Will you be replaced by a robot? Use this nifty tool to find out

Will you or your job be replaced by a robot, an algorithm, or some other type of automation technology?

Of course it will!

The question should really be 'When?' not 'If?'

But for something fun to on a Friday, head over to the NPR Planet Money site and take spin on their interactive tool that uses data from a University of Oxford study entitled “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?”, and lets you see just how likely your job will be automated away in the near future.

Here is what the tool says about 'Cashiers', one of the most likely jobs to disappear in the next 20 years or so.

As you can tell from the charts, the likelihood of a given job becoming the domain of robots is influenced by four factors: the need to conjure up clever ideas and solutions, the amount of social interaction needed in the job, the space the job requires (robots are still not great at navigating tight spaces), and the negotiation skills needed.

Luckily for many of us, jobs that fall in the 'management' domain still seem (reasonably) safe for now.

Go have some fun on a Friday, and check out your own odds and see if you should be considering a career move (before it's too late).

Have a great weekend!

VIDEO: The project is called 'Replacing humans with robots'

Directing you to a super-interesting short (about 5 minutes or so) video produced by the New York Times as the first installment of a series they call 'Robotica'. In the video, we see more about the growth, challenges, and worker impact of the surge in adoption of industrial robots in Chinese manufacturing. Take a few minutes to watch the piece, (embedded below, Email and RSS subscribers will have to click through), and then some comments from me after the clip.

Really interesting stuff I think, and for me, very instructive as in 5 minutes it hits many of the big picture issues associated with the increasing automation of work and the impacts this will have on human workers.

1. At least in this Chinese province, the goals of this program are extremely clear - 'Replacing human workers with robots.' While the motivations for this stated goal might be specific to this region, I think it would be foolish to think that this phenomenon and executive attitude isn't much more common, and not just in China. CEOs everywhere are going to be intrigued and in pursuit of what increased automation promises - lower costs, increased consistency and quality, and a predictable labor supply.

2. The video does a nice job of showing the likely mixed or divergent impact of increased automation on the front-line workers that are usually most effected. While one (hand-picked by the factory leaders) employee waxes happily about how the robots are making his job easier and happier, another talks frankly about his (and other's) inability to easily transition from manual, repetitive work that is replaced by robot workers, to higher value added or creative and 'human' work. Whether in China or in Indianapolis, no low skilled worker can suddenly become a high-skilled or creative worker overnight. 

3. The video alludes to the potential, one day, for robots to actually manufacture the robots themselves, even if that is not yet happening today. This notion, that automated technologies will largely build more of themselves is one of the key differences from modern, robotic-type automation than in previous technological breakthroughs. Henry Ford's Model A didn't drive itself, (or build itself). Telephones didn't make calls for you. Personal computers needed LOTS of people entering data into them in order to get anything useful back out from them. But robots building more robots to replace more people? That sounds a little scary.

I will sign off here, take a look at the video if you can spare a few minutes today and let me know what you think in the comments below. Or have your robot assistant watch it for you.

Have a great week!

Learning by watching, something else at which the robots are superior

This story, Robots can now learn to cook just like you do: by watching YouTube videos, made the rounds over the past weekend. The basics of the story are these: researchers at the University of Maryland and an Australian research center have managed to create a system by which robots can 'learn' to cook, (how to recognize cooking tools, how to grasp and manipulate objects, how to process unfamiliar inputs into cohesive sets of instructiokns, etc), with the raw learning material consisting of a set of 88 YouTube videos of cooking demonstrations.

The entire paper, Robot Learning Manipulation Action Plans by 'Watching' Unconstrained Videos from the World Wide Web is here, but I will grab the most interesting and telling bit from the abstract, and then shoot a few comments after the excerpt.

From the paper:

In order to advance action generation and creation in robots beyond simple learned schemas we need computational tools that allow us to automatically interpret and represent human actions. This paper presents a system that learns manipulation action plans by processing unconstrained videos from the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in order to acquire knowledge for robots.

Experiments conducted on a publicly available unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able to learn manipulation actions by “watching” unconstrained videos with high accuracy.

There is a lot to unpack even in that short snippet from the research, but the implications of this research suggests a future state of even more powerful automation technologies - the kinds of technologies that can learn simply by watching. And unlike us puny humans, they won't get tired of watching the same stupid 'life hack' kinds of YouTube videos 73,000 times before getting frustrated that we can't 'get it' and then just giving up.

Some time back I posted about robot technology replacing or at least augmenting human staff in retail big box stores. In that post I posited that the real advantage, or at least one of the most important (and I think really overlooked for the most part), advantages that robots and technology have over human labor are the robot's incredible ability to learn, store, and share information with other robots.

When the robot solves, or learns how to solve maybe just by watching a human colleague, a customer's problem, it can instantly share that knowledge with every other robot, who will all then have learned to solve that problem. Information, learned knowledge then becomes an asset for all. Immediately.

Think about the power of that ability the next time you have to roll out some kind of training program to your entire workforce. How many times do you have to explain the same thing to another person? How long does it take everyone to 'get it?'

How many never do?

REPRISE: I don't see him like a robot. I see him like a person.

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the next few days (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 2014. 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 2014!

The below post first ran back in January and is a good example of a theme I seemed to keep coming back to throughout the year, actually for the last few years - the workforce impact of more powerful and sophisticated automation technologies like Baxter the Robot . 

Have a great weekend!

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I don't see him like a robot. I see him like a person.

A couple of years ago when I know I was one of the few folks in the space regularly writing about robots at work and the potential impacts that were going to be realized from these developments, I used to get a boatload of Google search traffic simply from keyword searches on the word 'robot'. These days, I see much less of that kind of search directed traffic, even though I am probably writing even more frequently about the topic. 

But lately it seems like everyone in the HR/work/workplace blogosphere is talking, writing, and speculating about robots and the increasing automation of all kinds of work. While I do think that this increase and almost mainstreaming of attention on the topic is really quite needed, I also think that at some level we might be already getting a little tired of the topic, and are even beginning to tune out these messages.

So rather than run the latest piece about the newest advancement or application of robot or otherwise machine intelligence to a new form of work and issue off another warning about how you or your kids need to take this all very seriously as one day the robots will take all our jobs and leave us, well, trying to figure out what to do with ourselves, I decided to share a simple, short video about a specific application of new robot technology in the workplace, and let you decide what it might mean.

Embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), is a recent video from Rethink Robotics, the makers of the pretty amazing industrial robot known as Baxter. Baxter, you might have heard, represents an improvement to traditional stationary and bespoke, single-use manufacturing robots of the past. Baxter is flexible, can be easily programmed, and can work in very close proximity to people.

Check the video and pay particular attention to the comments of one of the plastics plant supervisors, a Ms. Martinez about what it is like working with (and supervising as it were) Baxter:

Really interesting, for a couple of reasons I think. Certainly the big, easy to remember line is when Ms. Martinez admits to 'seeing' Baxter like a person, like the person who would have previously had that job on the line that Baxter is now cheerfully, ceaselessly, performing. But we also hear some comments from the plastic factory leadership about how the cost savings and efficiency gains from automation are necessary to save jobs in the aggregate, even if the shift to Baxter(s) will cost at least some jobs in the process.

No matter if you take the 'robot threat' seriously, or think it all a bit silly, I think it does help to ground the conversation at least a little bit sometimes, and the experiences and observations of front line organizations, managers, and co-workers that are now, increasingly, co-existing with more and more advanced robotics are worth considering.

No one can find anything in a massive Home Center. Except this robot.

Getting back to the 'Robots are going to take all of our jobs' beat that I feel like I have been neglecting for a while and I wanted to share with you a short video, (Email and RSS subscribers click through), and some quick thoughts about a recent, and pretty interesting 'Robots in the workplace' development.

This one, perhaps surprisingly, comes to us from the folks at Lowes - the mega-chain of supersized home improvement centers. You know the ones I am talking about. Each one about the size of the town you grew up in, carrying tens of thousands of different items, and once within, it's usually impossible to find the specific item you are actually looking for (or a store employee to help you).

Enter OSHbot. A fully independent, multi-lingual, and infinitely patient Home Center assistant. Need to find an item in the store? OSHbot knows exactly where everytihng is located. Do you have the actual item in your hands? Hold it in front of OSHbot's camera and the robot can recognize and identify the item. Don't speak English? No problem, OSHbot will engage with you in the language you prefer.

Check the video below, (about 2.5 minutes), and then a couple of comments from me after that.

Seems like such an obviously good idea, right? This (pretty simple, really), technology goes a long way towards addressing the most common customer complaints with massive, big box stores.

Where is the item I want? Can you take me there? What is this part I know that I need to replace but I have never seen before? Can someone here speak to me in my language?

But I bet even more interesting, (and challenging for HR/Talent pros and organizations), will not be whether or not customers will embrace/adopt these robot store associates (I think they will), but what this might mean for staffing, deployment, and management of the robot's human co-workers.

Once technology like the OSHbot becomes more widely deployed, human employees will have to become accustomed to working with technology that at some level is 'better' than they can likely be. By 'better', I mean that the robot, with access to real-time store inventory, sales, and perfect recall, will have the 'better' answer (or at least just as good an answer as a human) to probably 90% of customer inquiries.

Certainly in a home center environment there will be some level of customer support, for more complex or nuanced questions, that actual human experts in paint or lumber or plumbing will be best prepared to answer. But I wonder for how long? I mean, couldn't Lowes just deploy a few more OSHbots to 'shadow' the best human experts to record, classify, evaluate, and share with all the other OSHbots across the world the 'best' or 'right' answers to these complex questions? And once that process starts, won't the line or level where actual humans remain 'better' at serving retail home center customers recede even more?

And finally, one last thought. Robots taking customer service jobs in a Lowes or similar might not be alarming to you yourself right now. But these applications are not going to stop at the Lowes or the Walmart. They are being developed everywhere.

How long until we see the first HR robot?

Have a great week!