Boston Dynamics demo clip shows we are not quite living in an i, Robot future – even if the machines can skate better than you can.
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Category: employment – Page 75
New clip of ATLAS, having some problems but interesting to see.
If at first you don’t succeed, try again—and, if you’re a robot, again and again and again and again and again and again. Because it’s worth remembering that unlike many humans, automatons will keep at a task until they do achieve success.
This GIF of Boston Dynamics’s Atlas robot taking a tumble, sliced from a TED talk published Monday, has gone viral. Presumably, that’s because when humans aren’t fretting about how they’ll steal our jobs, we sure do seem to enjoy laughing at robots falling over.
But robots are tenacious: failures don’t demoralize them the way they do humans. So you can bet that Atlas carried on trying to nail the task of moving a box for hours, and then shared its learnings with all its buddies so that none of them make the same mistake in the future. (And at any rate, the robot that steals your job is unlikely to be a humanoid.)
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Pan’s company is at the vanguard of a trend that could have devastating consequences for Asia’s poorest nations. Low-cost manufacturing of clothes, shoes, and the like was the first rung on the economic ladder that Japan, South Korea, China, and other countries used to climb out of poverty after World War II. For decades that process followed a familiar pattern: As the economies of the early movers shifted into more sophisticated industries such as electronics, poorer countries took their place in textiles, offering the cheap labor that low-tech factories traditionally required. Manufacturers got inexpensive goods to ship to Walmarts and Tescos around the world, and poor countries were able to provide mass industrial employment for the first time, giving citizens an alternative to toiling on farms.
Automation threatens to block the ascent of Asia’s poor. Civil unrest could follow.
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According to a new study from Oxford and Yale University researchers, those are the years artificial intelligence is slated to take over each of those tasks. And so it will go for millions of other jobs over the next 50 years, researchers find.
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Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, says he worries about the scary Artificial Intelligence revolution. Artificial Intelligence could decimate middle-class jobs and might cause World War III, but it could also be the opportunities to build new companies and change the current status quo of Africa. He believes that AI will be smarter than human and in the future we will make robot more like human.
He spoke to young African at the University of Nairobi and encourage African Entrepreneurs “When I arrived, I found the internet speed in Kenya is faster than in United states, and you will build even better infrastructure and build the future of Africa because entrepreneurship is the best philanthropy to help the society.”
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Exponential Fever. The business world is currently gripped by exponential fever. The concept came to prominence with Moore’s law — the doubling every 18–24 months of the amount of computer power available for $1,000. The phenomenon has since been replicated in many fields of science and technology. We now see the speed, functionality and performance of a range of technologies growing at an exponential rate – encompassing everything from data storage capacity and video download speed to the time taken to map a genome and the cost of producing a laboratory grown hamburger.
New Pretenders. A wave of new economy businesses has now brought exponential thinking to bear in transforming assumptions about how an industry works. For example, AirBnB handles roughly 90 times more bedroom listings per employee than the average hotel group, while Tangerine Bank can service seven times more customers than a typical competitor. In automotive, by adopting 3D printing, Local Motors can develop a new car model 1,000 times cheaper than traditional manufacturers, with each car coming ‘off the line’ 5 to 22 times faster. In response, businesses in literally every sector are pursuing exponential improvement in everything from new product development and order fulfillment through to professional productivity and the rate of revenue growth.
Stepping Up. For law firms, the transformation of other sectors and their accompanying legal frameworks creates a massive growth opportunity, coupled with the potential to bring similar approach to rethinking the way law firms operate. While some might be hesitant about applying these disruptive technologies internally, there is a clear opportunity to be captured from helping clients respond to these developments and from the creation of the industries of the future. To help bring to life the possibilities within legal, we highlight seven scenarios that illustrate how exponential change could transform law firms over the next 5 to 10 years.
Rise of the ‘Exponential Circle’. Our continuing programme of research on the future of law firms suggests that we will see exponential growth for those firms who can both master the legal implications of these technologies for their clients and become adept at their application within the firm. By 2025, we could indeed have witnessed the emergence of an Exponential Circle of law firms who have reached ‘escape velocity’ and left the rest behind.
We’re always hearing how robots are going to take our jobs, but there might be a way of preventing that grim future from happening: by becoming workplace cyborgs first.
A company in Wisconsin has become the first in the US to roll out microchip implants for all its employees, and says it’s expecting over 50 of its staff members to be voluntarily ‘chipped’ next week.
The initiative, which is entirely optional for employees at snack stall supplier Three Square Market (32M), will implant radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips in staff members’ hands in between their thumb and forefinger.
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