VIDEO: The robots are a lot like us

What a week. I am beat.

Let's take it into the weekend with a laugh - check out the video below, titled Shelved, from the Media Design School of Auckland, New Zealand. (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through).

Shelved gives us a look at what the future might hold for the incoming robot workforce - oddly enough it seems to resemble quite a bit the human workplace of today.

Shelved from Media Design School on Vimeo.

Awesome, right? "Replaced by a human!' And did you catch the key role of the HR lady?

Have a great weekend everyone!

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.

Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising #2

What will happen when the robots move from the factory floor or the warehouse and come much, much closer, right to where we eat and shop or even into our homes?

There have been remarkable advances in robots designed as household assistants, service industry providers, and even child and elder care aides.

What will it be like to actually interact with robots and android-type technology as a 'normal' part of day-to-day life? 

Recently two one-act plays were staged at the Japan Society in New York City that attempted to shine a bit of a light on the impending closer level of interactions and relationships between humans and robots that are surely going to be a part of the not-too-distant future. (you can see some excerpts in the video embedded below, Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

The two plays, "Sayonara" and "I, Worker", show robots as more than just chore completing servants - in a way they are companions or even confidants of the human characters. "Sayonara" featured an android character acting as a poetry-reciting companion to a girl suffering from a terminal illness. In "I, Worker", the robot characters were household servants working in a home in which a young Japanese couple struggles with the loss of a child and the husband's unemployment.

The brief clips from the plays in the video above, and the comments from Japan Society Artistic Director Yoko Shioya shed a little bit of light upon and raise many interesting questions about the (not really that distant) future of human-robot interactions and relations.

On one hand it can be easy and less threatening I suppose to view the relationships that we might have with these kind of advanced robots similarly to how we've always thought about technology - as tools created to perform a task, for increased efficiency, and to make our work and lives easier. Just tools - but more capable.

On the other hand, and what I think these two dramatizations suggest, is the combination of advances in robot technology, capability, and soon - proximity, might lead to a deeper, more complex kind of interaction.  

I am not really sure what the future holds, but it does seem to me there is a pretty significant difference in how we view a robot that solders parts together on an assembly line and one that we utilize to help care for a child or a sick or aged relative.

Brave new world my friends...

Have a Great Weekend!

Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising #1

Launching a new series on the blog this week - well not exactly new, since I have been writing about robots, the impact of increased robot automation on workplaces and jobs, and how if we don't watch out, pretty soon all our base will belong to them for quite some time now. But then I figured that the combination of the robot uprising, and my need for a steady source of reasonably interesting content for the blog warranted a more structured approach to collecting, classifying, and most importantly - providing an easy way for our future robot overlords to see that I am, actually, on their side, the future 'robot' content on the site. So then, this is the first 'official' piece in the new series, 'Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising'.

From the 'Jobs that the robots are not really doing, but could easily take over if given the chance' category, I submit for your consideration the 'job' of Entertainment Rreporter.  Take a look at the video below, (yes, it is from The Onion, but don't let that unduly influence your opinion), and then ask yourself honestly if robots could indeed replace all manner of entertainment industry 'journalists': (RSS and email subscribers will need to click through)

iInterviewer: Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola Talk Their New Movie, Inevitable Deaths 

Not that bad, right? And if you leave out the Onion's need to make the interview more of a gag than a true reflection of the typically horrible and banal celebrity interview  - 'How did it feel to work with such a great cast?', then I think you can pretty easily see that a robot, (and not even that powerful a robot), could step in for what passes for the in-depth and biting reporting that most entertainment shows pay high-priced human talent to produce.

I know what you're thinking - this is a goof, it's the Onion after all, and I'll never get back the approximate three minutes I've spent reading this post.

All of those reactions are fair and valid. At least the 'lost three minutes of your life part.'

But if you're still hanging in there with me on this, here's the payoff.

It does not matter what industry, job title, function, or process you are involved in. If what you do is easily repeatable, if the people that do the job are pretty much indistinguishable, and if it doesn't really matter who does the job, only that it gets done - then you or your job is a candidate for the impending robot uprising.

We laugh at the robot interviewing the actors. Until we realize a human reporter would have asked the very same questions.

And not been as funny.

Why is the robot looking at me?

This past Sunday the seemingly inevitable march towards humanity's future domination by our robot overlords took a pretty significant if old-fashioned step - with a feature story on the venerable news magazine show 60 Minutes titled 'March of the Machines'.  In the piece, (video embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through to watch), CBS' correspondent Steve Kroft provided a well-balanced overview of many of the recent advances in robot technology, and how automation plays a critical and complex role in the nature and future of many types of work. 

60 Minutes - 'March of the Machines'

The piece, and supported by interview comments from 'Race Against the Machine' authors Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson from MIT argues that some, if not most, of the jobless nature of the economic 'recovery' of the last few years has been driven by increased automation and the reduction in human workers required in those industries where this kind of automation, (manufacturing, logistics, even in health care), has become more widespread.

The piece, if you follow these developments reasonably closely, doesn't break much new ground, although simply by virtue of being covered on a well-known and widely watched show such as 60 Minutes, will bring the issue of the potential threat robotic automation into greater awareness.

In addition to the 13 or so minute piece that aired on the show, (the video you see above), the show's website also posted a shorter piece, with some additional footage and some out takes, that has the segment host, Mr. Kroft interacting more with some of the robotic technology from the story, (embedded below, same click through message as before). 

60 Minutes - The Robot Waltz

This little piece of B-roll cuts a little closer to some of what will be the inevitable issues and concerns that will arise from people working more closely with robots and robot technology. Fear, anxiety, trepidation, unease and more - all summed up in Kroft's telling question - Why is he (the robot) looking at me?'

Why is the robot looking at you indeed.

If you take a few minutes to check out the clips, please let me know what you think - are those of us that keep writing, talking, and thinking about the changes in the nature of work due to these kinds of advances in robot technology over reacting?

Or should we truly be teaching our kids how to better relate to their future robot colleagues?