Monthly Archives: July 2017

With automation threatening to upend half of American jobs in coming years, a new report examined which counties are most at risk of job loss and found that low-income communities already suffering economically are in for the worst of it.

The white paper released Tuesday by Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., measured county vulnerability to job loss from offshoring and automation, based on the types of occupations that previous studies have shown to be particularly at risk and how prevalent those jobs are in the counties.

Automation poses a far greater risk to American jobs than offshoring and has a disproportionately harsh impact on poorer, rural communities. While the risk of losing one's job to trade pressures or overseas labor competition is spread evenly across income and education, the risk of being replaced by automation is highest among people making less than $38,000 a year.

Economists often focus on the long-term benefits of more trade and automation but "the transition period could be extraordinarily nasty," exacerbating existing trends that have driven much of the nation's political and social discontent, said Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State and a co-author of the study.

"It would benefit my profession if we were more honest about the cost of transition the disruption of people's lives, the hollowing out of communities," Hicks said.

Big urban centers with a broad mix of jobs are poised to weather the labor market storm better than small rural communities. For example, in Cook County, 54.5 percent of jobs are at risk of being lost to automation, and 28.7 percent to offshoring, while in Alexander County at the southern tip of the state among several counties along the Ohio River substantially reliant on factories 62 percent of jobs risk being replaced by automation and 26.9 percent lost to offshoring.

None of Illinois' counties are in the top 25 ranking of most at risk from automation or offshoring, but some of its neighbors are. LaGrange County in Indiana, for example, has a 65 percent automation risk and 30 percent offshoring risk; the heavily Amish county, which has many assembly plants, is among seven Indiana counties in the top 25 for offshoring and one of three in the top 25 for automation.

The most at-risk county in the nation is Alaska's Aleutians East Borough, at 67 percent automation risk and 31 percent offshoring risk. Falls Church in Virginia has the lowest automation risk, at 36.4 percent.

DuPage and Lake counties have slightly lower automation risk rates than Cook County while Kane and Will counties are slightly higher. Champaign County has the lowest automation risk in the state, at 51 percent, not unusual for rural college towns where jobs in building and grounds maintenance aren't easily automated, Hicks said.

The study did not evaluate how many jobs will be created as a result of automation and offshoring or calculate the benefits of lower-priced goods, increased productivity and more free time that may come with those labor market changes. But it is likely that many of those replacement jobs and benefits will occur in more heavily populated areas, creating even greater gulfs between urban and rural communities, where people often don't have the means or resources to move to where the opportunities are.

The patterns aren't surprising but they are worrisome, Hicks said. The economic frustration of the past few years occurred during a period of job growth and relatively mild automation disruption compared with what some economists think is coming.

"We think that is evidence that it could get worse before it gets better," Hicks said.

The report urges policy discussions to address the transition period and says local and state policy solutions to shore up jobs have been shortsighted. Many communities, particularly in the Midwest, focus on attracting jobs with tax credits without consideration for whether those jobs will exist long-term or funding skills development without regard for whether those skills will soon be irrelevant, Hicks said.

The jobs most vulnerable to automation include data entry keyers, mathematical science occupations, telemarketers and insurance underwriters, according to the report. The occupations most at risk of offshoring include computer programmers, mechanical drafters, computer and information research scientists and, again, data entry keyers.

The jobs at least risk of being automated or offshored include recreational therapists, emergency management directors, mental health and substance abuse social workers, audiologists, and first-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers.

aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @alexiaer

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Study: Automation will hurt jobs in rural communities worse than urban centers - Chicago Tribune

When people talk about automation, most of us probably imagine a robot arm on a factory assembly line. And, for much of the past few decades, that wasa reasonableway to think about automation, because of its focus on replacing human physical labor with machines.

Related:The 3 Education Trends Preparing the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs

But that image is increasingly obsolete. With the advancement of artificial intelligence technologies, automation is still replacing humans, only it's now happeningthe cognitive space as well as the physical one.

Nor is this some remote future vision. When U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said earlier this year that AI is not even on our radar screens, adding that he figured it would be 50 to 100 years before humans started losing jobs to AI, he couldnt have been more wrong.

For example, were seeing AI technology companies targeting the replacement of what's estimated to be up to50 percentof current employees in the finance sector over the next 10 years. We would have considered these types of jobs safe from automation only a few years ago.

According to University of Oxford researchers, 47 percent of workersmay beat risk of losing their jobs to automation, in particular those in mid-skilled retail jobs, and office workers like cashiers and telemarketers. A recent McKinsey reportpredicted that a smaller percentage of jobs would be at risk of being completely replaced by machines, but pointed out that the majority of jobs would see some of their tasks replaced by automation.

In other words, were all going to feel the impact of AI in some way. And our skills arent keeping pace.

The sheer number of both soft skills and technical skills already required by most modern companies is exploding. At the same time, the skills people do pick up remain relevant for a shorter and shorter amount of time. AI only accelerates this trend. Weve crossed a threshold where the timed obsolescence for skills is shorter than for a single career.

The message: People need to adapt faster than ever. And this could have enormous consequences, including widespread unemployment and devastating disruptions for parts of the global economy.

One easily imaginable scenario: In the United States, there are approximately 3.5 million truck drivers. Suppose a truck company could retrofit a truck for $30,000 to makeit into a reliable, safe autonomous vehicle. That would be a one-time cost, and the cost would be less than the annual salary of a truck driver. Once that scenario became possible, the industry would likely overhaul its fleet extremely rapidly.

And what would those 3.5 million former truck drivers do then? What about todays taxi drivers and Uber and Lyft drivers? In fact, its entirely possible that we will still have taxi drivers in the streets protesting Uber when Uber drivers take to the streets to start protesting autonomous vehicles.

Related:4 Ways Technology Is Making Education More Affordable and Available

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Advancing Automation Means Humans Need to Embrace Lifelong Learning - Entrepreneur

Is automation poised to replace people?Politics and trade deals aside, I believe that technology innovation creates jobs in places you never thought there could be jobs before and enables people to take on more interesting, strategic work.

[Automation and blockchain have hugepotential to change business as we know it. Learn more in our related article, Blockchain: 3 big implications for your company.]

Heres an example. We have a new risk intelligence platform, which adds a credit limit recommendation, among other things, to our previous platform. In the past, companies would buy data from D&B, then look at the credit scores and make decisions about whether or not they were going to do business with that company based on the credit reports.

"This takes a step out of the process through automation, but it also delivers that data and that decision faster."

Now D&B is using internal analytics combined with our new product to deliver actual credit limit recommendations to the customer. This takes a step out of the process through automation, but it also delivers that data and that decision faster. So were bringing data and decisioning to places where its all being usedand where it can help our customers drive more revenue. Which creates more jobs.

In essence, weve opened up the entire product through APIs that the customers can integrate into their own systems so that automation flows straight through to whatever system theyre using. In addition, we are actively going out and partnering with some of the major software platforms that can use these systems, and bringing those credit scores and intelligence and decisioning right into those interactions.

Now our customers dont have to have their IT crews go and implement APIs with us because were partnering with that accounting platform. Which means they can deploy that staff to more strategic and interesting work.

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Automation's power: Streamlining for speed - The Enterprisers Project

Cybersecurity

The Trump administration's cyber executive order has tasked the departments of Commerce and Homeland Security with a year-long study of how to reduce botnets, but one former official says the immediate focus should be on standards and automation.

Ari Schwartz, former senior director for cybersecurity at the National Security Council and now with Venable LLP, said at a July 11 resilience workshop hosted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology that the proliferation of internet-connected devices -- many of which are insecure or can't be updated -- and increasing bandwidth of internet systems are leading to more, and more powerful, distributed denial of service attacks. Repeaters and other technology are making attacks increasingly complex.

Schwartz said that there were a variety of successes in the battle against bots over the last decade, including the FBI's Bot Roast and DNSChanger operations and the Federal Communications Commission Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council's Anti Bot Code of Conduct for ISPs.

But he said the government failed to build on the momentum.

"The fact that you need a botnet report and we're not at the point of saying 'here is the whole of government approach to this issue' and that the Trump administration needed this report," demonstrates that more could have been done, he said.

Going forward, Schwartz told FCW the first priority is speeding up the development of standards, especially for device manufacturers.

"We're just starting to see the standards be put in place for what they are supposed to do, so I'm worried that it's a long process to get to that point," he said. Schwartz warned that standards need to be put in place before any regulation comes down to avoid ending up "with things locked into place in 2017."

He said NIST and National Telecommunications and Information Agency are playing important roles in developing standards and facilitating public-private partnership.

"There needs to be sustained follow up and sustained participation," he said. "Government is part of that. Industry is part of that, and it's different parts of industry too."

Schwartz stressed that the government needs to hold off on regulations for now.

"You've got to get the standards in place," he said. "You've got to get people doing it voluntarily and see how that goes for some period of time and then start mandating it as people are not doing it or in the areas they're not doing it."

One of the key standards is automated device updating, Schwartz said.

"Education works to some extent, notification works to some extent, but the scale we're talking about, it's not going to be the answer," he said. "So it needs to be more of automated patching in this space."

"How do we make sure that we can update things and the user doesn't have to be involved in that discussion, but yet we're not invading their privacy, we're not breaking stuff on their side, right?" he said. "That's the key."

Schwartz and other panelists at the workshop acknowledged there will be an ongoing challenge posed by expired devices that are still connected but are no longer supported or being updated.

About the Author

Sean Carberry is an FCW staff writer covering defense, cybersecurity and intelligence. Prior to joining FCW, he was Kabul Correspondent for NPR, and also served as an international producer for NPR covering the war in Libya and the Arab Spring. He has reported from more than two-dozen countries including Iraq, Yemen, DRC, and South Sudan. In addition to numerous public radio programs, he has reported for Reuters, PBS NewsHour, The Diplomat, and The Atlantic.

Carberry earned a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and has a B.A. in Urban Studies from Lehigh University.

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Expert: Battling botnets requires standards and automation - FCW.com

Published on Tuesday, 11 July 2017 Written by Juan Martinez, PhD, PE, FCSI

We are closing in on an answer.

A couple of questions I get asked the most are Why has automation not arrived in restaurants? and When is it really going to get here? As I ponder the automated kitchen caricature seen here, my answer is that automation will become more mainstream when the laws of supply and demand take their toll. What I mean is this will become a reality for the restaurant industry when the cost of labor and the cost of automation intersect.

And as the restaurant industry inches closer to paying a $15 per hour minimum wage, this intersection is getting closer.

Recently I read an article about the impact of the minimum wage increase in Seattle. As most articles, there were differing viewpoints about how the so-called fight for 15 will impact businesses.

Perhaps restaurant automation will arrive when the economists agree on the potential long-term economic impact of the minimum wage increase. A consensus could lead to restaurants taking a more proactive stance with respect to automation since business leaders will have more of an incentive to prepare for the future better. In the meantime, the opinions on how these wage increases will impact the restaurant industry remain mixed.

From where we sit, rising costs provide reason for restaurants to continue their quest to improve efficiency. It matters not whether the rising costs take the form of labor or food or any other expense. Anything that helps restaurants operate more efficiently is a good thing.

Like most everyone else in the industry, though, I would like to have a better idea about the impact a higher minimum wage will have on restaurants over the long-term.

Technology, in this case automation, represents a very alluring option to help offset rising labor costs for a variety of reasons. Its new. Its different. It helps create that wow factor that guests love and positions a business as being leading edge. But its also important to realize that developing and implementing automation comes with a cost.

And other customer-driven forces continue to work against automation. Chief among these factors is providing guests the ability to customize their orders. Oftentimes, automation favors repeating the same task time and again with very little variation. This remains in stark contrast to what todays foodservice customer expects. So, for automation to be successful in a foodservice application it must be elastic enough to provide flexibility and variety to guests.

For example, the assembly line worked wonders to facilitate high production of the same (or similar) types of automobiles and other durable goods. But when you add more and more variables into the equation, the assembly line struggles to keep up. One concept that I have worked with, Giardino Gourmet Salads, actually has more than a BILLION possible salad combinations. This number is daunting. This type of diversity reflects what guests want nowadays, so as a concept you have to deliver.

Our collective vision of automation and robotics has always been on large-scale basis but with kitchens shrinking, perhaps this will never be the case. Will automation show up on a smaller scale? Well lets take a look at how automation is already showing up in todays restaurant industry.

In-store kiosks or smartphone ordering that allows customers to place their orders represents the biggest impact I have seen thus far. This is what I call indirect automation. This type of automation is nice, since aside from the investment in the software, the cost to the stores is small. Commercial foodservice operators that dont already have this type of technology or are not planning to implement it in the near future are behind the eight ball.

Consider that automating the order taking and handling payment aspects of a transaction in quick-serve and fast-casual restaurants is equivalent to 20 percent to 25 percent of the total labor required to service guests. Do you think automating these tasks could be impactful? Me too.

In fact, two of the most successful companies in foodservice Panera Bread and Dominos Pizza have embraced automation in big ways. Panera Bread reports 26 percent of its first quarter sales came from mobile ordering, the companys website or an in-store kiosk. On an annualized basis, Panera Bread reports digital sales have hit $1 billion and could double by 2019. Panera Bread customers place 1.2 million digital orders per week, according to a company release. Perhaps this was factor made Panera Bread attractive to the companys new owners.

And in its annual report to shareholders, Dominos said more than half of its 2016 sales came via its digital platforms.

The financial success of these two companies in a challenging operating environment speaks for itself.

Automation can take the place of much simpler prep machines, or automated washers, or automated filtering, among many others. I would even consider automation to be value-added food products, where the supplier does the prep work that would otherwise need to be done at the unit level.

In my mind, anything that reduces the labor necessary at the store level can be categorized as automation, since the employee does not have to do it.

In addition, it probably helps the restaurants deliver a more consistent product and perhaps improve food safety, both hallmarks of automation. Yes, ordering pre-prepped ingredients may increase food costs, but as long as it delivers larger cost savings on the labor side, then this step improves unit economics.

Mankind has always been trying to automate. And restaurants are no different. In fact, heres a link to a fully automated restaurant that was developed in the 60s. This example may make you think that the market may not have made much progress in automation since then. However, it may simply support the notion that the laws of supply and demand have not yet caught up with the need to automate. But as the minimum wage goes up, this gap will close and things will start to get really interesting.

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When Will Restaurant Automation Get Here? - Foodservice Equipment & Supplies

Daniel Komesch is a senior policy analyst with Polytechnics Canada.

Automation has become a scary word lately. As new technologies proliferate, unease and uncertainty surround the labour market of the future. Will jobs be destroyed? Created? Can a robot really replace what I do? What kind of career should my child pursue if we dont know what the jobs of the future will look like? How can I retrain?

If new studies are to be believed, nearly half of the Canadian labour force is at high risk of automation in the next 10 to 20 years. But what does that really mean for todays and tomorrows workers?

The reshaping of economies due to innovations in technology is a challenge that has persisted across time in fact, economist Joseph Schumpeter considered it to be the essential fact about capitalism: technologies emerge and economies are forced to transition.

In the face of a transitioning economy, we only have one choice, really: embrace and adapt. So, looking ahead to an automated future, where should Canada concentrate its educational energies?

The solution should be co-operational which means tapping all of Canadas resources as we adapt to the needs of the future. So politicians and policy makers would be wise to look beyond the usual players.

One of the avenues forward includes embracing educational institutions that are already used to working hand-in-hand with industry which means theyre already accustomed to perpetual innovation.

Im talking about polytechnics. Polytechnics are publicly-funded colleges and institutes of technology that offer a full suite of credentials, including four-year bachelors degrees and apprenticeships, while at the same time offering industry a range of research and development and innovation services. Programs are skills-intensive and technology-based, encompassing hands-on and experiential learning.

Polytechnics already have tight connections to Canadian industry, built through their innovation services and advisory groups made up of industry representatives, so they tend to know where labour markets are headed and care about the skills that are necessary for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

For example, Humber College in Toronto deployed its Electromechanical Engineering Automation and Robotics Advanced Diploma program in response to a manufacturing sector that has faced technological disruption. This program develops skills in industrial automation, robotics, control systems, machining, hydraulics, pneumatics, mechatronics and automated welding. Its graduates get jobs.

Calvin Kimura graduated from the program in 2013 and, after first working as a robotics technician at global manufacturing giant Magna, he owns and operates CK Automation, which supplies business with a full suite of automation services from design, development, build, installation and maintenance.

Thats how innovation and job growth happens. And it didnt come from the lab, but from a polytechnic education aligned with industry needs.

Yet, polytechnics are often neglected by policy makers. Their sister-institutions, universities, get the policy limelight. But as many as 30 per cent of those who have previously attended university go on to get a polytechnic education. That number is on the rise.

Why? Polytechnics are particularly good at a key component: connecting the supply and demand sides of the labour market. This is especially valuable as new technologies emerge that require the adoption of new skill sets.

One way polytechnics anticipate labour market shifts is through their program advisory committees, comprised, in part, of industry leaders.

If the essential fact about capitalism is creative destruction and the necessary reshaping of economies, then governments need to see polytechnics as the economic actors they are and bring them into the innovation policy discussion. Polytechnics adapt, embrace, and thrive in the face of economic challenge and change. Canada is on the verge of becoming an automation nation, and polytechnics say, Bring it on.

If we are to harness all the talent we have available, its time Canadas policy makers caught up and recognized the important place of polytechnics in the full suite of educational opportunities available to all Canadians.

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Polytechnics are the missing link in the automation revolution - The Globe and Mail