There will always be jobs the robots can't do. Maybe.

I know the entire 'Robots and other automation technologies are displacing human labor' line of discussion can get a little tedious at times. After all, advances in technology that fundamentally change the labor markets and the need for certain types of labor is an old story. And when other contributors on Fistful of Talent take on the robot subject, we may have finally jumped the shark on this one. But against my better judgement and with the quasi-approval of my friend Chris Wilson, I am going back to the robot well one more time. So here goes.

How many family farmers are out there anymore, working a few dozen acres of crops? When was the last time you took a train across the country to attend a business event? Have you had to individually print, collate, staple, assemble, and mail company reports or binders in the last 10 years or so? (Right now, someone reading this is thinking, 'Hey I still collate').

Old story, I know. Technology advances unabated, makes our lives better, (hopefully), raises the standard of living, and provides ample ammunition for our incessant, 'I remember back when I was a kid...' admonitions to our kids and friends who simply would DIE without their iPhones or free Wifi at Starbucks.

Besides, the standard thinking goes, there will always be entire categories and classifications of labor that simple will not ever be usurped by robot or other automation technologies. Robots can be programmed to perform simple, repetitive tasks, and respond accordingly to relatively simple external cues and stimuli, but advanced, nuanced, and subtle kinds of jobs and tasks are still the (more or less), exclusive domain of human workers. Service jobs and construction jobs in particular seem immune to the forces of robotization.

Case in point - robots, on their own, could never build something like this, right:

 

This picture, sourced from an article on the NPR Krulwich Wonders blog, is of a brick tower designed by Swiss architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler. The entire 20-foot tall tower was assembled by a team of four flying robots that grabbed each brick individually, then flew to the correct place on the rising tower, and finally set the brick in place before returning to the dispenser to re-start the process. The battery powered robots periodically stopped their work to plug in for a recharge when their batteries were running down.

Sure, it took humans to design the tower, build and program the flying construction robots, and monitor the entire process, but eventually couldn't the building, programming, and monitoring tasks themselves be automated?

You can take a closer look and see the flying robots in action on the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will have to click though). While you watch the video I challenge you to think just for a moment about our generally held ideas about labor, automation, and the future of work.

Eventually, is there going to be anything the robots can't do?

Check out the new and improved Fistful of Talent

For the last couple of years I have been a contributor on the outstanding blog Fistful of Talent. Last week Fistful re-launched with a fantastic new design and layout that does a great job of highlighting the contributions from the superb team of writers.Fight!

Today on FOT, my friend R.J. Morris takes on one of my favorite topics - how relentless technological progress, increased automation, and improving robotics are pressuring the workforce, even in so-called 'creative' fields of endeavor. Check out R.J.'s post, 'What HR Jobs are at Risk', as well as the rest of the new Fistful of Talent, you will be glad you did.

Thanks R.J. for the mention today, and thanks to everyone at FOT for the work you all do and for allowing me to play along too.

Elusive Cuteness and Building Approachable Systems

The smarties at the MIT Media Lab had a problem they were trying to solve - how to create a small, mobile, low-cost, audio and video equipped, and functional robot that could travel the campus and surrounding area on its own, find and approach random people, and get them to answer questions on camera.C'mon, look how cute I am!

Not such an easy problem to solve - since most people don't really seem to want to engage with other people that they do not know when approached on the street, what luck would the little robot, named Boxie, have with rolling up on passers by and getting them to stop, engage, participate, (and not break or steal), her.  How could the designers build and enable such a robot to successfully meet this goal, while constrained in equal measures by time, cost, and complexity? When you think about it, even though this specific problem is a bit unusual, and unlikely to come up in most of our professional pursuits, the essence of the problem, how to capture attention, engagement, and assistance from audiences that are not always motivated or incented to help is much more common and universal.

So in part limited in design by practical constraints, but by also skillfully capitalizing on most people's susceptibility to anything perceived to be 'cute', the MIT team, led by Alexander Reben, created Boxie with a soft, cardboard head, (rather than the original cold white plastic prototype), a very simple set of verbal interactions, and programmed her to ask people for help, and to intentionally elicit an emotional response from the ones she engaged with. Turns out being adorable, even in cardboard robots, is a pretty powerful tool in getting what you want.

The end result was that (most) people did want to help Boxie complete her assignment, helping her when needed, (like lifting her up on a table to get a better camera angle), and taking the time to connect more deeply than is typical with most artificial, task-oriented systems.

You can see more about the project and see and hear Boxie in the video below, but I wanted to pull out a couple of key quotes from the designers that are worth considering by anyone designing tools, programs, or environments that rely on adoption by an often skeptical world to succeed.

One - "We hope that this type of interaction that we studied will lead to simpler systems that may be more symbiotic with people instead of just trying to be a cold system without much interaction."

Two - "We think we can use this simple, emotional tie to create better systems and better interactions for people."

I like this line of thinking. Even if the MIT lab had the time and money to build a more fully functional, sophisticated, and powerful robot, it seems at least possible that such a robot would not have had any more success than the small, cheap, but likely to tug at the heartstrings Boxie.

While workplace and enterprise systems can probably never be 'adorable' or even cute, perhaps we could think just a tiny bit less about what we want people to do with our systems and just a little more more about how we want them to feel when using them.

It seems to be a winning approach for a tiny cardboard robot named Boxie.

Below is the video I referenced, courtesy of the MIT Media Lab

2011 Rewind - My Favorite Robot Post of the Year

Note: This week I am taking a look back on some of the 2011 posts that were either popular, interesting, (at least to me), or that might warrant a re-visit for some reason before the year is officially in the books. And also after about 200 or so posts this year, I am more or less tapped out of original ideas and want to recharge a bit. So that said, I hope you enjoy this little look back at 2011 here on my tiny corner of the internets.

I wrote several pieces about how increasing industrial automation and rapid advancements in robot technology continue to impact the workplace, and ask several important questions about what the future of work will look like, and how companies and individuals can best prepare for this digital future. This post, titled 'In Which I Admit to my Robot Obesession'  from September, was my favorite of the group.

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Just a quick one today, and yes just like yesterday's post the subject is robots, and their slow, steady, inexorable march to world domination. And quite frankly I don't have a problem with all the robot posts, since my favorite source of inspiration and content, the National Basketball Association, seems intent on remaining in a labor impasse for who knows how long, and I have to write about something.How are you feeling? That will be a $50 co-pay.

So for a busy Friday, the day before getaway day to Las Vegas and HRevolution (tickets still available), and the HR Technology Conference, another dispatch from the Robots vs. Humans front lines, this time from Slate.com:

Will Robots Steal Your Job? - Why the highest-paid doctors are the most vulnerable to automation

Yep, another take on the upcoming, heck already started process of further automation and supplementation of traditional careers and functions by complex and dedicated robot technology. But like yesterday's post where I featured robot technology beginning to make inroads into farming, the piece from Slate shows us even highly specialized, highly paid, and highly complex tasks like the evaluation of medical samples for signs of cancer can and are beginning to be encroached by robot labor.

I don't keep reading and posting about these 'robot stories' here because I find them to be surprising, or that most readers might not be aware that automation in all facets of industry, from low-tech to high-tech is an unstoppable boulder rolling down hill. It can't and won't be stopped.

But why I like to read these pieces, and think about them, is more about our reaction and response to these developments.  And on that note, I'd like to end this post with the most compelling point from the Slate.com piece:

By definition, specialists focus on narrow slices of medicine. They spend their days worrying over a single region of the body, and the most specialized doctors will dedicate themselves to just one or two types of procedures. Robots, too, are great specialists. They excel at doing one thing repeatedly, and when they focus, they can achieve near perfection. At some point—and probably faster than we expect—they won't need any human supervision at all.

There's a message here for people far beyond medicine: If you do a single thing—and especially if there's a lot of money in that single thing—you should put a Welcome, Robots!doormat outside your office. They're coming for you.

Boom. Specialization, even high-touch, highly complex, valuable specialization that requires spending years training, developing, and perfecting, still that is no guarantee or security against a robot that van do it better, cheaper, and faster. Even if those skills are ones that society needs and highly values, that's no protection in the long term.

The message? Invent something new, stay one step ahead of the robot masters? You'd better be prepared to keep inventing.

Or possibly the message is to continuously explore, challenge, and differentiate yourself as being more than a highly trained, highly skilled one-trick pony. Because if all you are only bringing one thing to the table, no matter how wonderful and complex that one thing is, chances are, eventually, someone else, maybe ever a robot, can do it better.

I promise no more posts about robots for a while, unless the NBA season gets canceled!

When the Roomba Grows Up

You've heard of the Roomba, right? That cute little robot vacuum that you can set up in your family room or bedroom, hit the button, and watch it smoothly and quietly scurry about the room vacuuming up your potato chip crumbs and the excess from Fido's winter coat while you can rest on the sofa, perhaps snuggled up with a good book and wearing your Forever Lazy.The Droid can help you with your hibiscus

The Roomba, at least the idea of the Roomba is awesome, right? I mean who would not want to trade the tedious chore of vacuuming for just about any of the alternative activities you could choose from if you were freed from the weekly waltz with the trusty Hoover or Dyson? Set up the Roomba, then kick back. Or work. Or talk to one of your kids. Or more likely, post a status update on Facebook that says something like, 'Man, the Roomba is awesome.' Which all your friends will interpret as, 'I can't believe that moron is Facebooking about his Roomba again.' Or, 'What a dork. I bet he's sitting on the sofa in a Forever Lazy.'

Jokes aside, we'd all probably agree that technologies like the Roomba have clear and obvious benefit - they save us time, effort, and automate an incredibly dull and low-skill type of effort, that allow us to engage in more interesting and productive things. And as a plus, there is a whole ecosystem that has to design, build, ship, sell, support, and maintain these devices. This creates jobs, (although in fairness at some cost of the loss of similar in the 'traditional' vacuum industry), but overall it would hard to feel worried or threatened if suddenly there was a Roomba in every home.

The parallels to the domesticated Roomba were obvious when I read this Wired.com piece: 'These May Be the Droids Farmers Are Looking For'. The story, about the testing of a more advanced, more capable Roomba-like robot that can help nursery owners organize, sort, and transport large numbers of plants and trees was interesting to me not so much for the pure technological angle, but rather for the economic impetus driving the grower's needs for this kind of technology. From the piece on Wired:

Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation is beta testing a small mobile robot that it’s pitching to nurseries as the solution to their most pressing problem: a volatile labor market.

In today’s human-tended nurseries, immature potted trees and shrubs arrive at nurseries by truck and are offloaded onto the ground. Teams of migrant workers — undocumented for the most part — spread the plants out one by one following markers outlining a grid. When the plants are ready to be shipped out later in the season, workers reverse the process to group the plants for loading onto trucks. “We’ve recognized the need for robotics in the nursery industry for moving pots because it’s one of our highest concentrations of labor use,” said Tom Demaline, president of Willoway Nurseries, Inc. in Avon, Ohio

So what you might be thinking. The history of the industrial revolution, heck the past 200 years of capitalism is essentially a story of technological invention and advancement, often resulting in the displacement of workers that are found to be either too expensive, less productive, and more of a pain in the neck to manage, (or some combination thereof), than their robot replacements.

But the farm robot story is I think because of the larger economical and political factors at play that are serving to catalyze and drive further development. The farming jobs that this new family of robots usurps were typically ones held by immigrants, often undocumented ones. With increasing enforcement of existing immigration laws, and the enacting of new, even stricter ones like in Alabama, many farmers and farm related businesses find themselves in a crunch. Their previous supply of labor has left or has been frightened away, local and legal replacements seem not to be available or willing, leaving this new robotic future as one potential way out of their bind.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. There's a job that has to be done. The labor market (for whatever reason), can't fulfill the need, so a new technology develops to close the gap. But the problem is, for all the 'Farmer Roomba' design, development, and manufacturing jobs, (which probably will be outsourced), they will never amount to the many hundreds and thousands of farm laborer jobs that are going to disappear. The technology will eventually allow the same amount of work to be done, faster, cheaper, with less errors, and with far, far less human effort, labor, and of course wages.

This equation works fantastically well for the vacuum example, like I said before, the trade-off usually involves you lounging on the sofa while the Roomba works. I have my doubts that any of the farm workers replaced by the 'Droids' are chilling in their Forever Lazy's right now.