VIDEO: Robots and our gadget addiction

Off topic for a rainy Friday - check out this amusing 4-minute look at our need to always have the latest and greatest gadgetry, (email and RSS subscribers will have to click through), brought to you by the folks at Big Lazy Robot, and perhaps not surprisingly, featuring some adorable robots.

IDIOTS from BLR_VFX on Vimeo.

All we are is just another robot sheep, marching silently in line to obtain the next thingamabob that we probably don't really need...

Happy Friday and put down your phone at some point this weekend!

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.

Making the most of the time you have

This is probably an 'Off-topic' kind of post except for that it falls squarely into the category of 'Things that are interesting to me' and therefore at least in the broad definition for this blog is actually 'On-topic.'

Check out the Tikker - a watch that not only tells you the time, but tells you the time you have left.

And the folks at Tikker mean that quite literally, the watch displays, based on information you provide on your current age, habits, BMI, etc., how much time in years, months, days you have left to live.

Why would anyone want to glance down at your wrist in hopes of determining (variously) if and by how much you are going to be late for work, how much longer this interminable opera/play/ballet your significant other dragged you to is likely to drone on, or to make the mental calculations that start with 'If I go to bed now, then I will still have 5.5 hours of sleep before the big meeting tomorrow, that should be enough', and instead be reminded that you only have precisely 41 years, 8 months, 12 days and some hours left upright?

Well according to the folks behind the Tikker project, the stark display and countdown of your time left will make you appreciate that time more, help you to make better decisions about how you use that limited and diminishing time, and even make you happier. 

From the Tikker project's Kickstarter page:

As a group we first started working on the idea of Tikker 2 years ago (although we have dwelled on the concepts of time and happiness for well over 10), and we've come a long way since those first development meetings. What started as an idea slowly took form in sketches, models and concept prototypes. It wasn't long until the project took on a rather morbid name – Tikker has come to be called "the death watch" by the people in and around the development group. But despite it's nick name we really doesn't see it as one.

"Forget all about "smart watches" that will keep you connected to your work email 24/7. How about a watch that is designed to actually make you happier, and help you get a better life? A happiness watch. That's what Tikker is designed to do."

It is an interesting concept for sure, that being forced to contemplate more directly the limited time you have left would lead you to be more thoughtful and even could change at least some of your decisions about how you use parts of that time.

Would it make you 'happier', to see every day the countdown clock winding down, winding down?

Hard to say. 

But it is pretty likely that just about all of us spent potentially large parts of this time we have doing things we really would prefer to not be doing. Of course many of these are from necessity - we have to work, sometimes at jobs we don't enjoy to provide for ourselves and our families, we have to rake the leaves, have to take the odd colonoscopy and so on.

However, it's also likely that we spend a fair chunk of our time on silly things that we choose to do, and rationalize this by convincing ourselves that we have to do to them, and don't really have a choice. Which is also silly, because of course we do.

Anyway, I found the Tikker kind of interesting. I am not sure I would want to wear one though. I am not totally convinced it would make me happier.

But then again maybe it would lead to some better decisions. 

And I just spent 31 minutes I will never get back writing this post.

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!