody limbs in fresh ways, designing our way into the next stage. Every time I sit by a fire an ember is thrown into my numb parts. That which I shy away from feeling, bubbles to the surface. The grief and sadness which can accompany the path of earthly awareness. Seeing the systemic disorder parading as normal. Artificiality worshiped as divinity. Oppression disguised in too many outfits.

Sweet mama Earth, your body is my own. Sweet brothers and sisters, your body is my own. When violence happens to you, my body feels it too. This is the web of particles which lace us together and an irreplaceable energy -empathy. The system would prefer that under these feelings I cripple, visit a doctor, have medication prescribed for a mood disorder. Numb the pain and block out the madness. Believe the demented who cast their spells of complacency, succumb to apathy and retreat. But my mantra is collaborative action and my spirit will not be satisfied 'til the Earth knows peace.

This is how the industrial growth society keeps perpetuating its disease, takes people away from the natural world and conditions them to depend on the artificial creations it produces. All at the cost of the planet we are gifted with to be stewards of, and our fellow people. It's a broken mechanism which supplies weapons, poisons water sources, creates divisions and worships greed. This culture of consumption is making us suffer. The crude oil which runs Australia is creating war torn environments outside our border, in which people can no longer live. Fleeing and hoping to seek refuge in distant countries, often these people are locked away because the nations they turn to are too obsessed with their own economies, in which there is apparently no room for them. But it's ok, there's always room for another coal mine! And that's great for business. Never mind about the sacred land or the smog your great grandchildren will know to be air. And this is civilized behavior?

Ladies and gentleman! Public service announcement – the more we regain our ability to live naturally, simply and self-sufficiently, the less we perpetuate harmful systems. I read an article circling the internet right now which said how conscious consumerism is merely something we do to feel better about our addiction to stuff, and that data showed no great significance in the footprint of an eco-consumer compared with a regular one. It suggested donating money to politicians instead so that legislation favouring nature over technocracy (life over extinction), could come to pass with greater ease. But our responsibility is bigger than that.

It's time to reclaim our own destinies and the collective vision we have for the future of humanity. It's not enough to place the responsibility in the hands of a small group of people and hope that the current environmental catastrophe will be set right by some new laws. Yes, these changes are crucial too and it's important to keep applying pressure onto our local, state and national governments, but I think the most radically constructive thing to do right now is learn how to support and meet your needs in a way which does not cost the environment or other people. We can learn to live in and with nature.

I don't suggest that everyone has to start learning how to build primitive shelters and return to a hunter-gather lifestyle, this would be a disaster and is not the answer. But I am suggesting that everyone has to start simplifying and embarking on the rejuvenating task of living increasingly naturally. Start by edging just a little bit out of your comfort zone. Learn how to plant seeds, compost, invest in natural fibers and produce your own flavored fashion or buy locally from people who make it themselves. Start eating seasonally and only local produce. Make practices and rituals which connect you to the living essence of nature, so you can start to feel the alive Earth as a friend, someone who loves and supports you and wants to have a reciprocal relationship with you. It's a process and it may not happen over night but our creative force and the power of intentions do work miracles. Especially when they are aligned with the love beam that strives to envelop the planet in an enlightened paradigm.

When you are conditioned in a culture that glorifies the accumulation of things, of course you are going to be addicted to buying things. When in school you were taught that you had to give respect to figures of authority based on a system of hierarchy, of course it's going to be harder to question the status quo. When ancient history in the classroom was prioritized over gardening it's not surprising you have no idea how to grow food for yourself and depend on supermarkets to provide it for you. But at least you know who Caesar was! These things sadden me but it's our will to look at these uncomfortable truths and come up with ways to become self-sustaining which is going to save us. Yes, there are myriad other sociopolitical issues that people are focused on right now but what is more potently able to unite us all despite our cultures, religious views, gender and sexual identities than the task ahead – how do we thrive on our planet and link arms, hearts and minds in order to overcome the very real extinction crisis? Leaving the paradigm of separateness behind.

Spiritual beliefs alone are not the answer and we need to back up what we preach about love, mama Earth, peace and unity with practical, grounded steps towards natural sustainability. From this determined space our actions, unified towards the common goal of restoring balance to the ecosystem and our social systems, are significantly more effective. Yes, it takes plenty of behavioral changes and means we have to acknowledge that our modern conveniences are selfish and destructive so that we can realise better alternatives. We've been tricked into thinking it's too hard or even impossible, but to become self-sufficient is to become truly free. We are liberated from the systems of oppression and have done very important work by transforming human civilization into a network which promotes life and expansion.

In the last couple of years, along this path I am dedicated to walk, I've observed that the most powerful, connected, genuinely cool and interesting people are the ones who have a relationship to the natural world. Who sense the spirit in the soil, the wisdom in the seeds, the life force animating the Earth. The people who know what's going on around them in the organic space their bodies inhabit. The natural, tangible environment in which their experience unfolds. Their presence is felt as strong, lively energy as they are connected to a natural, living and real source which is infinitely sustaining. Their engagement with existence and the things which support us (food, air, water, earth, shelter), is deeper. These people often know a lot about their ancestry and how the wise, ancient cultures of the Earth resided in harmonious relationship with the natural world. Giving respect to Gaia, honoring the cycles and observing the deep links between our psyches and the rest of the ecosphere. These modern people who can build their houses with their hands and the materials found locally. Who care more about this than any other superficial measure of success. These people who can support their families from food and resources they have cultivated themselves. Wow, slave labor didn't stitch your clothing, you made it yourself! That's sexy. People who can administer natural remedies and rely on plants for healing. These people who are aware that they are part of the biosphere, the ecosphere and the political and economic spheres of their societies, who are setting good examples which can institutionalize a new set of norms into their systems.

These are the people who I see as dismantling the corporatized global culture which is destroying the earth, in the most effective way. Who are self responsible and aspire towards sustainable goals. These are intelligent and humble people and this is the team I want to be a part of. Team Earth. Team liberated humanity. And everyone is encouraged to join, creating a diverse mosaic of human endeavor and consciousness. We are not separate from each other or the paradigm we gave rise to. As parts of this living system we can do the work and act as catalysts for its self healing. Like the Phoenix reborn from the ashes we rise, with wings outstretched and stronger than ever. Full moon blessings family!