Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Future of Work

Posts relating to changing employment and the future of work

  • Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

    Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

    While robots threaten to take our jobs, they also promise to change the agricultural industry. That paradox describes how both the risks and opportunities in our increasingly automated word.

    Brian Halweil, an ag-tech writer, describes how small farmers are using specialist robots to automate their operations. He lays out how the miniaturization of farm machinery will help encourage small, diverse farms.

    The available of cheap, adaptable robots driven by almost ubiquitous and build in artificial intelligence is going to drive automation across most industries.

    Ubiquitous robotics though means we have to rethink employment and social security as the workforce adjusts to new methods of working. Inadvertently former McDonalds chief executive Ed Rensi touched upon this in his somewhat hysterical response to the campaign to increase the minimum wage across the United States.

    Rensi is right to point out that fast food restaurants will replace workers with robots where they can, indeed McDonalds led the way through the 1970s and 80s in introducing production line techniques to the food industry and the company will automate their kitchens and ordering systems regardless of minimum wage levels.

    That relentless automation of existing jobs is why there is now a world wide push to explore the concept of a guaranteed minimum wage. We seem to be at the same point we were almost a century ago where the ravages of the Great Depression meant societies had to create a social security safety net.

    As we saw with the Great Depression, the jobs eventually came back but in a very different form in a much changed economy. We’re almost certainly going to see the same process this century, hopefully without the massive dislocation and misery.

    For businesses and industry, Halwell’s point about much smaller and adaptable robots giving rise to more nimble businesses is almost certainly true. For investors, managers and business owners adapting to that world will be key to avoiding being on the minimum wage themselves.

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  • A constancy of change

    A constancy of change

    One constant about the technology sector is change, and a visit to Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum emphasises just how much the industry has changed over the years.

    Notable are all the gone and forgotten brands that were in their day giants of the industry along with the efforts by various countries, Britain in particular, to compete with the US in computing.

    But most striking are the old roles that rose and fell as technology evolved over the past century, from the Morse Code operators whose skills were essential for safe shipping and telegraph communications through to punch card operators and the ‘tape apes’ of the 1980s.

    Most of those roles rose, became lucrative and then disappeared as technology evolved, just as the loom weavers’ jobs did in the eighteenth century.

    Like the loom weavers and the companies that employed them, history and technology overtook them. Something that today’s business giants and high paid occupations need to keep in mind.

    No industry is static and few jobs are safe in today’s rapidly changing world. It’s why we need to be making the investments in the skills and technologies that will define the future economy.

    We can’t assume today’s jobs will be those of tomorrow.

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  • Rethinking economics in the face of demographics

    Rethinking economics in the face of demographics

    The Western World’s demographic chickens come home to roost. Investor John Mauldin shows nine charts that illustrate the low growth dilemma facing central banks.
    For governments to stimulate economies, they are going to have to find a way to increase productivity and the spending power of populations. The current remedy of pumping cheap money into the economy isn’t enough to do this.
    One concerning message for the tech sector in these figures is that simply boosting productivity will not be enough to boost the economy. In fact widespread automation of existing jobs may make the problem exponentially worse.
    The statistic that indicates younger workers are dropping out of the workforce to look after older relatives should be particularly worrying for economists and a warning to politicians that thirty years of the neo-Liberal model espousing smaller governments and reduced public services now threatens to change the political dynamic – something that the rise of Donald Trump is also a symptom of.
    For policymakers, the question is how to employ people in jobs that give them enough income to support their families without ringing up huge debts.
    Interestingly, much of the current tech mania is based upon the same credit based consumerism that’s driven the last thirty years of western economic growth. Apps like Uber, AirBnB and the countless delivery apps are good examples of businesses based on happy consumers jamming more on their credit cards.
    The era of 1980s thinking is over, we’re going to have to rethink what policies encourage employment and wealth creation along with seriously considering what capitalism is going to look like in the mid-21st Century.

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  • Interesting times as the global steel glut bites

    Interesting times as the global steel glut bites

    For all the talk of digital disruption, who would have thought the old fashioned steel industry would be the industry causing the greatest upheaval in today’s economy?

    Globally the steel industry is in trouble. In China, the UK and Australia steelmakers are facing a painful time as chronic overcapacity bites.

    Beyond the immediate domestic problems of having a major part of its manufacturing industry shut down, Australia faces an added problem as the nation’s economic policies were based on a never ending Chinese demand for iron ore and coal.

    OECD “Excess Capacity in the Global Steel Industry" (2015)
    OECD “Excess Capacity in the Global Steel Industry” (2015)

    The impending collapse of Bohai steel shows the Chinese industrial boom is now in the past and the onus on Beijing’s rulers is to stimulate a domestic services economy.

    For the UK, the collapse of their steel industry adds further uncertainty to a nation that’s already putting its global role at stake with the referendum to move out of the European Union.

    Should Britain turn away from Europe, they will need to find some compelling reasons to be competitive in the global economy. Fantasies of some sort of Anglo-centric Commonwealth of Nations won’t be enough to sustain the Little Englanders and their high cost of living.

    In fact, the British problems of high costs and decades of underinvestment are common across the English speaking world – although Canada, New Zealand and Australia are particularly at risk in the current economic climate given their dependency on commodities and Chinese markets.

    That Chinese curse of may you live in interesting times is proving true again, we are about to enter a fascinating economic period. Our business and political leaders, along with our resilience, are about to be tested. The steel industry is the first test.

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  • Microsoft and the AI future

    Microsoft and the AI future

    Despite the embarrassment of their foul mouthed racist bot, Microsoft are pressing on with a move into artificial intelligence.

    Ahead of this week’s Launch event in San Francisco, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella laid out his vision for the company’s Artificial Intelligence efforts in describing a range of ‘bots’ that carry out small tasks.

    Bloomberg tagged Nadella’s vision as ‘the spawn of clippy’, referring to the incredibly irritating help assistant Microsoft included with Office 97.

    Tech site The Register parodied Clippy mercilessly in their short lived IT comedy program Salmon Days, as shown in this not safe for work trailer. While The Reg staff were brutal in their language and treatment of Clippy, most Microsoft Office users at the time shared their feelings.

    While Clippy may be making a comeback at Microsoft, albeit in a less irritating form, other companies are moving ahead with AI in the workplace.

    Robot manufacturer Fanuc showed off their self learning machine a few weeks ago which shows just how deeply AI is embedding itself in industry. Already there are many AI apps in software like Facebook’s algorithm and Google’s search functions with the search engine’s engineers acknowledging they aren’t quite sure what the robots are up to.

    For organisations dealing with massive amounts of data, artificial intelligence based programs are going to be essential in dealing with unexpected or fast moving events. Those programs will also affect a lot of occupations we currently think are immune from workplace automation.

     

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