Workplace Robots Need Better Machine Vision. A coming wave of industrial robots will be smart enough to work safely alongside humans in many different settings, says Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus of robotics at MIT and a founder of iRobot. "I think there's room for a real revolution by putting sensors and computation into industrial robots," says Brooks.
"What if the robots were smarter and they could go into smaller companies and be easier for ordinary people to use? "If manufacturing robots could recognize their human coworkers and interact with them safely Brooks says they could be used in many more manufacturing environments, assisting with repetitive and physically demanding manual tasks.In 2008, Brooks founded a new company, called Heartland Robotics, to develop robots for manufacturing. The company has said that its robots will be intelligent, adaptable, and inexpensive. McDonald's is killing the middle class - War Room. Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald’s launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that’s more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009.
And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald’s franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2 percent acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices. It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald’s hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job.
On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. The Rise of the McWorker. News: The Blog. “Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I’m talking about welfare for all. Without it, you’re going to have warfare for all.” This quote from Jerry Brown in 1995 echoes earlier fears that automation would cause mass unemployment and displacement. These fears have not materialized, due to surging economic growth, the ability of the workforce to adjust, and the fact that the extent of automation is largely limited to physical, repetitive tasks.
This is beginning to change. In recent years, before the current recession, automation in already well established areas has continued to make productivity improvements. As machines become smarter, less repetitive “white collar” jobs will become subject to automation. Jerry Brown was right. At Microtask and CloudCrowd, Assembly Lines Go Online. No such workplace yet exists, but with the fiendishly clever creation of standardized two-second tasks, delivered to any computer connected to the Internet, it is now technically possible to set up. Microtask, a start-up company in Finland, has come up with the software that delivers such tasks. The company offers to take on “dull, repetitive work” — like digitizing paper forms or business cards — for prospective clients. As it says in a video on its Web site, “Microtask loves the work you hate.” Microtask is in a position to love that work because not one of its 12 employees actually performs it.
Its software carves a given task into microscopically small pieces, like transcribing a handwritten four-digit number in a tiny rectangle on a form. (Handwritten numbers and letters are the bane of text-recognition software.) These tasks, stripped of identifying information about the client or the larger task, can then be distributed online anywhere. Such variety can’t yet be offered, Mr. Mr. Crowdsourcing and the future of working on your own terms. Trada Founder/CEO Niel Robertson. Niel moderated the panel; "The Human Cloud: Elastic Workforce in the Enterprise". Crowdsourcing has captured the imagination of people in the enterprise. The concept is that of a "Human Cloud" for labor.
While it has proven itself effective, in many cases, modern managers are confused, wondering which everyday tasks can be crowdsourced, how to define the tasks, and under what conditions an elastic workforce is the right decision? The underlying theme, as Webb noted: people should be able to “work on their terms,” and as Chiarella stated, “technology allows people to have a choice.” Crowdsourceing - The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. List of crowdsourcing projects at wikipedia What is crowdsortium? The crowdsourcing model is continually being applied to new problems. For example: Featured articles. Symbionics video interview with Rachel Botsman on shared infrastructures for collaborative consumption.
Idiagram: The Art of Insight and Action. The Future of Work. So what do digital technologies and the Internet mean for the future of work? That was the topic of last year’s Information Roundtable at the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program, an annual event that brings together some heavyweight businesspeople, technologies and academics to discuss a breaking issue. It was a fascinating discussion because so many of these issues are not probed in such depth by such diverse experts. Once again, I was the rapporteur for the three-day gathering. My report, The Future of Work: What It Means for Individuals, Businesses, Markets and Governments is now available online as a pdf file.
The report focuses on the concerns of traditional businesses and startups as they grapple with the new competitive environment created by digital technologies and networks. In the 20th Century, here's how most work was organized, according to Michael Chui of McKinsey & Co. Is the P2P Foundation a level 3 actor? Meta-level strategies for social change. What does the P2P Foundation do (or rather: aims to do)? Read the excerpt from Tom McCabe’s below in order to understand our approach better. - we collect Level 1 direct actions, try to connect with other actors involved in Level 2 indirect actions, while also attempting to achieve Level 3 (or 4, see below) “meta-meta” effects, through our P2P Theory and strategizing about social change.
Read the following to understand that important distinction. Tom McCabe: “One of the most useful concepts I have learned recently is the distinction between actions which directly improve the world, and actions which indirectly improve the world. Suppose that you go onto Mechanical Turk, open an account, and spend a hundred hours transcribing audio. On the other hand, suppose you take a typing class, which teaches you to type twice as fast. The most important difference between Level 1 and Level 2 actions is that Level 1 actions tend to be additive, while Level 2 actions tend to be multiplicative.
Ford and Fordism. Building a collaborative workplace. Thanks for your interest in our whitepapers. Feel free to download and share these white papers. Please don't modify them without our permission and we would appreciate if you would cite our work when you use them. Whitepapers Will your strategy stick? Making the most of story-work Making strategies stick - tackling anti-stories Four story-based practices to foster insight How to make your strategy stick with a strategic story The vital role of business storytelling Walking in two worlds: helping new aboriginal staff get comfortable and productive in a large government department Three journeys: A narrative approach to successful organisational change Crafting a knowledge strategy that works Building a collaborative workplace Using stories to size up a situation Techniques for Expertise Location Our take on how to talk about knowledge management Does your strategic planning make a difference?
Aligning brand and customer service Connecting people with content Harnessing tacit knowledge with communities. What it takes to get a job done. Physical tasks can normally be broken up in a reductionist way. Bigger tasks can be divided by assigning people to different smaller parts of the whole. For intellectual tasks, it is much harder to find parts that make for an efficient division of labour.
Intellectual tasks are by default linked and complex. Reductionism does not work. The machine metaphor led to the belief that if we only can arrange the parts in the right way, we optimize efficiency. When the image of work was the assembly line, work could be fragmented and individual performance goals could be set for each worker. The demands of work are different now: how efficient an organization is reflects the links people have with one another and the links they have to the contexts of value.
When we talk about relations, we often take examples from nature: murmuration and bird flocks. Birds then are not “free like birds”. When it comes to people it is a different story. Organizations are their communicative performance. Architecture of work. A manager recently voiced his concerns: “Most employees prefer being told what to do. They are willing to accept being treated like children in exchange for reduced stress. They are also willing to obey authority in exchange for job security.” That is the way we have seen it: managers inspire, motivate, and control employees, who need to be inspired, motivated, and controlled.
These dynamics create the system of management and justify its continuation. If we want to meet the challenges of the post-industrial world, this relationship needs to change. The workers changing their role is often seen as a matter of the extent to which the managers are willing to allow it and give up responsibility. In reality it is as much a matter of how much the workers are willing to develop their (management) capacity and take more and wider responsibility. A few researchers have started to dispute the assumption that the present system of management is a fact of life that will always be with us.