El fin del trabajo

[spainfull]

Y el triunfo actual que vende la empresa posmoderna es básicamente ese, que da igual gestionar una siderurgia que un servicio de comidas, porque todo son procesos, procedimientos, normas, formatos, estandarizaciones....

O sea que el problema del fin del trabajo, sólo se agudiza con la automatización, pero ésta no es el desencadenante, sino el acelerador.

Recientemente he visto con claridad un ejemplo demasiado cercano, desafortunadamente. Una persona valiosísima por su conocimiento y valor profesional, descartada en un proceso de regulación de empleo porque no encajaba en el modelo de negocio que se quiere implantar. Y es que se trata de una persona con criterio, que es capaz de decir no a quien sea, cuando hay que decirlo. Pero sobre todo, porque estaba en contra del modelo (no muerto sino favelizador) en el que pretenden insistir.

Unas pocas tandas de despidos más, y la empresa será exactamente lo que los procedimientos han terminado por moldear. Una vez la tecnología esté depurada, sustituir a todo el personal por máquinas será casi trivial. Sólo arriba se mantiene una cantidad de poder real, lamentablemente, como sabemos por el CEOismo, casi siempre para mal.

parcialmente de acuerdo. Pero el problema no son los procesos como tales, sino su creación e implementación errónea. Es decir, si se hace bien y se eligen procesos correctos y adecuados a cada situación, es beneficioso porque aumentan la calidad, la fiabilidad y no se pierde tiempo innecesario en las mismas tareas una y otra vez. Un proceso no te tiene que decir hasta el momento en el que tienes que ir al baño, por ejemplo. Tiene que tener la flexibilidad que la situación requiera, y si se encuentra una que no está recogida, se modifica el proceso para que la contenga. Es algo vivo que evoluciona con el tiempo.

Es cierto que se aprovechan del proceso del nuevo modelo de negocio para eliminar todo aquello que no casa con sus ideas o que les molesta (cuanto más sumisos los empleados mejor, aunque esto a la larga es un error tremendo porque te cargas a los mejores trabajadores), pero es solo una excusa. La herramienta no es el problema, son las ideas y deseos de los que mandan.

[Marv]

Y el triunfo actual que vende la empresa posmoderna es básicamente ese, que da igual gestionar una siderurgia que un servicio de comidas, porque todo son procesos, procedimientos, normas, formatos, estandarizaciones....

O sea que el problema del fin del trabajo, sólo se agudiza con la automatización, pero ésta no es el desencadenante, sino el acelerador.

Recientemente he visto con claridad un ejemplo demasiado cercano, desafortunadamente. Una persona valiosísima por su conocimiento y valor profesional, descartada en un proceso de regulación de empleo porque no encajaba en el modelo de negocio que se quiere implantar. Y es que se trata de una persona con criterio, que es capaz de decir no a quien sea, cuando hay que decirlo. Pero sobre todo, porque estaba en contra del modelo (no muerto sino favelizador) en el que pretenden insistir.

Unas pocas tandas de despidos más, y la empresa será exactamente lo que los procedimientos han terminado por moldear. Una vez la tecnología esté depurada, sustituir a todo el personal por máquinas será casi trivial. Sólo arriba se mantiene una cantidad de poder real, lamentablemente, como sabemos por el CEOismo, casi siempre para mal.

parcialmente de acuerdo. Pero el problema no son los procesos como tales, sino su creación e implementación errónea. Es decir, si se hace bien y se eligen procesos correctos y adecuados a cada situación, es beneficioso porque aumentan la calidad, la fiabilidad y no se pierde tiempo innecesario en las mismas tareas una y otra vez. Un proceso no te tiene que decir hasta el momento en el que tienes que ir al baño, por ejemplo. Tiene que tener la flexibilidad que la situación requiera, y si se encuentra una que no está recogida, se modifica el proceso para que la contenga. Es algo vivo que evoluciona con el tiempo.

Es cierto que se aprovechan del proceso del nuevo modelo de negocio para eliminar todo aquello que no casa con sus ideas o que les molesta (cuanto más sumisos los empleados mejor, aunque esto a la larga es un error tremendo porque te cargas a los mejores trabajadores), pero es solo una excusa. La herramienta no es el problema, son las ideas y deseos de los que mandan.

Justamente, no critico la herramienta. Al contrario, lo que digo es que es inevitable, debido precisamente a que no es un problema, sino una mejora. El problema está, y lo repito por enésima vez, en que la distribución de la renta que esas mejoras productivas conllevan, se reparte en función de si tienes o no una ocupación remunerada, un empleo.

Es tan fácil que no comprendo porqué este asunto no está ni siquiera de refilón en los programas electorales de todo el mundo. Sólo puede haber dos motivos:

1) Hay quien prefiere la fe a la realidad. Prefieren pensar que, al igual que ocurrió con los luditas, que fueron el hazmerreir filosófico (a lo mejor sólo se equivocaron en el timing, como les pasó a muchos excelentes burbujistas), los que avisan ahora del problema están completamente equivocados, y de pronto, no se sabe muy bien por qué arte de magia, en un futuro no muy lejano podremos volver a emplear a los 7000 MILLONES de seres humanos que pueblan esta tierra.

2) Es un secreto a voces, y es tan terrible, da tanto miedo, como la burbuja -su pinchazo- daba en su momento. Nadie tiene nada que decir porque no se puede concebir una solución, ni una realidad alternativa a la RELIGIÓN DEL EMPLEO.

[muyuu]

http://www.nuevatribuna.es/articulo/culturas-hispanicas/epa-niega-recuperacion-continuan-destruyendo-horas-trabajo/20140725175704105425.html



El tema de la duración de las jornadas laborales es complejo.

Acortar las jornadas significa "acortar los topes legales de las jornadas"[*1] porque es perfectamente legal y posible establecer jornadas más cortas que lo máximo en los contratos. Si esto no ocurre es por muchíiisimos factores entre los que destacaría la dificultad de verificar las relaciones reales entre trabajador y empresario, la asimetría de estas relaciones, los incentivos a jornadas de clases muy determinadas, y la rigidez de la legislación (en parte por las dificultades que impone todo lo anterior).

Uno no puede coger una variable y aislarla de todo lo demás.

Mi estimación personal es que si el gobierno ahora mismo acortara las jornadas a 30 horas semanales, tal como están las cosas ahora mismo, el batacazo de la economía sería bastante doloroso. Mucha gente iría al mercado negro a complementar su jornada ya que en el modelo económico actual uno no puede desvincular horas trabajadas de ingresos, en términos generales, y los ingresos están generalmente al límite y sin margen por la situación de endeudamiento.

*1 con salvedades, con horas extras penalizadas/bonificadas, etc.

*1B conviene tener siempre presente que acortar las jornadas *máximas* implica una mayor coacción normativa, no menor. Porque trabajar 20 ó 30 horas a la semana ahora mismo es perfectamente legal y posible - que se den las circunstancias para que esos trabajos sean deseables, es otra historia.

[Lili Marleen]

no se puede reducir jornada y sueldo hasta que baje lo inmobiliario, y mucho

[muyuu]

Ese asunto es muchísimo más complejo de lo que me parece que das a entender, Mad Men.

Hablando de esclavos.

Un empresario que automatiza y robotiza su empresa al máximo es totalmente  dependiente y esclavo de  la empresa de robotica  y automatismos.

Es una situación de dependencia B2B como muchas otras que hay entre empresa-cliente y proveedor. El grado de dependencia depende en gran medida de la situación de competencia que exista entre los proveedores.

Puede haber una situación de dependencia total como existe con empresas que dependen de un proveedor monopolista u oligopolista, algo que ocurre mucho hoy en día en el modelo de franquicias piramidales que se puso tan de moda hace más o menos una década.

PS: ¿soy yo o me has respondido a un mensaje que no tenía nada que ver con lo que has expuesto? Mi mensaje era una respuesta a Mad Men respecto a la reducción de jornadas.

[muyuu]

Un artículo contrario al uso de robots para el cuidado de ancianos:

https://medium.com/message/failing-the-third-machine-age-1883e647ba74

Failing the Third Machine Age: When Robots Come for Grandma
Why “caregiver robots” are both inhuman and economically destructive

A cheerily written op-ed in the New York Times proclaims: “It’s time for robot caregivers”.

Referencia: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/the-future-of-robot-caregivers.html?_r=0

Why? We have many elderly people who need care, and children—especially those with disabilities—the piece argues, and not enough caregivers.

Call in the machines, she says:

“We do not have anywhere near enough human caregivers for the growing number of older Americans.”
This how to fail the third machine age.

This is not just an inhuman policy perspective, it’s economically destructive and rests on accepting current economic policies and realities as if they were immutable.

Let me explain. When people confidently announce that once robots come for our jobs, we’ll find something else to do like we always did, they are drawing from a very short history. The truth is, there’s only been one-and-a-three-quarters of a machine age—we are close to concluding the second one—we are moving into the third one.

And there is probably no fourth one.

Humans have only so many “irreplaceable” skills, and the idea that we’ll just keep outrunning the machines, skill-wise, is a folly.

First machine age came to replace human muscle power. Industrialization took over many tasks that were previously done by humans, especially those that required brute force, but required less of human intricate abilities. Producing basic yarn and cloth became automated, but not fine embroidery.

Fine and well, you say, who wants to dig ditches and pick vegetables in farms in back-breaking labor? Bring on mechanized agriculture and bulldozers!

However, as it played out, the people relieved from having to pick vegetables or dig ditches were not instead given the option to spend the time in libraries, reading up on their future jobs. They were declared redundant—and, crucially, more expensive and less docile than the machines. They were abandoned. There are worse things than being exploited, and being redundant and unable to make a living is one of them. In Europe, they swarmed into cities, which became a bleak, overcrowded nightmare of Dickensenia—oh, wait.

That misery is what Dickens was writing about. No metaphor.

But, look, you say! A few generations later, those people’s children moved into better jobs that weren't dependent on muscle power. They became teachers, clerks and lawyers. It’s true, but remember: there were a few waves of revolutions, couple of bloody wars, and a massive state intervention in response to widespread conflict that set up structures like minimum wage, weekend, labor protections, retirement and the rest…

This was not a peaceful, easy transition.

It was not “they came for our jobs, and we simply and quietly just moved to new ones.”

Then came the second machine age which automated mental labor. The machines came for the clerks and bookkeepers. Calculators, typewriters, printing press, diagnostic systems, automated planes… The jobs that children of manual laborers had sought refuge in were now under threat. A whole range of mental labor skills became automated, and this continues to this day.

In fact, automation usually follows this path: first, the job is broken down into pieces, and “lower-end” pieces are first outsourced to cheaper labor (China in the 20th century or rural laborers that fled to cities in 19th century), then automated and replaced with machines, then integrated into even more powerful machines.

And this automation always moves up the value chain. First, the machine does the arithmetic, but the human is still solving the integrals. Then Matlab comes for the integrals. Next, machines are doing mathematical proofs, and so up it goes the value chain, often until it hits a regulatory block, hence Silicon Valley’s constant desire to undermine regulation and licensing. Doctors are somewhat safe, for example, because of licensing requirements, but technology can find a way around that, too: witness the boom in cheaper radiologists located in India, reading US-based patients x-rays and MRIs; and “homework tutors” that tutor US-based kids remotely from China.

For example, it was nurses who used to take blood pressure. Then it became nurse’s assistants or physician’s assistant—much lower-paid jobs that require less training. Then came machines that perform a reasonable job taking your blood pressure, and the job became even less skilled. More and more, you only see your doctor for a few minutes so that her highly-paid time is dedicated to only that which she can do—is licensed to do—, and everything else is either automated or done by someone paid much less.

This arrangement has advantages but it is not without trade-offs. Your doctor will miss anything that requires a broader eye and reflection, because she’s spending very little time with you, and the information she has about you in front of her is low bandwidth—whatever the physician’s assistant checked on a chart. She may or may not notice your slightly pale skin if it’s not noted on the chart. Most of the time, that’s okay. Sometimes, though, patients spend months and years in this “low-bandwidth” medical care environment while nobody puts two-and-two-and-three-and-that-pale-skin and wait-didn’t-you-have-a-family-history-of-kidney-disease together.

Occasionally, loss of holistic awareness due to division of labor between humans and machines ends up in disasters. This is a worry for flying planes that are so automated that the pilots lose their ability react in manual mode. For example, Air France 447 crashed over the Atlantic, killing 228, because the pilot forgot how to react to a stall—put the nose down, not up. Something every pilot, and most anyone who’s watched a few movies, knows. But when the automated system went down, that pilot simply got confused, and stalled the plane till it crashed.

So, what’s the trade-off here? In general, we are safer (automation makes airline flying safer, in general) except in the long-tail: pilots are losing both tacit knowledge of flying and some of its mechanics. But in general, we, as humans, have less and less understanding of our machines—we are compartmentalized, looking at a tiny corner of a very complex system beyond our individual comprehension. Increasing numbers of our systems—from finance to electricity to cybersecurity to medical systems, are going in this direction. We are losing control and understanding which seems fine—until it’s not. We will certainly, and unfortunately, find out what this really means because sooner or later, one of these systems will fail in a way we don’t understand.

Let’s get back to what happens to humans when the machines come for our mental labor. But remember, my argument is made in the context of current political and economic realities. It’s based on a world in which humans are valued only so far as they are economically productive.

There nothing wrong with not having to calculate logarithm tables by hand, an onerous task undertaken by previous era mathematicians. I often wonder what it must have been like to have compiled one of those essential logarithm books, only to live to the age of machine calculators and see it all become for naught. An act of intense labor—and love, as it was an essential service—that made engineering and navigation (and also, incidentally was crucial to war efforts as is much technological developments) possible became redundant in a *poof*—taken over by a much more reliable, cheaper machine.

But, once again, machines don’t replace humans under conditions of prosperity for all humans—they do so under capitalist market conditions in which machines are chosen because they are cheaper and more docile than humans: they don’t object, talk back, organize, strike, slack. And people made redundant by machines aren't given the choice of spending their in leisure or learn the next set of skills that humans will take refuge in.

But wait, you say, there’s a next set of skills, surely?

That has been the historical argument: sure, robots may replace us, but humans have always found a place to go.

As I recounted, there are really only one and a maybe two thirds examples of such shifts, so far, so forgive me if I find such induction unconvincing. Manual labor (one), mental labor (still happening) and now mental skills are getting replaced, we are retreating, partially into emotional labor—i.e. care-giving.

And now machines, we are told, are coming for care-giving.

We are told that this is because there aren't enough humans?

Let’s just start with the obvious: Nonsense.

Of course we have enough human caregivers for the elderly. The country –and the world— is awash in underemployment and unemployment, and many people find caregiving to be a fulfilling and desirable profession. The only problem is that we –as a society— don’t want to pay caregivers well and don’t value their labor. Slightly redistributive policies that would slightly decrease the existing concentration of wealth to provide subsidies for childcare or elder care are, unfortunately, deemed untouchable goals by political parties beholden to a narrow, über-wealthy slice of society.

Remember: whenever you hear there’s a shortage of humans (or food), it is almost always a code for shortage of money. (Modern famines are also almost always a shortage of money, not food). Modern shortages of “labor” are almost always a shortage of willingness to pay well, or a desire to avoid hiring the “wrong” kind of people.

The author gives the example of Japan as forefront of this development, because, she says, of “workforce shortages.” It’s a good example because it really highlights what shortage of humans actually means: a deep hostility to the “wrong” kind of humans. Japan is notoriously anti-immigrant, and also hostile to women’s rights in terms of childcare and family-career balance. As a result, more and more Japanese women choose not to have children: hence the shortage of Japanese children to take care of parents. And the country refuses to address its demographic crisis by any easing of immigration policies—hundreds of thousands ethnic Koreans who have been in Japan through multiple generations, for example, do not have Japanese citizenship and can only assimilate if they more or less give up their Korean identity.

So, it’s not a shortage of caregivers, it’s a shortage of caring.

Next, consider that emotional labor is all that’s left to escape to as humans workers after manual and mental labor have been already been mostly taken over by machines.

(Creative labor is sometimes cited as another alternative but I am discounting this since it is already discounted—it is very difficult, already, to make a living through creative labor, and it’s getting harder and not easier. But that’s another post).

US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the following jobs as the ones with the largest growth in the next decade: Personal care aides, registered nurses, retail salespersons, home health aides, fast-food, nursing assistants, secretaries, customer service representatives, janitors…

It’s those face-to-face professions, ones in which being in contact with another human being are important, that are growing in numbers—almost every other profession is shrinking, numerically.

No there won’t be a shortage of engineers and programmers either—engineers and programmers, better than anyone, should know that machine intelligence is coming for them fairly soon, and will move up the value chain pretty quickly. Also, much of this “shortage”, too, is about controlling workers and not paying them—note how Silicon Valley colluded to not pay its engineers too much, even as the companies in question had hoarded billions in cash. In a true shortage under market conditions, companies would pay more to that which was scarce. Instead, wages are stagnant in almost all professions, including technical ones.

Many of these jobs BLS says will grow, however, are only there for the grace-of-the-generation that still wants to see a cashiers while checking out—and besides, they are low-paid jobs. Automation plus natural language processing by machines is going to obliterate through those jobs in the next decade or two. (Is anyone ready for the even worse labor crisis that will ensue?) Machines will take your order at the fast-food joint, they will check out your groceries without having to scan them, it will become even harder to get a human on the customer service line.

What’s left as jobs is those transactions in which the presence of the human is something more than a smiling face that takes your order and enters into another machine—the cashier and the travel agent that has now been replaced by us, in the “self-serve” economy.

What’s left is deep emotional labor: taking care of each other.

And emotional labor is already greatly devalued: notice how most of it is so little paid: health-aides and pre-school teachers are among the lowest paid jobs even though the the work is difficult and requires significant skill and emotional labor. It’s also crucial work: economists estimate a good kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year, when measured as adult outcomes of those children she teaches well. (And yes, devalued emotional labor is mostly a female job around the world—and the gendered nature of this reality is a whole other post).

And the argument, now is that we should turn care over to machines as well, because, there is a “shortage of humans”.

What are seven billion people supposed to do? Scour Task Rabbit hoping that the few percent who will have money to purchase services have some desires that still require a human?

Turning emotional labor to machines isn't just economically destructive; it’s the very description of inhuman.

In my view, warehousing elderly and children—especially children with disabilities—in rooms with machines that keep them busy, when large numbers of humans beings around the world are desperate for jobs that pay a living wage is worse than the Dickensian nightmares of mechanical industrialization, it’s worse than the cold, alienated workplaces depicted by Kafka.

It’s an abdication of a desire to remain human, to be connected to each other through care, and to take care of each other.

The author says we will be fine with machines because look how much we stare into our phones! What a misunderstanding! That is the opposite of what most are doing on the phone: as I’ve long argued, it’s a desperate desire to remain connected to each other, in a world that makes this hard through suburbs, long work-hours and other physical barriers. Social apps –the ones we use talk to each other— are the biggest slice of almost everyone’s usage of technology. (It’s also why people are fleeing into “walkable” downtowns, away from the cold, humongous malls that can only be reached through cars.)

“Oh look, people are on their phones therefore it’s okay to let machines to take care of them” is a major fallacy, and a major misunderstanding of modern technology use.

So where to go? Here’s where not to go. Expecting all care work to be unpaid and done voluntarily (almost solely by women) is not the path forward.

I don’t mourn if Deep Blue beats Kasparov. Chess is a fine game, but it’s a pretty rigid game, invented by us as a game exactly because it doesn't play to our strengths—that’s why it’s a challenge and a game worth playing. If we were naturally good at it, there’d be no point to it as a game. I don’t mourn not having to dig ditches—though abandoning our flesh as if it were irrelevant is turning out not to be a good idea. Many of us hop on exercise machines that go nowhere to counter our coerced sedentary lifestyle, a development surely bemusing to our ditch-digging ancestors.

But surely we should mourn if we put our elderly and our children in “care” of metal objects animated by software because we, the richest society globally the world has ever seen, with so much abundance of wealth that there are persistent asset bubbles—indicating piles of wealth looking for something anything to invest in—as well as hundreds of millions, if not billions, of under and unemployed people around the world looking for a way to make a living in a meaningful way, cannot bring together the political will to remain human through taking care of each other, and making a decent living doing so.

[spainfull]

Justamente, no critico la herramienta. Al contrario, lo que digo es que es inevitable, debido precisamente a que no es un problema, sino una mejora. El problema está, y lo repito por enésima vez, en que la distribución de la renta que esas mejoras productivas conllevan, se reparte en función de si tienes o no una ocupación remunerada, un empleo.

Es tan fácil que no comprendo porqué este asunto no está ni siquiera de refilón en los programas electorales de todo el mundo. Sólo puede haber dos motivos:

1) Hay quien prefiere la fe a la realidad. Prefieren pensar que, al igual que ocurrió con los luditas, que fueron el hazmerreir filosófico (a lo mejor sólo se equivocaron en el timing, como les pasó a muchos excelentes burbujistas), los que avisan ahora del problema están completamente equivocados, y de pronto, no se sabe muy bien por qué arte de magia, en un futuro no muy lejano podremos volver a emplear a los 7000 MILLONES de seres humanos que pueblan esta tierra.

2) Es un secreto a voces, y es tan terrible, da tanto miedo, como la burbuja -su pinchazo- daba en su momento. Nadie tiene nada que decir porque no se puede concebir una solución, ni una realidad alternativa a la RELIGIÓN DEL EMPLEO.

entonces en cuanto a los procesos sí estamos de acuerdo . Lo único que para oler los beneficios derivados de todo esto lamentablemente ni con tener un trabajo te llega. Porque estos beneficios en las empresas en su mayor parte llegan a los de arriba, así que los beneficiados no son muchos, y si sumamos la automatización que acompaña a esos procesos, unos cuantos empleados van a la calle.

No entra en los programas electorales porque no creo que sepan ni remotamente cómo solucionarlo ni siquiera cómo plantearlo para que todo el mundo se les eche encima. Es un cambio de mentalidad gigantesco, casi tanto como el del pisito, así que llevará mucho tiempo (o una destrucción masiva y explosiva de puestos de trabajo).

[muyuu]

Hojas biosintéticas: http://www.dezeen.com/2014/07/25/movie-silk-leaf-first-man-made-synthetic-biological-leaf-space-travel/

[Маркс]

 

ROBOTISATION : Pourquoi aller gueuler et gesticuler vous-même dans un stade si une machine peut le faire à votre place ?

http://youtu.be/BBiRLYu8Wjo

[Datum]

Ese asunto es muchísimo más complejo de lo que me parece que das a entender, Mad Men.

Hablando de esclavos.

Un empresario que automatiza y robotiza su empresa al máximo es totalmente  dependiente y esclavo de  la empresa de robotica  y automatismos.

Es una situación de dependencia B2B como muchas otras que hay entre empresa-cliente y proveedor. El grado de dependencia depende en gran medida de la situación de competencia que exista entre los proveedores.

Puede haber una situación de dependencia total como existe con empresas que dependen de un proveedor monopolista u oligopolista, algo que ocurre mucho hoy en día en el modelo de franquicias piramidales que se puso tan de moda hace más o menos una década.

PS: ¿soy yo o me has respondido a un mensaje que no tenía nada que ver con lo que has expuesto? Mi mensaje era una respuesta a Mad Men respecto a la reducción de jornadas.

Conozco empresas medianas que funcionan con sistemas tipo Theos por miedo al espionaje industrial.

Supongo que los empresarios calcularán el riesgo de robotizar y automatizar. Personalmente pienso que una empresa muy robotizada ,crea un socio  que puede ser peligroso.

[muyuu]

http://qz.com/237833/automation-recessions-a-radical-shift-in-the-shape-of-americas-jobs-market/

Automation + recessions = a radical shift in the shape of America’s jobs market

More machines + worse economy = fewer people. Reuters/Lori Shepler

Over the past 30 years there’s been a shift and polarization of the American workforce. There have been fewer and fewer people employed in middle-wage occupations, mostly because “routine occupations,” jobs that can be performed by following a well-defined set of instructions, have been declining for years, and plummeted after the most recent recession.

n a recent working paper, researchers from the University of British Columbia, Duke, and the Federal Reserve suggest they’re unlikely to return.

Ref: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20307

In the chart below from their paper, ENRC refers to people “employed in non-routine cognitive fields” (such as the creative professions or finance), ERC refers to routine cognitive fields (like data entry or administrative work), ERM is routine manual employment (e.g., an assembly line), and ENRM is non-routine manual employment, which includes many service professions.

As you can see, both types of routine employment have been declining steeply as a percentage of American jobs, while non-routine work grows:

The research paper, based on data from the Current Population Survey (the US’s main source of labor statistics) from 1976 to 2012, paints a fascinating picture of how this happened. The basics are easy to surmise. As technology has accelerated rapidly, companies have been laying people off during recessions, and turning to cheaper, automated solutions, requiring fewer, more flexible workers. When recessions end, they’re reluctant to go back.

About two-thirds of the decline in routine work is explained by increases in the number of people who lost these jobs, and by the rising fraction of unemployed people unable to get them. Changing demographics, the decline of unions, and outsourcing jobs to cheaper firms abroad—the kinds of things often blamed for job losses—explain only a small portion of the shift, according to the research.

Not all workers made it through this transition equally. According to the paper, women, and particularly educated women, were more likely to make the leap to non-routine work. But men, particularly non-college graduates, are more likely to be among those who lost a routine job, dropped out of the labor force, and never made it back.

The result has been fewer middle-class jobs for the less-educated. And as better computing makes it possible to automate a greater variety of routine cognitive work, more people who might once have been confident of a long-term middle-class career might find themselves out of luck. The winners are those who are good with people and can work in the service economy, or those whose skills can be enhanced, rather than replaced, by computers.

[muyuu]

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/how-monsieur-shook-up-disrupt-sf-with-its-bartending-robot/

Video insáid.

Crowdfunding original: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/monsieur/monsieur-the-artificially-intelligent-robotic-bart/posts

[muyuu]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28551069

UK to allow driverless cars on public roads in January

The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year.

It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time.

In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines.

The Department for Transport had originally pledged to let self-driving cars be trialled on public roads by the end of 2013.

Business Secretary Vince Cable revealed the details of the new plan at a research facility belonging to Mira, an automotive engineering firm based in the Midlands.

"Today's announcement will see driverless cars take to our streets in less than six months, putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our economy and society," he said.

UK engineers, including a group at the University of Oxford, have been experimenting with driverless cars. But, concerns about legal and insurance issues have so far restricted the machines to private roads.

Other countries have, however, been swifter to provide access to public routes.

The US States of California, Nevada and Florida have all approved tests of the vehicles. In California alone, Google's driverless car has done more than 300,000 miles on the open road.

In 2013, Nissan carried out Japan's first public road test of an autonomous vehicle on a highway.

And in Europe, the Swedish city of Gothenburg has given Volvo permission to test 100 driverless cars - although that trial is not scheduled to occur until 2017.

Competition cash
UK cities wanting to host one of the trials have until the start of October to declare their interest.

The tests are then intended to run for between 18 to 36 months.

A £10m fund has been created to cover their costs, with the sum to be divided between the three winners.

Meanwhile, civil servants have been given until the end of this year to publish a review of road regulations.

This will cover the need for self-drive vehicles to comply with safety and traffic laws, and involve changes to the Highway Code, which applies to England, Scotland and Wales.

Two area will be examined by the review: how the rules should apply to vehicles in which the driver can take back control at short notice, and how they should apply to vehicles in which there is no driver.


How do driverless cars work?

he label "driverless vehicle" actually covers a lot of different premises.

Indeed, the cruise control, automatic braking, anti-lane drift and self-parking functions already built into many vehicles offer a certain degree of autonomy.

But the term is generally used to refer to vehicles that take charge of steering, accelerating, indicating and braking during most if not all of a journey between two points, much in the same way aeroplanes can be set to autopilot.

Unlike the skies, however, the roads are much more crowded, and a range of technologies are being developed to tackle the problem.

One of the leading innovations is Lidar (light detection and ranging), a system that measures how lasers bounce off reflective surfaces to capture capture information about millions of small points surrounding the vehicle every second. The technology is already used to create the online maps used by Google and Nokia.

Another complimentary technique is "computer vision" - the use of software to make sense of 360-degree images captured by cameras attached to the vehicle, which can warn of pedestrians, cyclists, roadworks and other objects that might be in the vehicle's path.

Part of the challenge for manufacturers will be how to hide the many sensors involved
Autonomous vehicles can also make use of global-positioning system (GPS) location data from satellites; radar; ultrasonic sensors to detect objects close to the car; and further sensors to accurately measure the vehicle's orientation and the rotation of its wheels, to help it understand its exact location.

The debate now is whether to allow cars, like the prototype unveiled by Google in May, to abandon controls including a steering wheel and pedals and rely on the vehicle's computer.

Or whether, instead, to allow the machine to drive, but insist a passenger be ready to wrest back control at a moment's notice.

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International rivals
In May, Google unveiled plans to manufacture 100 self-driving vehicles.

The search-giant exhibited a prototype which has no steering wheel or pedals - just a stop-go button.

Google has also put its autonomous driving technology in cars built by other companies, including Toyota, Audi and Lexus.

Other major manufacturers, including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and General Motors, are developing their own models.

Most recently, the Chinese search engine Baidu also declared an interest, saying its research labs were at an "early stage of development" on a driverless car project.

But concerns about the safety of driverless cars have been raised by politicians in the US and elsewhere.

Earlier this month, the FBI warned that driverless cars could be used as lethal weapons, predicting that the vehicles "will have a high impact on transforming what both law enforcement and its adversaries can operationally do with a car".

[visillófilas pepitófagas]

Earlier this month, the FBI warned that driverless cars could be used as lethal weapons

¿Puede alguien informar al FBI que los coches con conductor humano pueden usarse (y ya han sido usados) como armas letales?

[Datum]

Earlier this month, the FBI warned that driverless cars could be used as lethal weapons

¿Puede alguien informar al FBI que los coches con conductor humano pueden usarse (y ya han sido usados) como armas letales?

Los rebeldes en Siria, hace tiempo que usan camiones y coches bomba sin conductor.

LiveLeak.com - Syria: rebels’ arsenal includes remote-controlled car bombs	Small | Large

Entre sus inventos poseen rifles dirigidos a distancia, catapultas y tirachinas gigantes, y uno muy curioso un cañón que lanza bombonas de butano, que suena a chiste, pero,, si entra por la pared derrumba una planta entera de un edificio.