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Learn to love the real job killerTrade protectionism will not stop the advance of automation
The rise of angry native blue-collar (or formerly blue-collar) workers in the west has spelt political upheaval, but it also prompts an economic debate. Which is to blame for the loss in factory jobs across industrial economies? Is it primarily globalisation? Or is it largely automation and technology that have allowed manufacturers to churn out ever more goods with ever fewer workers? Regular readers will know that Free Lunch puts greater stock in the technology explanation — witness the fact that while western factories have been shedding workers, they have continued to churn out ever more physical output. The answer matters. Not just in looking back, to know where to point the finger of blame for the strength of anti-globalist populist movements. Not just for the present, in formulating policies that can improve matters for those who were left behind by the economic growth of the pre-crisis decades. It also matters for predicting what our economies have in store for the coming years. And paying attention to automation lends itself more easily than globalisation to the parlour game of guessing who will get burnt next.Over Christmas, FT business reporters took a hard look at the sectors they cover and came up with likely next candidates for technological disruption. Their findings range from the obvious to the unexpected. Not just travel agents and financial advisers, but also small component producers and distributors (because of 3D printing) and lots of professions working with cars — insurers, car rental and even mechanics (because electric cars have fewer moving parts) — stand an increasing risk of being put out of a job.If that risk transpires, it will come on top of the routine process of automation we are increasingly becoming accustomed to. Just a few examples from recent press reports include Amazon’s expanding robot workforce, the threat to truck drivers from autonomous vehicles, and plans to fully automate iPhone assembly plants in China.What this means is that anti-globalist voters may be in for a cold shower. More and more are likely to realise that, as Claire Miller puts it at the Upshot, “the long-term jobs killer is not China. It’s automation.” What will they think of those who sold them isolationist snake oil then?Admittedly, technology and automation are not entirely separable from economic globalisation. As Jared Bernstein rightly points out, technological change makes globalisation possible, and the existence of cross-border trade and financial networks changes the incentives for which technologies it makes most sense to develop or implement.Still, one shouldn’t make too much of this interdependence. Many, probably most, technological advances (including but ranging far beyond robotics and automation) increase productivity and hence reduce the demand for certain types of workers for a given rate of production. This effect occurs independently of how tightly the industry is linked across border — and even if it is entirely domestic. Especially in larger economies, which on average are more closed and incorporate more numerous and more complete supply chains within their borders, the effect of automation and other productivity-enhancing technology will be direct and unrelated to globalisation.What this means is that the “factory-free economy”, in the words of Lionel Fontagné and Ann Harrison’s overview of a new collection of research on deindustrialisation, is a pretty good, if simplified, picture of what the future is set to bring everywhere. We will not avoid it, and nor should we: greater labour productivity is the only way to sustainable and broad increases in living standards. Without it, making anyone better off is a zero-sum game against everyone else. But if we neither can, nor should, avoid the (approximately) factory-free future, we are obliged to manage it.In part this will mean taking care of those workers no longer needed in factories whose rising labour productivity reduces their labour demand. That can involve putting in place the best conditions for the creation of good jobs in services, and ease workers’ way into such sectors. It will also mean egalitarian income redistribution; one way or the other, unconditional basic income is too good a policy to be avoided forever.But less obviously, it may, in part, involve finding new value in manual work of lower productivity, at least as productivity is traditionally understood in a quantitative sense. The Wall Street Journal documents the soaring number of one-person manufacturing companies — or what one would once have called independent craftspeople. In wealthy societies, artisans have growing opportunities to make a living from the time-consuming opposite of mass manufacturing — but they also face challenges to make this a reality, as the FT’s Jonathan Foyle reports. Even Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, waxed lyrical about “artisanal globalisation” in a recent speech.It is only a beginning — but it is one that shows it’s possible to envisage harmonious pictures of the economic future, not just dystopian ones.
The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle ClassIN FEBRUARY 1975, a group of geneticists gathered in a tiny town on the central coast of California to decide if their work would bring about the end of the world. These researchers were just beginning to explore the science of genetic engineering, manipulating DNA to create organisms that didn’t exist in nature, and they were unsure how these techniques would affect the health of the planet and its people. So, they descended on a coastal retreat called Asilomar, a name that became synonymous with the guidelines they laid down at this meeting—a strict ethical framework meant to ensure that biotechnology didn’t unleash the apocalypse.Forty-two years on, another group of scientists gathered at Asilomar to consider a similar problem. But this time, the threat wasn’t biological. It was digital. In January, the world’s top artificial intelligence researchers walked down the same beachside paths as they discussed their rapidly accelerating field and the role it will play in the fate of humanity. It was a private conference—the enormity of the subject deserves some privacy—but in recent days, organizers released several videos from the conference talks, and some participants have been willing to discuss their experience, shedding some light on the way AI researchers view the threat of their own field.Yes, they discussed the possibility of a superintelligence that could somehow escape human control, and at the end of the month, the conference organizers unveiled a set of guidelines, signed by attendees and other AI luminaries, that aim to prevent this possible dystopia. But the researchers at Asilomar were also concerned with more immediate matters: the effect of AI on the economy.“One of the reasons I don’t like the discussions about superintelligence is that they’re a distraction from what’s real,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, who attended the conference. “As the poet said, have fewer imaginary problems and more real ones.”At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well. At Asilomar, they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.Rage Against the MachinesIn the US, the number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 and has steadily decreased ever since. At the same time, manufacturing has steadily increased, with the US now producing more goods than any other country but China. Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job. And all this before the coming wave of AI upends so many other sectors of the economy. “I am less concerned with Terminator scenarios,” MIT economist Andrew McAfee said on the first day at Asilomar. “If current trends continue, people are going to rise up well before the machines do.”McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. Now, most new jobs are either at the very low end of the pay scale or the very high end. He also argued that these trends are reversible, that improved education and a greater emphasis on entrepreneurship and research can help feed new engines of growth, that economies have overcome the rise of new technologies before. But after his talk, in the hallways at Asilomar, so many of the researchers warned him that the coming revolution in AI would eliminate far more jobs far more quickly than he expected.Indeed, the rise of driverless cars and trucks is just a start. New AI techniques are poised to reinvent everything from manufacturing to healthcare to Wall Street. In other words, it’s not just blue-collar jobs that AI endangers. “Several of the rock stars in this field came up to me and said: ‘I think you’re low-balling this one. I think you are underestimating the rate of change,'” McAfee says.That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” Etzioni says.Also on researchers’ minds was regulation—of AI itself. Some fear that after squeezing immigration—which would put a brake on the kind of entrepreneurship McAfee calls for—the White House will move to bottle up automation and artificial intelligence. That would be bad news for AI researchers, but also for the economy. If the AI transformation slows in the US, many suspect, it will only accelerate in other parts of the world, putting American jobs at even greater risk due to global competition.In the end, no one left Asilomar with a sure way of preventing economic upheaval. “Anyone making confident predictions about anything having to do with the future of artificial intelligence is either kidding you or kidding themselves,” McAfee says.That said, these researchers say they are intent on finding the answer. “People work through the concerns in different ways. But I haven’t met an AI researcher who doesn’t care,” Etzioni says. “People are mindful.” But they feel certain that preventing the rise of AI is not the answer. It’s also not really possible—a bit like bringing those old manufacturing jobs back.
The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.
La automatización no es nada nuevo, a mi me gustaría saber dónde está esa revolución tecnológica en robótica e IA que va a convertir al ser humano en obsoleto (por costes) a tan corto plazo.De momento en el único sitio dónde la encuentro es en el discurso de bocachanclas como el escritor del artículo y en el de políticos que reclaman más dinero público para paliar un problema que si no es realmente inventado (la automatización del trabajo tedioso es una realidad gracias a Zeus) si carece de la inminencia que predican, puesto que es un proceso paulatino que lleva produciendose muchos años.Al final es siempre lo mismo, políticos creando (o inventando) problemas para luego pedir o justificar mayor gasto para resolverlos.Y luego están sus voceros a sueldo...
In the shadows of the Alps, Swiss companies are confronting a new reality: They won’t be adding manufacturing jobs in the country anytime soon -- not for humans, anyway.Faced with an unsinkable franc and among the highest average annual wages in the world, Swiss companies looking to expand face a simple choice: add robots or leave. Fragrance-maker Firmenich International SA chose robots, spending $60 million in the last three years automating a factory outside Geneva to increase capacity by a third with no added staff. In contrast, pump maker Sulzer AG, is closing a facility outside Winterthur, in the canton of Zurich, to move production elsewhere in Europe, which will cost Switzerland 90 jobs.
“Automation is imperative if we want to remain competitive,” Gilbert Ghostine, chief executive officer of Firmenich -- developer of perfumes for designers like Hugo Boss and Issey Miyake -- said in an interview. “We need to keep on reinventing ourselves.”As populist leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump ratchet up pressure to keep manufacturing at home, Switzerland’s experience shows that it doesn’t necessarily mean more jobs. At the end of March 2016, more than a year after the Swiss National Bank returned to a free float against the euro, Switzerland’s machine, electric and metal sector registered 3 percent fewer full- and part-time workers than a year earlier, according to industry lobby Swissmem.Robots RuleAlthough Switzerland -- where the franc jumped as much as 41 percent on a single day after the SNB decision and the average annual wage is more than $58,000 -- may be an extreme example, companies in much of the developed world face similar pressures to boost productivity to remain competitive. Robots have even made it to the heart of a French presidential candidate’s economic plan.
Since 2010, global industrial robot sales have risen 16 percent a year on average, according to the latest figures from the International Federation of Robotics. South Korea has the most as a proportion of overall manufacturing jobs while Germany and Sweden are the leaders in Europe, ahead of the U.S. Switzerland ranks 17th.Take Swiss candy maker Ricola AG, for example. The company produces some 5.5 billion herbal bonbons each year, a volume-driven business that’s only able to make profits while manufacturing in Switzerland because of its high levels of automation, according to Chief Financial Officer Andreas Lindner.“We ask ourselves ‘can we avoid this process altogether?’ When not, we ask ‘can we fully automate it?’ This is what we try to do,” Lindner told a conference in Zurich in November. “We are really trying to automate not just our production sites but also our back office.”Disappearing JobsThat’s going to happen more and more, Suzanne Fortier, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University in Montreal, said during a briefing at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.“We are going to see a large number of jobs disappearing or changing significantly,” she said. “Obviously, that’s lower skill jobs initially, but with the increased sensory capacity of many of the algorithms right now, we are going to see even higher-skilled jobs in the future disappearing.”Almost half of all employees in Switzerland’s manufacturing industry are in occupations with a high likelihood of automation, Deloitte said in a 2016 survey. The previous year, a Deloitte/BAKBASEL survey of 400 Swiss machine-building companies found 70 percent of respondents had increased automation in response to the strong franc. Others have simply moved production to cheaper locations abroad.
Companies like Sulzer felt they had little choice.“We had to shift outside of Switzerland production that’s just not cost competitive anymore,” CFO Thomas Dittrich said in October. Although the company has automated production in Switzerland for the dental and industrial adhesives markets, products requiring a lot of manual work will be filled by the company in China, he said.Firmenich’s Swiss rival Givaudan SA had already shifted about a third of its home-market flavor production to Hungary before the 2015 currency upheaval. Last month it said a greater proportion of its ingredients were made in Mexico and China in 2016. The Vernier, Switzerland-based company is also spending $55 million on a new flavors factory in India.Robotic ScentsFirmenich stayed put, but its new installation is 90 percent automated. The company’s decision to keep investing in the canton of Geneva stems in part from its strong connections with local banks and universities developed over its 122-year history.“The automated plant helped us be more flexible and respond to increased demand, while keeping prices under control,” Anthony Schofield, who oversees the new Firmenich factory, said as barrels of fragrances that will fill perfume bottles including Giorgio Armani’s “Acqua di Gio” and “Flower” by Kenzo rolled along the production line.On the factory floor, 1,400 ingredients including scents like vanilla, sandalwood and jasmine are transported, measured and mixed via a machine-operated pipe system spanning 60 kilometers (37 miles). Self-driving vehicles ferry barrels around, and product-filled containers are sorted, labeled, wrapped and shipped with little human intervention. The plant’s 200 workers pace the aisles, program robotic arms and oversee processes such as quality control.The installation is now the largest of the family-owned company’s 28 production sites worldwide and churns out a quarter of its total fragrance output, or 35,000 tons a year. “It’s much better now,” said Alexandre Esteves, a 17-year company veteran who leads a team at the factory. “There’s less maintenance needed, people don’t have to carry heavy things around as much. We produce more.”
https://www.technologyreview.es/informatica/46970/la-inteligencia-artificial-no-destruira-a-la/
Perdona Muyuu, pero te lo discuto Opino que no está habiendo ningún salto cualitativo en AI.El único salto cualitativo ha sido el perfeccionamiento de las herramientas de marketing disponibles, y especialmente el número de receptores de mensaje gracias a internet.Atento a lo que voy a decir: mil millones de personas (=internet) creyendo que hay avances en Inteligencia Artificial NO SIGNIFICA QUE HAYA AVANCES EN IA.
Por ejemplo ahora ya caben pocas dudas de que las máquinas conduzcan, reconozcan caras, piloten, clasifiquen objetos, o monten instrumentos mucho mejor que las personas.
La capacidad de realizar tareas para las que hace o hacía falta un ser humano, es lo que está mejorando a pasos agigantados.