AI Replaces Staff

It starts.  Selectively expected

Suumit Shah, founder of an e-commerce website, said that his firm had laid off 90% of its support staff.

An Indian CEO is being criticised after he said that his firm had replaced 90% of its support staff with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Suumit Shah, founder of Dukaan, said on Twitter that the chatbot had drastically improved first response and resolution time of customers' queries, The tweet sparked outrage online.

It comes at a time when there has been a lot of conversation and apprehension about AI taking away people's jobs, specially in the services industry.

In a series of tweets, which have over one million views, Mr Shah wrote about his firm's decision to use a chatbot. He said that though laying off staff had been a "tough" decision, it was "necessary".. 

Fruit Picking Robotics

 Fruit-Picking Robot Eve Ready to Harvest Apples Commercially, as Shortage of Workers Persists

By ABC News (Australia), May 25, 2023

Eve, the fruit-picking robot.

Australian startup Ripe Robotics spent four years developing its autonomous fruit-picking robot Eve, which is processing apples in Victoria-based orchards owned by agribusiness Ardmona amid a labor shortage.

Ripe Robotics' Hunter Jay said Eve picks several hundred apples at a time, using cameras on its arms to "look at the tree, measure the size and color of the fruit, and if it's ready to be picked. Then the arm will reach in with a soft suction cup, use air to suck the fruit in and twist it off a tree, and then place it on the conveyor belt."

Engineers trained the robot to identify apples using a massive neural network composed of thousands of images.

From ABC News (Australia)    

View Full Article    

Tech Workers Long Got What they Wanted?

How true?

Tech Workers Long Got What They Wanted. That's Over

The Wall Street Journal, By Katherine Bindley, July 15, 2022

Technology workers who once could name their salaries and expect to be allowed to work from anywhere increasingly are encountering resistance from both startups and tech giants. Amid fears of a recession, more employers are slowing their hiring, rethinking remote jobs, and even rescinding some job offers. Companies like Microsoft, Netflix, and Twitter recently reported layoffs, and Google announced plans to pull back on hiring for the remainder of the year. Recruiters, however, say highly skilled workers in areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence still have an advantage. Further, CompTIA reported more than a half-million tech jobs were posted in June, marking a 62% gain over the same time a year ago. ... ' 

On the Resilience of Gig Workers in China

I taught Chinese workers at Columbia, and was impressed.  Another example?

China's Gig Workers Are Challenging Their Algorithmic Bosses   By Wired

Huang Hui, a Ph.D. candidate at King's College in London who spent six months as a gig worker in Shanghai, is among a cohort of researchers studying how algorithms control gig workers' lives. China's platform economy has engulfed almost a quarter of the country's labor force, with an estimated 200 million people working in "flexible" employment.

Companies have leveraged algorithms to force couriers to work faster and more efficiently, squeezing them with tighter delivery times. Some gig workers are banding together to turn the data-driven approach to performance assessment against their bosses. Many more are forming unofficial unions with the help of social media platforms such as WeChat and Douyin, China's version of TikTok.

Although China bans independent unions and labor strikes, that hasn't stopped gig workers from organizing unofficially. Many food delivery riders find opportunities to band together thanks to other types of algorithms — those that help them find like-minded people on Douyin, where gig workers share experiences and advice.

Whole Article

Getting Remote Workers Back to the Office

Brought to my attention.

How to Get Remote Workers to Want to Return to the Office

People want to work from home because offices have become miserable places to work.

BY GEOFFREY JAMES, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC.COM

@SALES_SOURCE

MGM Trains with VR

 Have seen similar things tried with VR in Retail environments a decade ago without much success.  Is it enough to just be innovation in a clever way and fun way?  Or is it just a way to attract potential employees?

ACM TECHNEWS

Desperate for Workers, MGM Resorts Lets Applicants Role Play With VR

By Gizmodo, December 30, 2021

MGM Resorts will use VR to simulating checking guests into hotels as part of the hiring process.

MGM Resorts will adopt virtual reality headsets that allow job applicants to experience various customer-service roles before making a decision. The headsets will enable applicants to simulate various front-of-house roles, including operating casino games and checking in hotel guests.

The company also is considering using immersive technology at career fairs, and has partnered with enterprise VR training firm Strivr to create a VR employee training module.

The module will cover "difficult guest interactions, said MGM Resorts' chief human resources officer Laura Lee. "It can be very difficult just to verbally explain the types of positions or show a video," and VR lets applicants "throw a headset on and really experience the job," Lee said.

From Gizmodo

Robots as Essential Workers

Still have not seen many robots about, will that change?

How Robots Became Essential Workers in the COVID-19 Response

Autonomous machines proved their worth in hospitals, offices, and on city streets

By Erico Guizzo and Randi Klett

A robot, developed by Asimov Robotics to spread awareness about the coronavirus, holds a tray with face masks and sanitizer.

As the coronavirus emergency exploded into a full-blown pandemic in early 2020, forcing countless businesses to shutter, robot-making companies found themselves in an unusual situation: Many saw a surge in orders. Robots don’t need masks, can be easily disinfected, and, of course, they don’t get sick.

An army of automatons has since been deployed all over the world to help with the crisis: They are monitoring patients, sanitizing hospitals, making deliveries, and helping frontline medical workers reduce their exposure to the virus. Not all robots operate autonomously—many, in fact, require direct human supervision, and most are limited to simple, repetitive tasks. But robot makers say the experience they’ve gained during this trial-by-fire deployment will make their future machines smarter and more capable. These photos illustrate how robots are helping us fight this pandemic—and how they might be able to assist with the next one.  .... ' 

It will be About the Cobot

Not a new term: Cobot: Collaborative Robot. but fairly rarely used recently.  Does not have to mean a physical robot, but can also include collaborative AI systems tools.  Its how the architecture of collaboration is set up, how data and goals are shared.  How process is followed.  General AI is still far away, but many real domains will be influenced quickly.

Why human-AI collaboration will dominate the future of work  in Techrepublic
At the 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Summit, a panel of AI experts discussed how machine learning will impact the workforce.

We are in the midst of an "AI awakening," as artificial intelligence technologies can now match or surpass humans in fundamental skills like image recognition, Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, said in a panel discussion session at the 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—the point when machines will be able to perform all intellectual tasks that humans can—is still a long way off, Brynjolfsson said. But machine learning has reached superhuman capabilities in certain areas, and can offer enterprises a number of benefits.

In two papers recently published in Science and the American Economics Association, Brynjolfsson and colleagues developed a rubric of 23 questions to identify tasks that AI is now adept at, and applied those to the O*NET database of 964 occupations in the US.

Most jobs involve 20 to 30 distinct tasks, the research found. In most cases, machine learning could perform some tasks better than humans in a given occupation. However, it could never perform all tasks needed for the job better than its human counterpart. ... 

"Most jobs will be partly affected by machine learning, but there will also be things humans need to do," Brynjolfsson said in the session. Instead, the future will likely involve partnerships between humans and machines (known as collaborative robots, or co-bots) to more efficiently get work done. "Rarely will we completely wipe out entire job categories," he added.

Only 5% of workers will be displaced by AI, said panel participant Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of MIT's Work of the Future Task Force, citing McKinsey research.

"The introduction of the co-bot is allowing us to replace routine work and allow workers to do something else," Reynolds said. "You do have to deal with displacement, but it is a small percentage of the growth we see." This echoes Gartner research, which predicted that AI will eliminate 1.8 million jobs by 2020, but will create 2.3 million in that same timeframe.  .... "

Visions of the Future of Work

Reviewing:

The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology
We’re imagining scenarios for the future of work

Findings of Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology
What do a hundred American leaders find when they compare different possibilities for the effect of technology on work’s future?

Full text of Shift Commission findings on the future of work in the U.S.
For those who prefer to read the whole thing in all its detail, we’re including it here 
 (34 page report)

Via O'Reilly:

Four visions of the future of work

New America and Bloomberg have come together to convene Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology, with the goal of analyzing theories of the future of work. In a new report drawn from discussions with leaders in technology, business, policy, and culture as well as those whose livelihoods are already being affected by automation, the commission outlines four possible future economies: some with more work and some with less, some focused on task-based work and some oriented around traditional jobs.  ....  Fulltext PDF.