REPRISE: At least the creative jobs can't be taken over by robots. Wait, what?

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the next two weeks (that is code for I am pretty much out of decent ideas, and I doubt most folks are spending their holidays reading blogs anyway), and will be re-running some of best, or at least most interesting posts from 2013. Maybe you missed these the first time around or maybe you didn't really miss them, but either way they are presented for your consideration. Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2013!

The below post was just one example of the topic I talked about the most in 2013 - the continual and increasing encroachment and pressure that technology and automation is having on the workplace - rendering more and more of us if not obsolete, at least significantly less relevant. The piece originally ran in April 2013.

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At least the creative jobs can't be taken over by robots. Wait, what?

I know I have beaten the 'robots are coming to take our jobs' angle pretty much to death here over the last few years, and I really want to move on to other things like what we can learn about leadership from Kobe Bryant and the Mamba Mentality, and why Jasper Johns is America's greatest artist, something about the automation of formerly human jobs keeps sucking me back in.

Check this excerpt from a recent piece on Business Insider titled How Facebook Is Replacing Ad Agencies With Robots, about some of the behind-the-scenes machinations that result in those often eerily smart advertisements you see on your Facebook timeline and newsfeed:

Facebook is working furiously to find more ways to make ads work better inside its ecosystem. Many of those ads, however, are untouched by ad agency art directors or "creative" staffers of any kind. And a vast number, from Facebook's larger e-commerce advertisers — think Amazon or Fab.com — are generated automatically by computers. 

If you're an e-commerce site selling shoes, you want to serve ads that target people who have previously displayed an interest in, say, red high-heels. Rather than serve an ad for your brand — "Buy shoes here!" — it's better to serve an ad featuring a pair of red heels specifically like the one the user was browsing for.

The ads are monitored for performance, so any subjective notions of "taste" or "beauty" or "style" or whatever go out the window — the client just wants the best-performing ads. There's no need for a guy with trendy glasses who lives in a loft in Williamsburg, N.Y., to mull over the concepts for hours before the ad is served.

It might be easy to miss in that description, but the key to the entire 'no humans necessary' ad creation and display process is a technology that is called 're-targeting' - Facebook (via some partners it works with), knows what products and services you have shown interest in out on the web, and then the algorithms try to 'match' your browsing trail with what the advertiser hopes will be a relevant ad. Since the volume of people and data and browsing history is so immense that a person or people couldn't actually create all the possible ads the process might need, the algorithms do all the work. 

So if you stopped at that Rasheed Wallace 'Ball Don't Lie' shirt on the online T-shirt site this morning, don't be surprised if you see an ad for similar on your Facebook feed tonight. 

Not a big deal you might be thinking, it's the web after all, and algorithms and machines run it all anyway. 

The big deal if you are a creative type person in advertising or media planning is this - if these kinds of re-targeted and machine generated ads show some solid ROI, more and more of the ad budget for big brands will follow. Budget that could be used for TV spots, print campaigns, or even more innovative games and contests on social networks, (that still, for now, have to be hatched and launched by actual humans). If machine-generated ads drive more revenue, (or drive revenue more efficiently), than traditional and expensive creative, then we'll see that impact in staffing. 

Traditional ads often run in media where it can be notoriously difficult to determine success - how valuable and how much revenue for a brand like Budweiser can be attributed to an obscenely expensive Super Bowl ad?

But these computer generated Facebook ads? The system can see in real-time how they are performing, which versions of a given campaign are more effective, and they can learn and adapt in reaction to this data. They are smart, so to speak. Almost everything about them from an ad standpoint is 'better' than the creative ad in a magazine or on TV.

Except for the fact that hardly any people are needed to create them. Depending on your point of view of course.

Be nice to the robots.

REPRISE: Jagger, Warhol, and another guy you've never heard of

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the next two weeks (that is code for I am pretty much out of decent ideas, and I doubt most folks are spending their holidays reading blogs anyway), and will be re-running some of best, or at least most interesting posts from 2013. Maybe you missed these the first time around or maybe you didn't really miss them, but either way they are presented for your consideration. Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2013!

The below post is about my favorite themes in 2013 - talent, and the threat of automation and robotics to workers and originally ran in January 2013.

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Jagger, Warhol, and another guy you've never heard of 

Check the letter below, a fairly famous one at that, written in 1969 from the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger to the artist Andy Warhol regarding Warhol's impending collaboration with the band on the cover art for their soon to be released album:

In three short paragraphs, and with 100 words give or take, Mick schools us all on the difference between the Talent - himself, the band, and of course Warhol; and the 'support' types like the unfortunate Mr. Al Steckler, who will look 'nervous' and can essentially be ignored.

I post a lot on this blog, perhaps too much, about the challenge and threat that increased automation and robot technology pose to the workforce and workplaces of the future. But I don't think that the changes and potential disruption that more powerful automation technologies, smarter artificial intelligences, and the increasing acceptance of robots in all kinds of workplace environments can be ignored. The primary challenge for many of us, and certainly for the next generation of workers, will be to find ways to ensure we can continue to create value - unique, hard to copy, and certainly hard to automate value.

This is not really a new requirement, although the pace of technological advances are making it more pressing. Back in 1969, Mick Jagger already it pegged. People like himself and Andy Warhol, well they were the creators. They were the important parts in the machine. And they'd enjoy the spoils - did you catch the line in the letter were Mick basically tells Warhol to name his price for creating the album cover art?

In 1969, for a non-creative, non-essential type like Steckler the worst think likely to happen was he'd be ignored and maybe marginalized a little. In 2013, the risks of being someone branded as a non-creative, worrying, nervous, functionary I think are far worse.  We can get a robot to handle those jobs soon enough. 

And the robots won't get nervous or bother the talent.

Have a great week all!

It's a good time to be a truck driver, (until the self-driving trucks take over)

And when I say 'good time' please do accept that as a relative comparison to say burger flipping, making lattes for annoying customers, or working the graveyard shift at the Kwickie Mart.

I caught this really interesting piece on Forbes, DOT's New Curb on Driver Hours Is Hurting Productivity, Truckers Charge, that while seemingly a dull piece about changes in Federal work rules governing working hours for commercial truck drivers that would only be interesting to say actual truck drivers and trucking company operators, actually to me reveals much about the future of work and the automation of work here (and likely everywhere).

First, take a look at the main point of the piece in Forbes, then a take from me on why this matters more generally, (and why robots are involved, naturally).

Rules limiting the number of hours that commercial drivers can be on the road are resulting in a marked drop in productivity, trucking companies claim.

The latest Hours of Service (HOS) rules were put into place on July 1, 2013 by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. They state that drivers of commercial motor vehicles can be on the job for a maximum of 11 hours, following 10 consecutive hours off duty. They must take a minimum 30-minute break during the first eight hours of a shift. Their maximum average work week is capped at 70 hours, down from the previous limit of 82 hours.

The trucking industry fiercely opposed the tighter rules during public hearings, but to no avail. Today, a trucking company whose driver exceeds the limit by more than three hours can be fined $11,000 per offense, and the individual driver faces civil penalties of up to $2,750.

During the public comment period, truckers warned that the rules would cut deeply into their productivity. Now, they say, that is precisely what has happened.

Schneider National, one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers, predicted back in February of 2011 a productivity drop of between 3% and 4%. Four months after implementation of the HOS rules, Schneider is reporting declines of 3.1% on solo shipments and 4.3% on team shipments.

Pretty straightforward, right?

The Feds tighten up the rules around how long in a day and for a week that commercial truck drivers can be behind the wheel, thus creating an artifical constraint on labor supply, (I am not going to even try to get in to the debate about whether or not this change in rules was needed or makes sense, because I simply do not know), and the trucking companies begin to feel the pinch in lost output and productivity.

The simple solution, and the reason this story was interesting to me, would be for the operators to simply hire more drivers. But it turns out, this would not be an easy solution at all.

From a related Bloomberg piece on the changes in truck driver working hours regulations:

Adding more drivers to payrolls will be a difficult undertaking. The industry was 158,000 drivers short of what it needed to meet demand in the second quarter, according to (trucking industry analyst firm) FTR Associates.

The shortfall probably will widen by the end of this year to 251,000 truckers, the biggest deficit in nine years, and reach a record 338,000 by the end of 2015, according to FTR’s Driver Shortage Surplus gauge. The economic expansion and higher turnover help explain the industry’s labor shortage.

“Every cost gets passed down,” said Sean McNally, a spokesman for the ATA, an Arlington, Virginia-based industry group. “As the labor market tightens and as demand for drivers goes up, typically wages go up as well. The competition is already fierce for good drivers. This is only going to increase that competition.’

An industry and job function that had been already been facing labor shortages, (Mama's don't let your babies grow up to be truck drivers), and now feeling even more of a pinch from a forced reduction in labor capacity (in the name of safety, at least according to the Feds). In the short term, it seems like wages are going to have to rise at least some in order to get more people recruited into becoming commercial truck drivers. Of course the operators, (and their downstream customers), don't like to hear that. Increased wages means lower profits.

But longer term, it seems like while we have read lots and lots over the last two years or so about self-driving cars, the real 'killer' application of the self-driving technology is going to be for commercial trucking.

If the big trucking companies are looking at labor shortfalls that estimates say will increase to over 300,000 in a couple of years, then something is going to have to break. And applying the self-driving technologies to a very real and growing economic problem will provide the necessary incentive to push the development of these technologies into higher gear (apologies for the very unfortunate pun).

It will probably be a pretty good time for the next few years to be an experienced commercial driver. But after that, probably not so much, as automation or self-driving or whatever it ends up being called will eventually put 'truck driver' on the list of careers that end up being displaced by technology.

Which of course will make it even more difficult for the trucking companies to find the human drivers they need today, who will begin to sense their days are numbered from the first moment they get behind the wheel.

Happy motoring.

If manufacturing really returns to the US, it will be with far fewer humans

The return or rebirth or re-emergence of American manufacturing continues to be a desired if elusive goal. Medium or moderately skilled manufacturing jobs, long the foundation of much of the American middle class, have been on a long but steady decline over the last several decades. 

Check the below chart (from the New York Times) to see some data on the percentage decline in employment in various manufacturing sectors:

The data on job losses since 1990 show the most dramatic decreases in employment in textiles and apparel. Which makes sense just by thinking about how the vast majority of the clothes we buy and wear are made somewhere else. The history and reasons for this shift to overseas import of textiles and apparel are pretty well understood - manufacturers relocated operations and increased capacity in low and even lower wage places in the world - China, India, Bangladesh, and so on.

But as the recent New York Times piece "U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People" does a great job of documenting, even textile and apparel manufacturing can return to the United States, provided that the conditions whereby the American companies can  compete, chiefly increased automation thus reducing 'people' costs, are in place.

In the piece (which is kind of long, but you should read it all anyway), we see how textile plants in South Carolina are re-opening and even expanding their capacity as the advances in technology and automation, coupled with the logistical benefits of being able to produce where the customers want to sell, are enabling this rebirth or renaissance of sorts.

Except that the 'rebirth' requires many fewer people than in the heyday of American manufacturing.

From the NYT piece:

American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

But as manufacturers find that American-made products are not only appealing but affordable, they are also finding the business landscape has changed. Two decades of overseas production has decimated factories here. Between 2000 and 2011, on average, 17 manufacturers closed up shop every day across the country, according to research from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Now, companies that want to make things here often have trouble finding qualified workers for specialized jobs and American-made components for their products. And politicians’ promises that American manufacturing means an abundance of new jobs is complicated — yes, it means jobs, but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process.

Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people

It is a story I think we are going to continue to see - automation and robots and logistics are going to conspire to make 'Made in America' a more commonly seen tagline on all kinds of products.

But this new 'Made in America' will be far different than what many of us remember - when the colossus' of American manufacturing companies employed veritable armies of workers to churn out the products for the domestic and export markets.

It is amazing and incredible to read a story like the Times piece that describes just how some American manufacturers are coming back, and are on par competitively with anyone else in the world. But we also need to remember that just taking the one example from the Parkdale mill, what used to be the work of 2,000 is now the work of 140.

Those 140 jobs have indeed come back. 

There are 1,860 that are almost certainly never coming back.

Have a great weekend!

ODDS: Are you going to be replaced by a robot?

Note: I'm taking one more run down the robot trail today, then I will probably let it go for a while, at least until the robot overlords tell me I need to resurrect the topic again.

Lots of folks, including me, have presented example after example, chart after chart, and anecdote after anecdote all pointing towards a future where more and more jobs that are currently held by people will become automated, roboticized, or rendered unnecessary. But for all the individual examples of this phenomenon, and all the hand-wringing around the issue, I had not ever seen a 'macro' assessment of the topic, i.e., a look at attempting to measure just how many and whay type of jobs are more or less likely vulnerable or susceptible to robot-like automation.

Well a newly released study from researchers at Oxford titled 'The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?', attempts to do just that - to place a number, (or a target if you are more cynical), on the number and types of jobs that are more or less likely to be automated away in the coming years. 

The study, a collaboration between Dr Carl Benedikt Frey (Oxford Martin School) and Dr Michael A. Osborne (University of Oxford), found that jobs in transportation, logistics, as well as office and administrative support, are at “high risk” of automation. More surprisingly, occupations within and across the service industry are also highly susceptible to automation, despite recent job growth in this sector.

The entire paper can be found here (PDF), and since it is really long, your humble blogger took the liberty of spending Sunday morning reading it for you and I will share with you a couple of choice excerpts below:

Although the extent of these developments remains to be seen, estimates by MGI (2013) suggests that sophisticated algorithms could substitute for approximately 140 million full-time knowledge workers worldwide. Hence, while technological progress throughout economic history has largely been confined to the mechanisation of manual tasks, requiring physical labour, technological progress in the twenty-first century can be expected to contribute to a wide range of cognitive tasks, which, until now, have largely remained a human domain. Of course, many occupations being affected by these developments are still far from fully computerisable, meaning that the computerisation of some tasks will simply free-up time for human labour to perform other tasks.etheless, the trend is clear: computers increasingly challenge human labour in a wide range of cognitive tasks (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2011).

Did you catch that? 140 million knowledge workers, a group that I would expect includes just about everyone reading this post, could be susceptible and threatened by sophisticated algorithms.

And let's not forget about the service and 'lower skilled' occupations as well. Here is more on that front from the paper:

Expanding technological capabilities and declining costs will make entirely new uses for robots possible. Robots will likely continue to take on an increasing set of manual tasks in manufacturing, packing, construction, maintenance, and agriculture. In addition, robots are already performing many simple service tasks such as vacuuming, mopping, lawn mowing, and gutter cleaning – the market for personal and household service robots is growing by about 20 percent annually (MGI, 2013). Meanwhile, commercial service robots are now able to perform more complex tasks in food preparation, health care, commercial cleaning, and elderly care (Robotics-VO, 2013). As robot costs decline and technological capabilities expand, robots can thus be expected to gradually substitute for labour in a wide range of low-wage service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013). This means that many low-wage manual jobs that have been previously protected from computerisation could diminish over time.

Look, it may not be breakthrough or even interesting news at this point that automation continues to advance, and both individual jobs and entire job categories are likely to be eventually transformed or even completely replaced by technology - be it robots or software or a combination of both.

But I still think the size of this transformation, and its impact are still underestimated. If the Oxford researchers are only half right, and instead of their conclusion that 47% of jobs in the USA are likely to be hihgly susceptible to automation in the next 20 years or so, and it works out to be closer to a quarter of all jobs that meet that same fate, it still has deep and profound implications for the economy, for education, and for society.

If you are interested at all in this topic, then I do suggest marking out some time to read the entire paper, it is one of the most fully developed takes on the subject that I have seen.

And I promise to lay off the 'robot' posts for a while!

Have a great week everyone!