Future of Work | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Microsoft and the AI future

Microsoft’s continued push into artificial intelligence is part of an economy wide shift

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.

Running a post conventional company

Organisations are having to adapt to rapidly changing times, Holacracy is an attempt to move on beyond older management structures

One of the most derided organisational theories of recent times has been Holacracy, a system of running organisations without managers.

The idea behind Holacracy is job descriptions are outdated and unnecessarily limiting. Modern workplaces and roles are far more fluid than the traditional, almost militaristic, structure of the hierarchical organisation chart.

Creator of Holacracy, Brian Robertson, describes in a Medium post how the anti-management theory came around during the early days of running a tech startup in the early 2000s.

The impact of our deep dive into agile software development went far beyond just “how we built software”?—?it infused our culture and gave us a foundation of principles and practices for the management of the company as well. Over the next several years, we’d do our best to express this paradigm in everything we did. Agile principles became a guidepost and a measurement for all of our future experimentation, as did the highly overlapping principles of the lean movement.

Given the tech startup roots of the idea, it’s not surprising Holacracy applies many of the principles that make up the Agile and Lean movements – particularly the hostility to micro-management.

Moving on from Holacracy

It’s notable that Robertson posted his background on Holacracy on Medium as the service was one of the more prominent adopters of the organisational theory, however the publishing platform has now dumped the philosophy.

In his post about why he and his business partner have dumped Holacracy, Medium founder Ev Williams said “the system had begun to exert a small but persistent tax on both our effectiveness” however he still thought the concept has merit and traditional management structures are too slow to deal with the demands of modern business.

The management model that most companies employ was developed over a century ago. Information flows too quickly?—?and skills are too diverse?—?for it to remain effective in the future.

Williams’ point is right, the 19th Century military structure of businesses was fine at a time when product cycles could be measured in years if not decades. In today’s world where the life of companies, let alone products, has been drastically compressed a much more flexible and fast moving way of organising businesses is needed.

Dynamic times

Along with needing far more flexible and fast moving structures, organisations also have the tools to create them. Again, the days of memos moving through layers of management via manila envelopes are long gone and now we have collaborative, real time communications methods.

One of the great changes in business over the next decade is going to be the rethinking of how organisations are managed, Holacracy may turn out not to be the answer but it is an early attempt of making sense of a very changed business world.

Management are the one group that really hasn’t been disrupted over the past thirty years. As strange as it might sound, Holacracy is a taste of the radical changes the executive suite are about to experience.

What happens when machines start to learn

Deep reinforcement learning promises to change the way robots are taught to do tasks

Computer programming is one of the jobs of the future. Right?

Maybe not, as Japanese industrial robot maker Fanuc demonstrates with their latest robot that learns on the job.

The MIT Technology Review describes how the robot analyses a task and fine tunes its own operations to do the task properly.

Fanuc’s robot uses a technique known as deep reinforcement learning to train itself, over time, how to learn a new task. It tries picking up objects while capturing video footage of the process. Each time it succeeds or fails, it remembers how the object looked, knowledge that is used to refine a deep learning model, or a large neural network, that controls its action.

While machines running on deep reinforcement learning won’t completely make programmers totally redundant, it shows basic operations even in those fields are going to be increasingly automated. Just knowing a programming language is not necessarily a passport to future prosperity.

Another aspect flagged in the MIT article is how robots can learn in parallel, so groups can work together to understand and optimise tasks.

While Fanuc and the MIT article are discussing small groups of similar computers working together it’s not hard to see this working on a global scale. What happens when your home vacuum cleaner starts talking to a US Air Force autonomous drone remains to be seen.

How artificial intelligence can outguess people

Google have developed a tool that determines a location from a photograph

It’s hard to spot locations from a photograph and it’s something people can’t do this very well. MIT’s Technology Review reports Google’s researchers have developed a tool that figures out the location of an image with twice the accuracy of humans.

To illustrate their point Google have their Geoguesser game that allows people to pit their knowledge against the computer.

While this could be seen as a gimmick, it again shows how computing power is being used in areas that were seen as being immune from technology not so long ago and how artificial intelligence will be applied in various fields.

For the moment, applying artificial intelligence to seemingly trivial fields like games gives researchers to opportunity to test it before being applied to areas like cancer treatment.

As artificial intelligence advances, a whole range of existing fields are going to be disrupted – particularly in ‘knowledge industry’ fields like law, consulting and management – while new industries and occupations will arise out of these technologies.

Disrupting professional services

Stripe’s US business registration service shows how professional services companies are under threat

As Irish immigrants, the founders of San Francisco payments company Stripe, John and Patrick Collison, know too well the difficulties of setting up a US based corporation.

So the company establishing Stripe Atlas, a service to help foreign entrepreneurs set up their US presence makes sense and the payments services bundled into the package may also generate business for the brothers.

The Stripe Atlas service also illustrates the challenges facing professional services businesses as the service automates many of the bread and butter tasks that were good earners for lawyers and accountants.

Until recently it was thought those ‘higher level’ occupations would escape disruption, now it appears software will eat the professions as well.

Tough times for startup staffers

Times are getting tough for Silicon Valley’s low level workers

One of the frequently reported things about tech startups is how well they treat their staff. The truth is not always so rosy.

At Yelp staff get free meals, drinks and snacks but many of them barely earn enough to pay the rent. A now fired staffer wrote an open letter to the company’s CEO describing how tough she found working their call centre on a wage that left her destitute.

Similarly Buzzfeed reports working conditions at Zenefits, last year’s hottest startup, are more akin to a boiler room than the nice, relaxed offices of places like Google.

While we often portray tech companies as being enlightened workplaces, the truth is they can be as harsh as any other employer. The big question for those working for tech startups though is how long their benefits and jobs will survive as the current funding crunch bites.

Actuaries and the future of Public Relations

Will actuaries become the most valued profession in the PR industry? Some think so.

One of the truisms of modern industry is we’re going to need more workers with data skills. Could it be actuaries will be the profession of the information age.

Much of the focus around how companies will deal with an information rich age come down to the need for ‘data scientists’, those with a combination of statistical, analytical and coding skills will be required to coax insights out of complex and rapidly changing data sets.

At a Future of PR meetup in Sydney earlier this week, one of the panellists raised the possibility that tomorrow’s most valued agency employees will be actuaries as data analytics comes to dominate the industry.

That boring old actuaries – one particularly cruel joke is atuaries are accountants who failed the personality test – could be the hottest profession in the sexy PR industry is quite a delicious scenario.

Should that turn out to be the case though, it won’t just be the PR industry chasing actuaries, almost every industry is going to demanding the same set of skills.

In a strange way it could be the staid professions of today that are the exciting jobs of tomorrow, we’ll reserve judgement on the actuaries though.

Cloudy times for the tech workforce

Autodesk’s firing of ten percent of its workforce indicates some harsh times are coming for tech workers.

For listed tech companies 2016 has been a bloodbath to date however design company Autodesk seems to have bucked the trend.

The key to keeping investors happy seems to lie in announcing major layoffs, in Autodesk’s case ten percent of its workforce which equates to 950 workers.

Autodesk’s management are painting those layoffs as being due to the company’s transition to cloud services with online subscriptions making up over half the business’ revenue.

Regardless of how valid that reasoning is, the message to the tech workers is clear; more tough times are coming.

With investors ruthlessly expecting better profits, focused leadership and leaner workforces many managers are going to have to face some tough decisions in what’s looking like a difficult year.

Seppuku for the health care sector?

The assisted suicide Seppukuma robot raises some interesting ethical questions and challenges how secure employment is in the health sector

It turns out Seppukuma is a parody and I fell for it. My apologies.

Continuing the theme of Japanese robotics meet SeppuKuma, the friendly robot bear that might be the last thing you ever see.

When we look at the future of work, health care comes up as one of the fields that is least vulnerable to automation. Seppukuma shows we shouldn’t take that for granted.

Seppukuma is also an interesting example of how technology can subvert laws. Banning assisted suicide means little when a robot can be programmed to it.

As cheap and accessible robotics become commonplace so too do devices like suicide assisting androids which raise a whole range of legal and ethical issues.

Even though Seppukuma is a joke, the technology is feasible. We need to consider the issues and risk these devices will raise.

Making seniors mobile

Robotics and automation promise to improve mobility and extend our working lives

One of the understated benefits of automation and robotics is it allows the elderly and disabled more mobility.

Facing an aging population, the Japanese are unsurpringly ahead of the rest of the world in understanding this and, as the Wall Street Journal reports, researchers are investigating how driverless cars can help the elderly get around.

While autonomous vehicles of all sizes promise greater mobility to many people currently restricted in their access, robotics also promises to extend our working lives just as mechanisation has over the past two hundred years.

Where the jobs will go

An Australian state government survey outlines the impact of automation on employment

That automation is having a profound impact on existing jobs is beginning to be appreciated by governments. A study by the New South Wales government’s Parliamentary research service examines what the effects will be on the Australian state’s economy.

Like equivalent overseas studies, the report finds over half the state’s jobs – a total of 1.5 million positions – could be at risk from computerisation.

An interesting aspect of this is the bulk of the impacts being felt in the mining, construction and logistics industries. While there’s no doubt those sectors will be hard hit, particularly for lower skilled workers, the assumption is higher level positions in management and supervisory roles won’t be as greatly affected.

Examples of this include ‘professionals’ only being at a 4.6% risk of being displaced and ‘General Managers’ at 5.0%. This compares to labourers at 96.1% and 95.7% of ‘filing and registry clerks’ losing their jobs.

While there’s no doubt the lesser skilled roles are at immediate risk, and have been for decades, the rise of artificial intelligence and business automation are increasingly going to put management roles at risk.

Quibbles aside, the report is a good read on the impacts of automation and computerisation on what has been one of the western world’s more successful economies.

The hollowing out process of Australia’s middle classes it describes show that phenomenon is not just confined to the United States and this probably creates the greatest challenge to politicians as populists seek to blame foreigners and minorities for much of the population’s declining fortunes.

Almost every government in the world is facing these issues and the efforts of public servants and economists to accurately describe what’s happening has to be applauded and encouraged.

For voters and workers, reading these reports to understand the forces changing their industries and communities is essential to making informed choices at the ballot box and the workplace.

Working in the gig economy

The motivations of demand economy contractors are varied and not without suspicion towards the services that employ them.

Just what do people think about the on-demand, or gig, economy? A survey by public relations company Burston-Marsteller looked at those who use and provide services for companies like Uber, AirBnB and Instagram.

Unsurprisingly the majority of users are have positive experiences with on-demand services which allows them to access product they couldn’t afford otherwise.

More important are the views of the contractors, and those who are doing these jobs for the flexibility are matched by those who’d rather have full time employment but can’t find a role.

Strikingly, the longer a contractor has worked for one of these services the more likely they are to find the company’s practices exploitative and more than half believe the platforms are gaming the regulations.

Overall, it shows participants in the ‘sharing economy’ have no illusions about the caring aspects of the services that employ them, unlike many of those touting the benefits from the sidelines.