Please tell the robot where you see yourself in five years

Note: I warned you on Monday - it is unofficially 'robot week' here on the blog. Bail out now if this is not your kind of thing. Don't worry, I won't know if you did. Probably.

Researchers and engineers have long identified manufacturing, warehouse operations, and even more 'advanced', complex, and interactive processes like patient and elder care as potentially fertile ground for the further automation and robotization of the economy and society. While each new encroachment of these increasingly better, smarter, cheaper, and more reliable pieces of technology, many of us pause to take stock of just how near or far we see our own roles and jobs from this impending and inexorable onslaught.

And also increasingly, the answer to the question of 'Just how close is my job to being replaced by a robot?' is 'Closer than you think.'

For the folks who read this blog, mostly HR and Talent management professionals, 'basic' kinds of automation have mostly made our jobs better, easier, simpler, and allowed us to spend more time on complex and higher order activities. Instead of endlessly keying and re-keying data on dumb terminals, we have our employees process their own transactions on their iPads. Instead of calling up references for soon-to-be-hired candidates, we send the references a link to an online survey and have some software send us any red flags or exceptions. You get the idea. 

Automation in HR has no doubt helped make our operations much more efficient, reduced errors, and with the latest batch of exciting new technologies, given us insight into our organizations that would have only a few years ago been impossible to see.

But will automation in HR ever go even further and reach into one of the 'essential' HR and Talent functions - the actual assessment of a candidate in the traditional interview setting? Some researchers at LaTrobe University Business School in Australia are betting that the answer to that question is 'Yes'.

Check this excerpt from a piece on the Australian Financial Review site, 'Interviewed for a Job by Sophie the Robot':

With big eyes, a feminine voice and some interesting dance moves, Sophie is rather cute but don’t let that fool you.

Sophie could soon be conducting your toughest-ever job interview, monitoring not just what you say but tiny twitches in your eyebrows that give clues about how you really feel.

Sophie and her fellow “human-like” robots Charles, Matilda, Betty and Jack plus two as yet unnamed robots are the product of a research joint venture between La Trobe University Business School in Melbourne and global electronics giant NEC Corporation in Japan.

NEC provided the robots and La Trobe is adapting them for use in recruitment, health care and as “emotionally engaging learning partners” in Australia. Rajiv Khosla, who has been driving the project since its inception, says the robots are a “world first in the area of recruitment”.

Sophie was already involved in trial interviews of candidates for sales jobs, asking 76 questions about selling.

“She captures their [candidates] cognitive verbal responses and captures their emotional responses by monitoring changes in their facial expression,“ Khosla says.

Khosla insists robots will not replace humans conducting later stage interviews or employers making final hiring decisions.

Sure, the interviewer robots are just here to help the process, that is all Mr. or Ms. HR Director. There's no way a robot for gosh sakes would be better at assessing the validity, truthfulness, accuracy, and the like of a candidate's responses.

There's no way a robot would be able to compare, in seconds, and with astonishing precision the information provided in the interview with a candidate's resume, LinkedIn profile, social web exhaust, old resume from five years ago they forgot was still on Monster.com, and so on.

There's no way a robot would be able to sense subtle eye movements, increase in respiration, body temperature changes, as different questions get asked and answered.

There's no way a robot could, in fractions of a second, compare and contrast dozens of candidates' answers to the same questions and produce detailed analyses on quality and accuracy, and perhaps truth across these answers.

There's no way a robot could also compare the new candidate's responses and reactions with the last persons hired into similar roles, and how the successful and not so successful hires reacted in similar circumstances.

There's no way a robot could conduct dozens and dozens of interviews across a high volume hiring period for retail or food service without getting tired, crabby, maybe even a little forgetful.

Nah, no way a robot can do all that. We need people for all those things.

Happy Wednesday.

When the robots realize what they don't know

Warning in advance to the good folks that check out the blog here, I sense another 'robot' kick coming on.

So bail out now if indeed the tales from the robotics frontier are not really your thing.

Today's dispatch from the robot wars - Robots Learning Better Ways to Ask Clueless Humans for Help, is from the IEEE site. Scientists and robotics researchers at MIT, (it is always MIT it seems), have taken the 'clueless' robot that traditionally can do only what is specifically programmed to do, and enhanced it with the ability to interpret where and when it needs assistance to carry out an assigned task, and then to communicate that need for help to an equally clueless human counterpart.

In the research conducted at MIT, scientists have taught the robots to ask for help to complete the assembly of a piece of furniture. They can make requests for assistance like 'Please flip the white table top over' and 'Please hand the blue robot the black table leg'. check out the embedded video below to see how this process and technology work (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

If you watched the video all the way through (you deserve a medal for that), you might have caught the most interesting line of all - that this kind of robot technology would eventually allow humans to supervise larger and larger groups of robot workers.

Robots are great at completing the majority of most simple tasks, but eventually there are one or two steps in whatever you want a robot to do where it's much more likely to fail. Giving robots the ability to recognize these failure points and then intelligently ask for assistance could open up many more tasks to at least partial automation, and it's likely to have the most impact in variable, unstructured environments.

You know, like the kinds of environments and types of jobs that we keep thinking are going to be safe from the eventual robot uprising.

Have a great week!

More on the STEM talent shortage, or lack thereof

Fall weekends are for two things, watching my beloved New York Football Jets display their unique brand of ineptitude on fields across America (big non-relevant aside: I am starting more and more to come down on the site of Malcolm Gladwell regarding football and its eventual and likely marginalization. The only football game, college or NFL, I watched all weekend was the Jets vs Bucs, and in that game alone in the first half, two Jets players wobbled off the field, pretty much incoherent from blows received to their helmets. Multiply that by hundreds of games, many played by little kids as young as 7 or 8 and try to count, you can't, the number of kids/teens/collegians/men who are absorbing ridiculous and repeated trauma to the head each weekend. I don't know. Most of think boxing is a crazy sport. But we are ok with football. Sorry, that was a long aside), and catching up on some longer reads from the week I did not have time to really review.

The piece I'd like to call your attention to is titled 'The STEM Crisis is a Myth', an absolute takedown of the notion that currently the American economy is suffering, and will continue to suffer from a dearth of workers with the needed STEM skills to fill current and expected demand for them (or more precisely, the skills themselves). The author, Robert Charette, makes a compelling case that there is not, in fact, a STEM worker shortage. If anything, there is a surplus of STEM-capable workers, both from the amount of STEM graduates that are produced each year, and from the upwards of 11 million STEM-trained workers that for one reason or another, are not working currently in STEM roles.

Chech the below chart from the piece to see where Charette is coming from:

Do the math, (no pun intended), if you like, but when you break down the estimates of new STEM jobs being creating against the numbers of new graduates and existing STEM-educated workers it becomes harder and harder to make the 'shortage' case.

Additionally, it might be in tech and other firms best interested to play up the shortage narrative.  Why?

From the piece:

Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

 And STEM wages are 'in check', check this nugget from the article:

And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”

It is a complex and even controversial subject, but in light of all the available data, it gets harder and harder to make the 'shortage' case, and in fact, it gets more dangerous if it perpetuates to the point where it serves to help create a real shortage in the future, as students decide to avoid these fields in the future.

If you're interested at all in these issues, I encourage you to take a few minutes to read 'The STEM Crisis is a Myth', maybe bookmark it for new Saturday though!

Have a great week!

VIDEO: Unboxing the future

The 'unboxing' video format, (essentially, a video of someone unboxing a new gadget like a computer or a smartphone and describing the contents and packaging), has enjoyed a run of popularity amongst the geeky set.  I mean who doesn't want to watch a choppy video with bad sound and lighting of a random 15 year-old kid unpacking a new Xbox?

Yes, 'unboxing' videos are generally horrible, and it is with that horribleness in mind that I run the risk of alienating those readers that not only don't know or care about 'unboxing' but also are lacking my interest and fascination with advances in robotics.

Check the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), of a team at MIT receiving and unboxing its Atlas robot (built by Boston Dynamics) to use in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. I will have a couple of (probably nonsensical) comments after the jump.

What is Atlas all about?  Here is a small description from the Boston Dynamics site:

Atlas is a high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain. Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment. In extremely challenging terrain, Atlas is strong and coordinated enough to climb using hands and feet, to pick its way through congested spaces.

The team at MIT will develop software to control and command Atlas to perform various actions in a disaster response situation - think things like defusing bombs, looking through tornado damage, potentially working in toxic waste spills, that kind of thing.

Why should you as an HR/Talent pro care about something like Atlas, and its capability and potential?

Because like lots of other technologies, these kinds of advanced robotics applications might start in research universities or government labs, but the best ones almost always become a part of the workplace.

Because at some point you as an HR pro will get asked a question from the CEO something along the lines of, 'Can't we find a way to automate that, instead of opening another assembly plant?' or 'Can you get me a cost/benefit breakdown of buying 10 new Baxters vs. hiring 50 new assembly workers?'

Because at some point someone you work for is going to see an 'unboxing' video like the one above from MIT and think, (perhaps erroneously, perhaps not), that pushing advanced automation further and farther into the business is getting easier and easier - not unlike how easy it is to set up that new Xbox.

Maybe I am completely off-base on this, and the time when the average HR pro really needs to concern themself with this kind of thing is decades away.

Or maybe I'm not wrong, and sooner than not you will have to add a 'person type' in your HRIS for new employees named Baxter or Atlas.

The next evolution of corporate social media management

Just might be something like Beatrix - a new 'advanced virtual social media assistant' that can assist organizations, (or individual 'thought leaders' as well I suppose) in their quests to become 'social media rockstars.'

How does it work?

Unlike more well-known social media management and scheduling tools like Buffer or HootSuite, both of which allow an organization to schedule and plan social media activity, Beatrix not only helps wth the scheduling of social media updates, it actually helps find and select the actual content as well.

Let's say a local pizza shop wants to buff up its social media presence. The organization can then give Beatrix a few keywords to focus on - like 'pizza', 'wine', or 'sandwiches', and the Beatrix algorithm finds interesting content from around the web and sets it up to be shared on the company's social accounts.

Here is what Beatrix says in her own words...

The algorithm creates instant content plans for you. Stuck for things to say on social media? Beatrix will plan out your week. No time to post? Beatrix will post for you at times you specify. Beatrix does everything a social media intern does.

Just like a real assistant, Beatrix emails you a new content plan every week. If you like it, Beatrix will post that content throughout the next week. Or tell Beatrix what's wrong and she'll create a new plan. Beatrix gets smarter the more you use her. And she never misses a deadline

A 'smart' social media assistant that takes your input, seeks, finds, schedules, and shares interesting content related to your business, and keeps you abreast of the ongoing content plan? An automated service that not only decides for you when to post to social networks, but what to post in the first place?

That sounds pretty awesome to me.  Of course maybe it is because I spend ridiculous amounts of time looking for good content to share, (and blog about).

Sure, someone out there is likely to respond with a comment like - 'That's not what effective social media is all about. Companies need to be authentic or personable or real, or some such.'

Maybe.  Or maybe most of us just really want our fans and followers to think we are on top of our industry, and are sharing relevant and interesting content about what they are interested in. 

And if that is the case, then why wouldn't an algortihm be just as effective at that task as a social media intern who is counting the days before he or she can head back to school.

Have a great week!