Surplus Humans ? Should we be scared??

The Bob Pritchard Column 

Karl Fogel, partner at Open Tech Strategies, an open-source technology firm, described the employee-victims of advances in automation as “Surplus humans.” 

“Surplus Humans” is a term that could easily describe the once secure “middle-class” professions, including jobs in the automotive industry, nursing, tax preparing, office administration and law. 

 

There are many reasons for rising insecurity among the group that suffered from the cost of their children’s daycare, from rent and mortgages and student and health care debt. 

They are also concerned about being put out of work by robots and AI.

 

 

While some people insist that robotization will produce new jobs to offset these losses, it is also understood that the wages of many of these jobs will be far from middle-class, and that pay is the real problem.  

Federal and local governments must try to retain the value of human infrastructure. 

 

So which professions and jobs are vulnerable?

Women are the robot’s prime targets. According to a study published this year from the World Economic Forum, 57% of the 1.4 million U.S. jobs technology will replace by 2026 will be those held by women. They are more likely than men to lose their jobs to automation in the next eight years and also much less likely to find new positions.

 

Putting gender aside, if you work in advertising, public relations, broadcasting, law or financial services, you have a real reason to be very concerned. 

The World Economic Forum in 2016 projected a total loss of 7.1 million jobs by 2020, two-thirds of which may be concentrated in these sectors plus health care.

And if you work as a secretary or an assistant, you are also likely very vulnerable. 

People assume that it’s all miners and truck drivers that are losing jobs, but it’s also the jobs of those who do office work. If you work as a waiter or a cashier, or if you don’t have higher education, the robots are likelier to come for your jobs. 

 

The American Trucking Association warns that driverless vehicles threaten the livelihoods of the 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States. As trucker’s pay tends to exceed the national average—potentially $70,000 per year, with overtime, plus medical coverage — truck driving is now a blue-collar job with white-collar pay.

 

Even being in a growth profession doesn’t ensure that your human job is protected. Take nursing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the demand for nurses will grow by 15% from 2014 to 2024 as the elderly compose a bigger and bigger proportion of the population. Nevertheless, the National Science Foundation is spending nearly $1 million to research a future of robotic nurses who will lift patients and bring them medicine. And elsewhere around the country, hospitals are using algorithms to run their hospital floors.

 

So, what do we do about this?  

Firstly, organizing so worker’s collective voices can be heard by those in charge and by those who rely on those human-led services.  

The second is to rethink automation recognizing that when people lose their jobs, real families get hurt, even if in the abstract other jobs are created.

 

At the end of the day, the truth is that when robots prevail, so many vocations will actually become obsolete. 

The big money will be in making robots, until they can make themselves.

 

A robot walks into a bar, orders a drink, and lays down some cash.
Bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve robots."
And the robot says, "Oh, but someday you will."

Facial Recognition is a game changer

The Bob Pritchard Column

Facial recognition systems that can verify a person’s identity have been around for several years now with security cameras and criminal databases. 

Now with the rapid improvements to big data analytics and artificial intelligence, facial recognition software is about to become commonplace and change the way we live and interact with the world.

 

Consumers will be able to use facial recognition  to make purchases, book tickets and unlock doors simply by looking into a camera lens and letting the software make rapid simultaneous measurements of the face that’s as distinct as a fingerprint. 

This AI-powered facial recognition software will be more convenient, far more secure, and create new exciting apps and hardware.  

 At a time of uncertainty it will also allow security forces to track and identify people with far more precision.

 

 

The latest facial recognition software from Baidu, China’s version of Google is currently being used by Didi, China’s equivalent to Uber, to allow customers to confirm the identities of their drivers and is being deployed in high tourism cities to provide ticketless access to attractions. 

And Chinese security officials are deploying the technology to hunt down criminal suspects by drawing from its national ID database as well as images collected from public security cameras that dot the country.

 

 It is the new applications that facial recognition is making possible that is exciting. 

When you combine facial recognition technology with deep learning, the AI technique that’s emerged over the last few years, what you get is facial recognition that’s good enough to identify people even when video of them is grainy,  if the video is shot at an odd angle or even pick one person in a crowd of a million people in Times Square on New Years Eve.

 

This is one of the profound advancements and also the most disconcerting. With extreme accuracy, the new technology can take a blurry image and identify what parts of the image should be used to create the fingerprint-like facial profile. The results have been extremely accurate.

 

Deep learning is a relatively new form of artificial intelligence involving a network of complex algorithms that are loosely based on the neural networks of a human brain. It’s basically a very potent pattern recognizer that draws from an immense amount of data that enables computers to do things like automatically add accurate colors to black-and-white photos or visually translate the text of a restaurant menu snapped by a smartphone camera.

 

This technology has the potential to make consumer life easier with ticketless train rides and transactions that don’t require a form of laminated identification.

It will have increasingly significant ramifications for privacy and state surveillance.

 

The risks to privacy and civil liberties are substantial with technologies like facial recognition that can be used to identify and track people covertly, even remotely, and on a mass scale, for example, identifying individuals at lawful protests. The public should be skeptical of any surveillance technology implemented for consumer convenience that builds a mass surveillance network the government can appropriate for intentions beyond the scope of the original purpose.

 

As facial recognition technology grows more powerful, it will also heighten privacy concerns. Like many emerging technologies that rely on collecting massive amounts of data, it will be up to the public and lawmakers to decide how far they want to compromise privacy in exchange for convenience. 

To be really effective, the government must have the trust of the public.  Hmmmm 

Addendum 

A number of Qantas passengers have started to use facial recognition technology at Sydney Airport. When fully tested, the system will enable passengers to complete most parts of their trip using their face as their "access identification," the airport said

#technology #facialrecognition #travel #qantas #tech #technology #sydney #australia #airline #flight #plane #boeing

Credit: CNBC

A $58b cap company whose warehouse is run by machines and 4 people

AI/ECONOMY | In China, a picture of how warehouse jobs can vanish (Axios) JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce gargantuan, has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots. What's going on: Welcome to the creeping new age of automation. When the talk turns to Chinese big tech — rivals to Google, Amazon and the rest of Silicon Valley — the names usually cited are Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. But scrappy JD, with a respectable $58 billion market cap, is investing aggressively to be added to the pantheon.

5G , Huawei and Innovation in Australia

AUSTRALIAN Financial Review 15 June 2018

There are talks about not using Huawei, a leading edge Telco to be part of the supply of Australia’s 5G network. 

Not only would the price differential between Huawei and its competitors such as Ericcson  and NOKIA be up to 30pc more favourable,  but Huawei’s technology has been consistently ahead of its competitors. 

Huawei is a major player in Canada, Britain, France, Italy and Africa  and operated with full transparency, ethics and within the laws of each country.

Tom Uren, a cyber security expert says that the 5G network and the NBN will together form the spinal chord of the Australian economy - which needs the highest levels of trust, reliability and security of these networks.

Most countries have managed to embrace Huawei’s technology within their own national security network - and there is no reason why Australia can’t do the same says 

 (CEO, John Lord (rear Admiral of Navy , Chairman of DMS Maritime Services Pty Ltd and a member of the Victorian Government’s Defence Council as well as other State Government Boards. )

The question is ... who can you trust? 

USA suppliers - who have just been the centre of major data security breeches re Facebook and Elections , or Data beeeches with Equifax - where 10million records of USA citizens credit cards and social security numbers and personal details are sitting somewhere in the dark cloud.

USA has placed trade restrictions on Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies to protect and grow their USA companies. 

Huawei’s chairman, John Brumby (former Treasurer and Premier of Victoria) says if China's growth slows as a result of America's trade tariffs, the consequences for Australia will be immense. Mr Brumby has emphasised the perils of economic protectionism, saying tariffs on China - Australia's largest trading partner across ten categories - will be detrimental to the global and national economy.

China is a great contributor to the Australian economy on so many levels, and we should embrace them as a Global Partner!

My view is that protectionism is not healthy - and does not come from a place of being “part of a global community”

We are a global economy, and we need to collaborate, learn and grow together. 

What do you think? 

A crypto that represents carbon credits

The Bob Pritchard Column 

Ben and Jerry’s, a company committed to cooling down global warming, is the first major retailer to create a carbon-credit system using blockchain tokens. The tokens can be traded on a distributed, open-source blockchain exchange run by start-up Stellar.

 

Ben and Jerry’s have built carbon credits into every scoop of ice cream purchased, a departure from existing carbon credits that are usually only sold in massive quantities to companies. Blockchain-based “micro-transactions” now make the same system possible for individuals.

 

 

Ben and Jerry’s will contribute a penny per cone to offset emissions. and offer customers the chance to donate a penny of their own. They hope to offer individual consumers an app to track their carbon offsets.

 

The blockchain ledger creates a more efficient and transparent method for exchanging the valuable certificates tied to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. YBlockchain, the electronic ledger technology underpinning bitcoin, has been used to address pollution and energy consumption in the past; now it is being used to attack global warming and deforestation.

 

Regulators are yet to determine what kind of instrument the tokens represent (i.e., a security or a commodity).  That will then inform who and how individuals and/or corporations are eligible to buy it.

 

The tokens will represent a portion of carbon credits, which are issued by governments under cap-and-trade programs set up over the past decade or so to limit the amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases companies emit. A carbon credit is equal to one metric tonne of carbon dioxide, so companies that emit fewer greenhouse gases and thereby underuse their allotted credits can trade them privately or on exchanges to others expecting to exceed their limit.  The purpose of cap-and-trade is to push companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by "capping" the amount they can emit and allowing them to "trade" excess credits.

 

The process of calculating carbon emissions and trading credits, however, is a manual, time consuming and expensive process. Through the use of a permissioned blockchain, the use of fossil fuels could be tracked at the same time carbon credits are traded.

 

Deforestation – the clearing of forests and green areas – is responsible for more carbon emissions than the sum total of all cars and trucks on the road.  The purpose behind REDD+, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, is to make trading carbon credits more valuable to corporations than developing large swaths of rainforests -- typically by burning the trees.

 

A blockchain-based ledger that allows carbon credit data to be freely shared among corporations would go a long way toward reducing complexity. There is currently a lot of friction involved in trying to purchase them and use them to offset a carbon footprint.  The blockchain exchange will create trust through transparency in trading since anyone on the permissioned electronic ledger will be able to verify the carbon credits exchanged.

“Remote workers” or “distributed teams”

Idea of the Day: We need to stop thinking about "remote workers" and start thinking in terms of "distributed teams", says Atlassian Head of R&D and Work Futurist Dominic Price.

“With that tiny mental shift, you've gone from focusing on an individual – an edge case, perhaps – to taking a holistic look at what's going on at the organisation level.” 

What's your take? Join the conversations on today's stories in the comments.

— Cayla Dengate 

South Africa’s 2018 Innovation Zebra award