Get your head out of the sand – automation is the future!
08 Dec 2016
Get your head out of the sand – automation is the future!
I was having a conversation over a beer with a friend last week when the topic turned to automation. I quipped that automation would eventually take my job as a journalist and hers as a librarian, and she dismissed me without hesitation, pointing to the fact that one of our local grocery stores recently eliminated its automated checkout lanes.
“People don’t want them,” she said.
I think she’s wrong – and so does Amazon. This week the company announced Amazon Go – a brick-and-mortar grocery store equipped with what Amazon calls “just walk out technology”. It uses “computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion, much like you’d find in self-driving cars” to allow people to walk into the store, fill their backpacks with the items they want and exit without ever interacting with store personnel or even an automated kiosk. Here’s a short video, showing how it works:
It’s about customer experience
The issue with acceptance of automated checkouts at my local grocery store is not that people don’t want automation. It’s backlash against technology that doesn’t work very well. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been stuck in an automated lane because I interacted in an unexpected way, causing the scanner to throw a fit and stop working…well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have to write this blog to buy more food.
If Amazon can create a better customer experience for shoppers using automation, and I believe it can, grocery store clerks will quickly become obsolete.
This is a huge topic of conversation within telecom organizations today. The two hottest buzzwords of 2016, NFV and SDN, are all about automation (and, yes, eliminating jobs). Just today, Ericsson announced it will complete the first half of its promised elimination of 3,000 jobs by the end of the year. True, these layoffs are not all the result of automation, but there is no question that operators’ adoption of virtualized network functions instead of hardware is a driver.
Automation is also one of the reasons Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Trump appealed to Americans whose jobs have been eliminated (for example, coal miners and autoworkers) by promising to put them back to work. That will go down in history as a big, fat unfulfilled election promise, because a lot of the jobs those folks were doing had already been replaced by automation (and in the case of coal, much cleaner technology), and they are not ever coming back.
It reminds me of the old tale my late father-in-law used to love to repeat: Two guys are watching an earth-mover at a construction site. The first shakes his head and says, “That could be jobs for 100 men with shovels.” The other replies, “Or 1,000 men with spoons.” Let’s face it folks: No coal company beholden to shareholders is going to throw away its giant mechanical drills to employ 100 men with pick-axes.
The future is now
The future is automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, NFV, SDN, driverless cars and Amazon Go grocery stores. Instead of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending it’s not going to happen, we need to plan for our automated future. It can be brilliantly bright, but only if we figure out how to adapt our economies.
I’ll leave you with another fun exercise from Pistono’s book. Two of the following ledes were written by journalists and one by a robot. Can you guess which was written by the robot?
The University of Michigan baseball team used a four-run fifth inning to salvage the final game in its three-game weekendseries with Iowa, winning 7-5 on Saturday afternoon (April 24) at the Wilpon Baseball Complex, home of historic Ray Fisher Stadium.
Michigan held off Iowa for a 7-5 win on Saturday. The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.
The Iowa baseball team dropped the finale of a three-game series, 7-5, to Michigan Saturday afternoon. Despite the loss,Iowa won the series having picked up two wins in the twin bill at Ray Fisher Stadium Friday.
