Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: employment

  • 3D Printing promises to change architecture and building

    3D Printing promises to change architecture and building

    One of the longest running large scale 3D printing projects is based at the UK’s Loughborough University where since 2007 researchers have been working on developing the technology’s applications to the construction industry.

    Loughborough’s technology, named Freeform, offers faster and more flexible ways of casting concrete and building structures using a computer controlled concrete pouring system. For property developers the attraction is cheaper buildings while for architects the technologies offer more innovative structures.

    In late November the team announced a venture with Swedish building company Skanska SA to develop the world’s first commercial concrete printing robot.

    The venture, which will include collaborations with companies including iconic UK architects Foster and Partners, Buchan Concrete, Scandinavian contracting giant ABB and Lafarge Tarmac, aims to have the first commercially available robot printer available by mid 2016.

    Competing with the European venture is Chinese company WinSun who earlier this year showcased its 3D printer capable of producing ten houses every 24 hours. An interesting aspect of WinSun’s project is that the printing rig was build out of existing parts and controlled by an off the shelf Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing software system.

    While the Chinese results are relatively crude, they show the potential for the technology. The economics of the WinSun project are enhanced by using waste building site material for the concrete which only increases the attraction of these machines to cost conscious property developers.

    The Chinese and British are not just the only countries working on these technologies, in the Netherlands the 3D Print Canal House shows how techniques and materials are being developed while in the United States the University of Southern California’s Contour Crafting project is looking at how to use large scale 3D printing in a range of construction scenarios including building space colonies.

    While using moon dust to build structures in space is some way off, both Freeform and WinSun show what will become commonplace on building sites in the near future.

    These technologies promise to radically change architecture and the building industry with ramifications for jobs and the economics of building structures.  3D printing buildings is another example of how industries and employment will be very different by the middle of this century.

    For businesses, it’s another example of how managers have to prepare for very different marketplaces.

    Builder image courtesy of thesaint through Freemimages.com

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  • Where will the jobs come from? ABC Nightlife radio

    Where will the jobs come from? ABC Nightlife radio

    If you missed the program it’s available from the Soundcloud site.

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife across Australia from 10pm Australian Eastern time on Thursday, November 27 to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

    Last week a US company showed off its robotic security guard, with the boast it costs less than half the wages of a human officer. It isn’t just security guards, baristas or taxi drivers, many knowledge based jobs — from call centre workers to lawyers — can be done by computer programs, or algorithms.

    Even the building industry isn’t immune from the robots as 3D printing moves into making houses by squeezing concrete out of computer controlled nozzles.

    In almost every occupation technology is changing the way we work and reducing the number of workers needed to do a job. So where next for employment in the Twenty-first Century?

    Meet the K-5 robot security guard

    For this month’s Nightlife we’ll be discussing how the robots and algorithms are taking over the workplace and what this means for our communities and businesses.

    Join us

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Australian Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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  • The rise of the robots

    The rise of the robots

    One of the key themes of this site is how  industries and workplaces are changing, one good example of this is Knightscope’s K-5 robot, a refrigerator sized device that does many of the tasks currently done by human security guards.

    The K-5 comes with an impressive list of security features; live video,  facial recognition, behavioral analysis and a range of other tools to help organisations protect their premises.

    With an advertised running cost of $6.25 an hour, half the US mean average wage for security guards, the robots appear an attractive proposition although one suspects the limitations of the devices, not to mention the networking infrastructure involved, won’t make them feasible for most places in the near future.

    Despite its limitations, the K-5 shows the direction of robot technologies in replacing jobs that until recently were thought to be immune to automation. As the technologies inside the K-5 become smaller and lighter, future devices will become even more flexible and adaptable.

    Adding to the strengths of these autonomous devices is their constant connectivity, as the promotional video shows the robot uses cloud services to run its recognition and alarm services. Coupled with various sensors and beacons within a building, and these robot security guards become formidable devices.

    The applications for devices like the K-5 goes beyond patrolling shopping centres, car parks or industrial complexes; it’s not hard to see how similar devices can be deployed in applications like agriculture, mining or manufacturing for tasks where it would be expensive or dangerous to employ humans.

    What the K-5 illustrates Andrew McAfee’s warning of exponential technological change being about to engulf businesses, the employment implications of that should have community leaders thinking as well.

    For entrepreneurs, on the other hand, advances in robotics are another great opportunity.

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  • How smart hiring paid off for the PayPal mafia

    How smart hiring paid off for the PayPal mafia

    One of the challenges facing people who’ve started their own businesses is re-entering the broader workforce. Many managers are reluctant to hire previously self employed workers; the PayPal experience shows that attitude could be hurting working

    At the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco yesterday three PayPal alumni, part of Silicon Valley’s infamous ‘PayPal Mafia’, discussed why the company was such a successful incubator of talent.

    “The company was composed of a bunch of young folks who were very driven,” said founder of LinkedIn and early PayPal employee, Reed Hoffman. “Once they sold the business to eBay they weren’t the type to retire.”

    Along with PayPal’s founders being driven, the company also tended to hire people who had run their own businesses but were finding the  going tough in the economy at the time; “Silicon Valley was collapsing under its own weight,” observed PayPal founder and fellow panellist Max Levchin.

    “There was a lot of running for safety in the Valley,” Levchin remembers. “We were looking for people who were into risk taking and were excited to take a risk and this would be the last company they worked for because the next one would be their own. As a result we biased the selection towards entrepreneurs.”

    Copying that hiring practice today is Stripe where co-founder John Collison told Decoding the New Economy last month that one of the keys to managing a fast growth business is to hire entrepreneurs and former self employed workers.

    “They are self starters; they don’t need much supervision,” said Collison in describing how hiring people who’ve run their own businesses makes running a business that has gone from ten to 150 employees in three years.

    it’s no coincidence that one of the investors in stripe is Peter Theil who along with Levchin founded PayPal and is probably the best known of the ‘PayPal mafia’.

    PayPal and Stripe’s experience show the folly of overlooking workers who’ve run their own businesses; in a world where business is becoming more competitive, having entrepreneurial employees is an asset too good to miss out on.

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  • Contemplating a jobless future

    Contemplating a jobless future

    Last October, ahead of the company’s Orlando Symposium, Gartner Research Director Kenneth Brant released a paper looking at the effects of technology on the workplace.

    “Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades,” Brant wrote. “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”

    Brant’s view about middle class jobs is a sobering thought, many of the corporate ‘knowledge worker’ positions can be easily replaced by computers to make the decisions now being made by armies of mid level managers, bean counters and clerks.

    Indeed the whole concept of ‘knowledge worker’ that was fashionable in the 1980s and early 90s in describing the post-industrial workforce of nations like the US, Britain and Australia is undermined by the rise of powerful computers and well crafted algorithms to do the jobs unemployed steel workers and seamstresses were going to do.

    Twenty years later and the ‘knowledge workers’ had morphed into the ‘creative class’ and it appears the computers are coming for them, too.

    Personally, I subscribe to the view in the medium to long term new jobs in new industries will evolve – a view shared by economists like GE’s chief economist, Marco Annunziata.

    Over the next decade however there’s no doubt we’ll be seeing great disruption to established industries and the hostility to Google buses in San Francisco may be just an early taste of a greater antagonism to the technology community in general.

    For managers, the problems are more complex; while their own departments, corporate power bases and even their own jobs are at risk, they are going to have to find ways to incorporate these changes into their own business. Gartner warns CIOs in its briefing paper;

    The impact will be such that firms that have not begun to develop programs and policies for a “digital workforce” by 2015 will not perform in the top quartile for productivity and operating profit margin improvement in their industry by 2020. As a direct result, the careers of CIOs who do not begin to champion digital workforce initiatives with their peers in the C-suite by 2015 will be cut short by 2023.

    Few industries are going to be untouched by the disruptions of the next decade and the resultant job losses are going to present challenges for all of us.

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