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[Netease smart news August 20 news] Last year, Japan Softbank opened a mobile phone store in Tokyo, and its cooperation with sales partner Pepper. This is not as hard as it sounds, because all Peppers are robots.
More precisely, Softbank described humanoid robots as "kind, cute and surprising." Each Pepper is equipped with three multi-directional wheels, a collision avoidance system, multiple sensors, a pair of arms, and a chest-mounted tablet that allows customers to enter information. "Pepper" can "express his emotions" using a 3-D camera and two high-resolution cameras "to identify movements and identify the interlocutor's expression."
The chat bot can identify happy, sad, angry, and amazed faces and judge whether a person's mood is good or bad—Pepper's engineers believe that this ability makes him an ideal personal assistant or salesperson. Sure enough, there are more than 10,000 Peppers working in Softbank stores, Pizza Hut, cruise ships, homes, and other places.
In a less anxious world, Pepper may be considered a lovely technological innovation. But for many pundits and prophets, the harbingers it brings are more serious: human workers are getting older. (The picture of the naive Pepper is in many articles. The title of the article is "The robot will replace your job.")
We live in the second machine age
In the past few years, it was widely believed that the tremendous advances in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence have enabled us to embark on the road to unemployment in the future. We live in "The Second Machine Age," which is the title of MIT researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Erik 燘rynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee - manufacturing, sales, and Various routine tasks such as bookkeeping and food preparation are being steadily automated, and even complex analytical work will soon be replaced. For example, a widely cited study conducted by Oxford University researchers in 2013 found that almost half of the work in the United States in the next 20 years is facing the risk of complete automation. We have been told that the final outcome is inevitable: robots are advancing rapidly while the human labor force is slowly withdrawing from the stage.
This concern for automation is understandable because technology companies have made surprising advances in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. Today, it has been able to defeat Go Masters, defeat champions in Texas, and safely drive a car. . We are in an era of rapid growth in the scale and scope of automation. This concept is undoubtedly in line with the general feeling in Silicon Valley that we are living in an unprecedented era of accelerated innovation. Some tech industry leaders, including Sam 燗ltman from Y. Ombinator and Musk from Tesla, are convinced that such unemployment is imminent – ​​they are busy thinking about how to build a social security network for a less-working world. As a result, Silicon Valley has suddenly generated enthusiasm for the so-called “basic income for allâ€. This income will be automatically distributed to every citizen so that people can earn some living after they lose their jobs.
This is a dramatic story, an epoch-making story about automation and permanent unemployment. But it has a major problem: There is actually not much evidence that it is happening.
An epoch-making story about automation and permanent unemployment
Suppose you are the pilot of an old Cessna airplane. You fly in bad weather. You can't see the horizon. A panic-stricken passenger is shouting and you are rushing to land. What would you do? There is no doubt: you believe that your instrument - your altimeter, your compass, and your level - let you determine the actual position, and then continue to fly.
Now imagine that you are an economist and a panicked software engineer warns that his work will allow everyone to go straight into an unemployed world. It is also certain that there are statistical tools that can immediately consult to determine if this prediction is valid. If automation is actually changing the U.S. economy, then two things will be right: Total productivity will rise sharply, and employment will be harder to achieve than in the past.
In terms of productivity, this is an indicator of the economic output per hour. Because automation allows companies to produce more products with less manpower, a wave of automation should drive productivity gains. In fact, however, the increase in productivity over the past 10 years, measured by historical standards, is very low. During the heyday of the U.S. economy, from 1947 to 1973, labor productivity grew at an annual rate of nearly 3%. Since 2007, China’s economic growth rate has remained at around 1.2%, which is the slowest growth rate since World War II. In the past two years, productivity has only increased by 0.6% - this is exactly the year when people's anxiety about automation soared. If efficient robots replace inefficient humans, you will not see this. As McAfee puts it, "Slow growth in productivity does indeed slow down as our technology grows at a rapid pace."
Today, part of the reason for the slowdown in productivity growth may be the shift of mankind from the factory to the service industry (history productivity of service jobs is lower than that of factories). But even if manufacturing automation and robotics have been well developed in the past decades, their productivity growth has been negligible. Dean 燘aker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said: "I am sure that automation is playing a role no matter where the manufacturing industry is." "But it is difficult to see this change in the total number."
The job market also shows no signs of an early robot. Unemployment rate is less than 5%. Employers in many states are complaining about labor shortages rather than excess labor. Although millions of Americans withdrew from the labor market after the Great Depression, now they are back -- and they find jobs. Even more shocking is that with the improvement of the labor market, the wages of ordinary workers are also rising. It is true that wages have not risen as much as historical standards, but they are growing faster than inflation and faster than productivity. If human workers embark on the path of rapid elimination, this is unlikely to happen.
Automatically reshape the job market
If automation is really reshaping the job market, you will also see what many economists call "work loss", that is, people are unemployed, from one company to another, and from one industry to another. But what we see is exactly the opposite. A recent paper published by Robert 燗tkinson and John燱u of the Foundation for Information Technology and Innovation shows that “the occupational loss level in the United States is currently at historical lows.†Between 1950 and 2000, the mainstreaming of the Internet and artificial intelligence In the era of emergence, the turnover rate was only 38%. This is consistent with U.S. employment statistics. Since 2000, this figure has been increasing rather than shortened. In other words, this is not a time of great destruction, but most of the United States labor force is surprisingly stable. Today's jobs are similar to those in the 1950s — we believe that that era is the pinnacle of work stability.
This is not to say that automation and artificial intelligence have no major impact on the economy. But this effect is far more subtle and limited than what the world-day doom forecast shows. For example, an in-depth study of the effects of robotics on manufacturing, agriculture, and public utilities in 17 countries found that robots did reduce the working hours of low-skilled workers—but they did not reduce the total time for human work. They also raised their wages. In other words, automation may affect the work humans do, but at present, it is difficult to see that it will bring a world without work. In fact, McAfee mentioned his previous public statement: “If I come back again, I will pay more attention to the ways in which technology will change the economic structure and reduce the impact on employment.†The core phenomenon is not net unemployment. He said: "It is possible to make changes in different jobs."
McAfee pointed out that the retail and transportation sectors are areas where automation can have a significant impact. However, even in these industries, the number of unemployed people is not so terrible in many media reports. A report just released by Goldman Sachs predicts that auto-driving cars may eventually consume 300,000 driving jobs per year. However, the company believes that this situation will not happen. In another 25 years, it will be enough for the economy to adapt. At the same time, a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicted that 9% of jobs in 21 different countries face serious threats from automation. This is an important number, but it is not the end of the world.
Of the 271 occupations listed in the 1950 census, only one, the elevator operator, was eliminated by automation in 2010. Of course, there are even more horrific predictions, such as Oxford University research. But to take a closer look, these predictions often assume that if a job can be automated, it will be fully automated soon—it overestimates the speed and completeness of automation in the field. History shows that this process is more unbalanced than this. For example, an ATM is a textbook-like example of how machines are used to replace humans. The ATM was first introduced around 1970, and it was widely adopted in the late 1990s. Today, there are more than 400,000 ATMs in the United States. But as the economist James 燘essen pointed out, the number of bank tellers actually increased between 2000 and 2010. This is because, although the average number of cashiers per branch decreased, ATMs reduced the cost of opening branches, so banks opened more branches. Indeed, the US Department of Labor now predicts that the number of cashiers will decrease by 8% over the next 10 years. But this is 8%, not 50%. And 45 years ago, this robot that should have replaced them first appeared.
Of course, if automation today is much faster than it used to be, historical statistics on simple machines such as ATMs will be limited in predicting the future. In The Singularity Is Near (12 years ago) by Ray燢urzweil, this book describes the “knee†moment when a technical society reaches an exponential growth curve, triggering explosive growth in mutually reinforcing new developments. The traditional view of the tech industry believes that this is exactly what we are now - just as the futurist Peter Can 犓 犓 犓 骸 骸 骸 骸 骸 骸! The recent generation of an awkward and unprofessional version of the game has also been followed by a recent publication of awrence Mishel and Josh Bivens. The paper points out: "The automation in the broad sense is actually slow in the past 10 years or so." Recently, the pace of development of the microchip has lagged behind the schedule set by Moore's Law.
Automation does not leave humans permanently unemployed
For its part, the American business community does not seem to believe in the future of unemployment. If the return on automation is as great as predicted, then the company will invest a lot of money in new technologies. but it is not the truth. In the past decade, investments in software and information technology have grown slower than in the last decade. According to 燤ishel and Bivens, capital investment since 2002 has grown at a slower pace than in any post-war period. This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect in a fast and automated world. As for baubles like Pepper, the total spending of all robots in the United States last year was only 11.3 billion U.S. dollars. This is about one-sixth of what Americans spend on pets each year.
So if the data doesn't show any evidence that the robot is taking over humans, why do so many people outside of Silicon Valley believe this is happening? At least in the United States, this is partly due to the coincidence of two widely observed trends. Between 2000 and 2009, 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States disappeared, and wage growth in the entire economy stagnated. During the same period, industrial robots have become more and more popular, and the Internet seems to be changing everything. Artificial intelligence has become very useful for the first time. Therefore, it seems logical to link these phenomena: the robots kill high-paying manufacturing jobs, and they will replace other people's jobs.
In other words, Donald Trump’s views on the work of the US factory are not entirely wrong. However, around the year 2000, the global economy has also undergone some changes: China has joined the World Trade Organization and has significantly increased its output. It is this, not automation, that has hit the U.S. manufacturing industry. A recent paper by the economists Daron 燗cemoglu and Pascual燫estrepo, entitled "Robots and Employment", has attracted widespread attention. The paper stated that industrial automation has resulted in the reduction of up to 670,000 jobs since 1990. However, between 1999 and 2011, trade with China caused the disappearance of 2.4 million jobs, which is almost four times the previous figure. Baker said: "If you want to know the situation of manufacturing after 2000, the answer is obviously not automation, but China." "We have always had a huge trade deficit, mainly manufacturing, and the number of jobs in our manufacturing industry has dropped dramatically. ""If there is no connection between the two things, it is nonsense."
Nevertheless, automation will indeed replace many of the existing jobs in the coming decades. As McAfee said, "In the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars and trucks, it is still in its early stages." Their real impact will be hard to notice in the coming years. However, it is still unclear whether the impact of these innovations on the job market will be much greater than the huge impact of technological progress in the past. After all, outsourcing work to machines is not new – it is the main theme of economic history over the past 200 years, from gins to washing machines to cars. Over and over, as more work was replaced, other work was created. Over and over again, we have never known what kind of new work people will eventually do.
Even if we worry about automation is nothing new, they are closely related to the anxiety of the late 1950s and early 60s. Observers at the time also believed that automation would lead to permanent unemployment. The Triple Revolution's special committee, a group of scientists and thinkers who were concerned about what was then called "computer-controlled" influence, proposed that "the power of machines is growing faster than many people's capabilities." In 1965, democracy WHFerry of the Research Center wrote that "network countries" have broken the link between work and income, and have freed more and more men and women from the economy. Turn "computer control" into "automation" or "artificial intelligence", all of which can be accomplished today.
Two conflicting futures
What is special about this historic moment is that we also fear two conflicting futures. On the one hand, we are told that robots will replace our work and that their superior productivity will change one industry after another. If this happens, economic growth will increase dramatically and the entire society will be much wealthier than it is now. At the same time, we were told that we are in an era of long-term stagnation. Our economy is doomed to slow growth and experience stagnant wage levels. In this world, we need to worry about how we will support the aging population and pay for rising medical expenses, because we will not have more wealth in the future than we do now. Both of these futures are possible. However, they cannot be realized at the same time. There is no point in thinking about the rise of robotics and the long-term stagnation of the economy. However, this is exactly what many smart people are doing.
Our irony about automation anxiety is that if the predictions about robots leading the future come true, many of our concerns about other economies will disappear. For example, a recent Accenture study showed that the implementation of artificial intelligence in a broad sense can increase the annual GDP growth rate of the United States by 2 percentage points (to 4.6%). This growth rate will make it easy for us to cope with costs such as social security and medical insurance, as well as rising healthcare costs. This will bring more extensive wage growth. Although this will make the issue of allocating economic cake even more complex, splitting a growing cake is always easier than splitting a shrinking cake.
However, the future of this study's vision seems far-fetched. To be sure, people's concerns about automation have been proven wrong in the past, but this does not mean that they will continue to do so in the future, and those positive feedbacks that have been foreseen—exponential growth—may suddenly become a appear. However, given the limited investment in new technology by companies and the slow pace of economic growth, it is difficult for us to see how we can achieve this goal in the short term. In this sense, the problem we face is not the arrival of robots, but they are not coming. (English source: wired  and   îºåºµ îºåºµ îºåºµ îºåºµ: Wu Man)
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