El fin del trabajo

[NosTrasladamus]

Camioneros, taxistas (los que hayan sobrevivido al meteorito Uber), conductores de furgonetas de reparto... you're next...
Se acabaron las huelgas de transportistas... en cuanto haya alguna tangana grave y/o alguna gran flota estilo Norbert Dentressangle (Christian Salvesen (Gerposa)) invierta en implantar este sistema... game over.... además ahora se está a la espera de que la legislación permita este tipo de sistemas... si se demuestran fiables y/o rentables, lo que puede que suceda es que pasen a ser de instalación obligatoria...

Los camiones de Mercedes-Benz conducirán de forma autónoma en 2025

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Foxconn sustituirá a los trabajadores de la cadena de montaje del próximo iPhone por robots

El fabricante chino automatizará la producción del próximo teléfono de Apple, reduciendo los gastos de personal y alejando la sombra de los abusos laborales[

(...) Según ha revelado la compañía durante una reunión con sus accionistas, sus cadenas de producción están recibiendo los últimos ajustes para acoger a un ejército de 10.000 robots que sustituirán a sus empleados de carne y hueso.

Cada una de estas máquinas, denominadas Foxbots, tendrá un coste de entre 14.700 y 18.400 euros al cambio y se hará cargo de la producción de unos 30.000 teléfonos de media. Su diseño ha sido realizado siguiendo las especificaciones de la propia empresa y no serán ofrecidos a otras compañías, puesto que Foxconn reconoce que no tendrá los suficientes.

En la página anterior he posteado esto (por si se te ha pasado):

http://www.quesabesde.com/noticias/foxconn-cambiara-trabajadores-fabricacion-iphone-6-por-robots_11994

Foxconn sustituirá a los trabajadores de la cadena de montaje del próximo iPhone por robots

Alberto Ballestín
Con más de 1,2 millones de empleados en todo el mundo, Foxconn es el mayor contratista de la industria de la electrónica de consumo y una de las firmas más poderosas del sector. Su éxito está íntimamente ligado a los dispositivos portátiles de Apple, quien desde hace años ha confiado en el coloso asiático la producción de sus iPad y iPhone. La fabricación de estos dispositivos en China y las condiciones en las que se realiza han sido objeto de polémica, y Foxconn quiere poner fin a esta situación automatizando el montaje del futuro iPhone 6.
Según ha revelado la compañía durante una reunión con sus accionistas, sus cadenas de producción están recibiendo los últimos ajustes para acoger a un ejército de 10.000 robots que sustituirán a sus empleados de carne y hueso.
Cada una de estas máquinas, denominadas Foxbots, tendrá un coste de entre 14.700 y 18.400 euros al cambio y se hará cargo de la producción de unos 30.000 teléfonos de media. Su diseño ha sido realizado siguiendo las especificaciones de la propia empresa y no serán ofrecidos a otras compañías, puesto que Foxconn reconoce que no tendrá los suficientes.
De acuerdo con las últimas filtraciones, el iPhone 6 se ofrecerá en dos versiones notablemente más grandes que los actuales iPhone 4s y 5s. A pesar de que Apple todavía no ha facilitado información oficial -ni se espera que lo haga hasta el evento de presentación-, varias filtraciones de unidades inertes han revelado el supuesto aspecto que tendrán estos terminales dotados con pantallas de 4,7 y 5,5 pulgadas. Su lanzamiento tendrá lugar en otoño.
Más eficiencia, menos protestas
El uso de robots ayudará a reducir los costes de producción del iPhone 6 y sus sucesores, pero no eliminará completamente el factor humano. De hecho, recientemente se supo que Foxconn contratará a cerca de 100.000 trabajadores para lanzar el nuevo teléfono de Apple, si bien por ahora se desconoce cómo afectará la automatización de la cadena de producción a las filas de la compañía.
Estos robots también servirán para reducir las acusaciones de abusos laborales que han convertido a Foxconn en una de las firmas más polémicas de la industria. Inspecciones independientes revelaron hace varios años abusos tan graves como la utilización de mano de obra infantil y la imposición de horas extras más allá de lo permitido por la legislación china, en ocasiones incluso sin retribución económica (problemas que también han salpicado a Samsung).
Estas revelaciones hicieron que Apple lanzara sus propias auditorías, que revertieron en un amplio programa de mejoras de las condiciones de trabajo de los empleados de Foxconn. Con la llegada de los nuevos robots, muchos de ellos ni siquiera serán necesarios.

Menos problemas de imagen para Apple, ya no habrá explotación laboral de ninguna clase en la fabricación del iPhone.

Aunque me parece muy interesante que esa maquinaria se desarrolle en Japón, Taiwán, China y Korea (los gigantes tecnológicos asiáticos). Apple tendrá que ponerse las pilas o los Android asiáticos se los comerán con patatas, conservando toda la cadena en Asia salvo el Sistema Operativo y los servicios en Internet (de momento).


Estaba cantado que esto se iba a acelerar desde que implantaron un SMI notablemente más alto en Shenzhen y Guangzhou.

Aunque ocurrir, a la larga iba a ocurrir.

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/07/06/foxconn-robots-assemble-iphone/

Creo que es bastante ilustrativo del progreso que vamos a ver en unos pocos años.

Mientras tanto en algunos McDonalds:



(Al meter el pedido en caja ya te la van poniendo las maquinitas)

[muyuu]

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http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/that-time-2-bots-were-talking-and-bank-of-america-butted-in/374023/

That Time 2 Bots Were Talking, and Bank of America Butted In
And what this silly exchange says about the future of machine-machine interaction

Twitter, because of its strict character limit, has become a significant testing ground for developers who like making bots that imitate humans. It's easier for their botmakers to get their creations to do cool things when they only have to spit out a line or two of text to play along in the human world.

One of the best bots is Olivia Taters, the creation of The Colbert Report's Rob Dubbin. Taters is a teenage girl, roughly, and as On the Media put it, "she may not always communicate in complete sentences, but she's convincing enough that teenagers actually converse with her."

Most of these bots simply chain together sentences from a corpus of words, often someone's Twitter account. They "hold a conversation" by finding something in the text of a reply to which they can say something vaguely related. To put it mildly: These exchanges can devolve quickly.

Well, the other day, a bot imitating film producer Keith Calder happened to engage with Taters. As their almost sensical conversation continued, Taters says "different are soffttttttt," to which the Calder bot responds (perhaps picking up on the word 'different'): "It has two different BOA branches trying to get a temporary debit card."

At which point, this conversation between two homemade bots gets detected by the corporate Bank of America bot, which surely trawls Twitter for mentions of Bank of America, or BOA.

"Hello, were you able to get the problem resolved?" the BOA bot says. "If not, I'd like to help. ^co"

The Calder bot then says, "Why do people break up?" And BOA responds, "Please let us know if you need assistance. ^co"

All in all, not much information was exchanged in this set of Twitter replies and responses. It was a silly thing.

But each of us is going to have more and more bots acting on our behalf as well as trying to get our attention. What we see working on Twitter will soon spring from the computer and begin acting in the world.

Consider the digital assistants on your phone, the Facebook News Feed algorithm, even Priority Inbox for Gmail. All of these things are pieces of software that control one's information flow.

As the "Internet of things" connects up an ever greater percentage of the physical world to the world's networks, there will be little bots lurking in the coffeemaker and the shower. Nest already has a simple artificial intelligence built into its thermostat to try to detect and predict the ways that its users will consume energy.

The metaphor that I've been using to describe all this stuff is the microbotome. The microbiome is the set of non-human organisms that live within us. Many help humans digest food. The microbotome is all the bots that help humans digest information and interact with the machine world. The microbotome will become—if it's not already—absolutely essential to economic and social survival.

In this scheme, the human is the center of an ecosystem, but each of the constituent members can interact with each other. It's in those bot-to-bot interactions that things can get weird. Bot-to-bot interactions strike us as absurd. But they occur all the time already: Think of trading algorithms that detect an auto-tweeted news item and then execute financial transactions based on that information.

That's the high-level version of this Taters-Calder-Bank of America conversation. But make no mistake: Both types of interactions are going to be happening more and more often as we invite these digital mediators into our lives, or they are deployed upon us.

And as we do, we will understand less and less of why things are happening. The most recent advances in what is called "deep learning" make the logic of the systems opaque even to their creators. Why this Facebook post in the newsfeed and not that one? Why this temperature at 4pm on a Tuesday? Why this route through New York? Why this stock trade?

There won't be anyone to ask, but there will be many bots that would like to help.

Capturas de pantalla en el artículo.

Automatización de los diálogos de besugos

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10952317/Robots-will-take-over-middle-class-professions-University-Minister-says.html

Accountants, teachers and other middle-class professionals will see their jobs increasingly be taken over by robots, the universities minister has said.
David Willetts said that professions which require “quite high level cognitive” skills are more likely to be replaced by robots than ones that involve manual tasks such as making a cup of tea for an old lady.
This “rise of robots” would lead to “dramatic changes in the pattern of work”, he said, although not to a reduction in the number of jobs as a whole.
He said that it was a “paradox” that IT advances mean that professions that are seen as “really rather sophisticated” are actually easier to replicate with a computer programme. More instinctive manual tasks are much more challenging to replicate.
Speaking at an event at the think tank Policy Exchange, entitled “The Rise of the Robots”, Mr Willets said: “You kind of intuitively think that beating a grand master at chess must be a harder challenge, but in this world… giving a cup of tea to a little old lady is a bigger IT robotics challenge than doing chess.

“So quite a lot of stuff that we think is really rather sophisticated cognitive work is also routine and can be replaced by systems.
“In areas like accountancy, clearly very significant changes, and dare I say it, much as I love Fleet Street’s finest significant areas of journalism - for several years we have had computer generated financial reports.
He added: “Some of these things that we think of as quite high level cognitive may be more likely to be computerised and taken over by robots ahead of, as I say, giving an old lady a cup of tea.”
IT advances would mean “big changes” in education with automatic systems were already in place to mark tests and even essays, he said.
Vocational teaching for practical skills such as dentistry through to video game style virtual courses “will soon be sufficiently realistic that it will count as training” he added.
Although advances in technology would “dramatically change the type of work we do” but that people must not “fall for the luddite fallacy” that there would be less work as a whole to go around, he said.
Mr Willetts made his comments as analysis by the press agency Associated Press of employment data from 20 countries showed that jobs that had disappeared in the past four years tended to be in well-paid positions in traditionally middle-class careers.
Recent research has shown three in 10 Britons believe that they will soon be replaced in their job by a robot.
The military, space exploration and policing are the industries those surveyed thought were most likely to take over in the next 10 years.

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-biggest-threat-to-american-workers-162716201.html

A century ago, roughly one-third of U.S. workers toiled in agriculture. Now just 1.5% do. Yet agricultural output has skyrocketed, and the United States, after feeding itself, has plenty of food left over to export.

That explosion in agricultural productivity is considered a crowning achievement of 20th-century capitalism. Yet a similar trend that may now be underway in manufacturing and even the service economy isn’t viewed with the same reverential awe. Instead, the rise of robots and computers in place of workers looms as one of the great challenges in capitalism’s next century.

“The economic challenge of the future will … be providing enough good jobs,” Harvard economist Larry Summers wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. “Technology is allowing the production of far more output with far fewer people.”

Summers penned his economic prognostications for the Journal’s 125th anniversary, which arrives as the job market has been recovering from a sharp downturn. The total number of employed Americans recently eclipsed the prior peak established before a grueling recession began in 2007. Job creation is approaching healthy levels of nearly 300,000 new jobs per month. Many economists expect GDP growth to finally hit levels associated with good times later this year.

Troubling trends

Still, Summers highlights several troubling trends. The number of manufacturing jobs, while slowly growing, is still far below levels of the late 1990s and seems unlikely to reach that pinnacle ever again. As blue-collar jobs have become scarce, the number of Americans receiving disability payments from the government has skyrocketed. That’s bad news for taxpayers footing the bill, and also for disability beneficiaries themselves, who may never reenter the workforce.

Men have suffered most from the contraction of the blue-collar economy, and they represent a high number of the economic dropouts who are capable of working but have simply stopped looking. Summers points out that, 50 years ago, barely 5% of men aged 25 to 54 were out of work at any given time. That could rise to an ambient level of 25%, Summers warns, with more than half of all men spending a year on the sidelines at some point during their working lives. Such a dystopian, slow-growing economy would produce fewer winners and more losers, and drag down prosperity for nearly everybody.

Summers isn’t necessarily right. Other economists argue that Americans will adapt in ways that haven’t come into focus yet. There have been other periods of technological disruption that made many workers obsolete but also freed them to do other things, leading to unforeseen innovations and totally new industries. The Industrial Revolution in the 1800s put many artisans out of work, for instance, but also created millions of new jobs and helped generate fabulous wealth that did, in fact, trickle down to a newly emerging middle class.

Smoothing the transition

The question now is what will it take to smooth the transition to a new world of ubiquitous automation and prevent robots from taking every single job? Summers advocates a new role for government in safeguarding workers from the relentless churn of technology. But he doesn’t spell out what, exactly, the government ought to do. Besides, gridlock in Washington shows no sign of abating, and small-government advocates seem likely to end up more, not less, influential during the next several years. So government solutions are probably limited, at best.

That might require individual workers to do more to protect themselves from obsolescence. For example, as Summers points out, software is devouring some industries once dominated by people. But software doesn’t design itself; people create software, and the number of college students earning the types of science and engineering degrees that lead to technology work has been going up. So some workers are, in fact, adjusting to the changing economy by ensuring they have skills likely to be most in demand.

More young Americans and their parents also seem to be scrutinizing the value of college as an investment meant to generate the highest possible return, rather than approaching it as a life experience merely meant to be enriching. Workers can take that one step further by remaining agile in their careers and alert to change, so they can get additional training if necessary or even move to a more dynamic field. And trends such as more people renting rather than owning a home and family members doubling (or tripling) up under one roof may provide a bit of breathing room as workers adjust to a demanding new economy — and get comfortable with the robots.

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Enlazando con el tema de Japón y de la "eficiencia" que comentaba en otro hilo...

http://www.gereports.com/post/91250246340/lettuce-see-the-future-japanese-farmer-builds

Fotitos y video en el enlace.

Anuncian un crecimiento un 250% más rápido, reducción de pérdidas de la cosecha del 50% al 10%, y reducción del gasto de agua a tan solo el 1%

Lettuce See the Future: Japanese Farmer Builds High-Tech Indoor Veggie Factory

Humans have spent the last 10,000 years mastering agriculture. But a freak summer storm or bad drought can still mar many a well-planted harvest. Not anymore, says Japanese plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura, who has moved industrial-scale farming under the roof.

Working in Miyagi Prefecture in eastern Japan, which was badly hit by powerful earthquake and tsunamis in 2011, Shimamura turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world’s largest indoor farm illuminated by LEDs. The special LED fixtures were developed by GE and emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth.

The farm is nearly half the size of a football field (25,000 square feet). It opened on July and it is already producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day. “I knew how to grow good vegetables biologically and I wanted to integrate that knowledge with hardware to make things happen,” Shimamura says.

The farm uses 17,500 LED lights spread over 18 cultivation racks reaching 16 levels high.

The LED lights are a key part of the farm’s magic. They allow Shimamura to control the night-and-day cycle and accelerate growth. “What we need to do is not just setting up more days and nights,” he says. “We want to achieve the best combination of photosynthesis during the day and breathing at night by controlling the lighting and the environment.”

Shimamura says that the systems allows him to grow lettuce full of vitamins and minerals two-and-a-half times faster than an outdoor farm. He is also able to cut discarded produce from 50 percent to just 10 percent of the harvest, compared to a conventional farm. As a result, the farms productivity per square foot is up 100-fold, he says.

By controlling temperature, humidity and irrigation, the farm can also cut its water usage to just 1 percent of the amount needed by outdoor fields.

Purple lighting simulates the ideal night conditions.

Shimamura got the idea for his indoor farm as a teenager, when he visited a “vegetable factory” at the Expo ’85 world’s fair in Tsukuba, Japan. He went on to study plant physiology at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, and in 2004 started an indoor farming company called Mirai, which in Japanese means “future.”

The concept took off in 2011, when GE approached Shimamura with an idea for using advanced LED lights to illuminate the farm. The LEDs last longer and consume 40 percent less power than fluorescent lights. The companies started testing the technology in March 2012 and came up with the final design a year later.

The farm is producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day.

GE engineers used proprietary technology to make the lights thin enough to fit inside the stacks, provide uniform light and endure the high humidity inside. “That way, we can put in more growing racks and increase productivity dramatically,” says Tomoaki Kimura, country manager for GE Lighting Japan.

The GE Japan team believes that indoor farms like the one in the Miyagi Prefecture could be a key to solving food shortages in the world. Mirai and GE are already working on “plant factories” in Hong Kong and the Far East of Russia. Says Shimamura: “Finally, we are about to start the real agricultural industrialization.”

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Selección de video.

Logística general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1jCwKmNgHQ

Selección-empaquetado de salami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTd8XDZOEk

Almacén de congelados completamente automatizado: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuvrP1QKsdk

Sistema de carga y descarga para camiones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdpjuWfG2D4

Yahoo News: "Should we let robots take our jobs?" https://screen.yahoo.com/let-robots-jobs-dnews-130000441.html

[Mad Men]

existen dos dos razones por las que cada vez hace falta menos factor trabajo humano:

Por la globalización y externalización del factor humano en las empresas, el cual solo se podría detener si el mundo se vuelve más inseguro y empiecen a cerrarse los países en sí mismos

Por la evolución tecnológica y la sustitución por máquinas, este difícilmente se puede detener , puede haber más o menos inversión en el sector tecnológico, pero el progreso es imparable.

La primera puede detener en parte el fin del trabajo , pero la segunda.... es imparable, al final todos terminaremos conectados a un súper-pc tipo matrix   

[Datum]

Mucha tuerca veo en los Warehouse  robotizados, algún empleo crearan.
Lo que evita robotiza, es que los humanos tengan un mal día.

Fork Lift Accident Brings Down The Warehouse FAIL	Small | Large

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Mucha tuerca veo en los Warehouse  robotizados, algún empleo crearan.

Alguno crean, pero por cada ingeniero caen X-mil operarios. Y el ingeniero igual no es ni del mismo continente.

Ojo que me parece cojonudo, pero es un reto gestionarlo bien al ritmo que se está produciendo, y por el hecho de no poder controlar su efecto económico global a golpe de decreto.

[Datum]

Mucha tuerca veo en los Warehouse  robotizados, algún empleo crearan.

Alguno crean, pero por cada ingeniero caen X-mil operarios. Y el ingeniero igual no es ni del mismo continente.

Ojo que me parece cojonudo, pero es un reto gestionarlo bien al ritmo que se está produciendo, y por el hecho de no poder controlar su efecto económico global a golpe de decreto.

Personalmente no me creo nada de las empresas tecnológicas, sus cifras y sus poderes.
En concreto el Tema de los Warehouse  robotizados, a gran escala, me gustaría saber el beneficio real que le queda al empresario, además considero que ese grado de mecanización implica que cualquier tontería,  bloquee la cadena completa., demasiados elementos mecánicos  imprescindibles interrelacionados,. No me creo nada, me fascina la tecnología rusa, por su sencillez. cuando veo estos engendros mecanicos/roboticos tipo Warehouse, sencillamente no me creo nada.

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Es muy real. Aunque obviamente no se va a acabar todo en tres tardes.

Las factorías de Toyota y Honda en Japón admiten visitas, son todo un espectáculo. Hay una que tiene dos o tres operarios a tiempo completo y escupe coches a todo meter, impresiona. Brazos robóticos a toda velocidad con precisión. Incluso habiendo currado en ello impresiona cuando lo ves todo funcionar.

Claro está que ahí hay mucho curro de ingeniería, de investigación y de momento de mantenimiento también. Pero muchísimo menos que la producción que sustituye, porque es serializable. Que se lo digan a los que montan iphones en Foxconn.

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Los de Amazon parece que van en serio con lo de los drones.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/11/us-amazon-com-drones-idUSKBN0FG08B20140711

[Mad Men]

Es muy real. Aunque obviamente no se va a acabar todo en tres tardes.

Las factorías de Toyota y Honda en Japón admiten visitas, son todo un espectáculo. Hay una que tiene dos o tres operarios a tiempo completo y escupe coches a todo meter, impresiona. Brazos robóticos a toda velocidad con precisión. Incluso habiendo currado en ello impresiona cuando lo ves todo funcionar.

Claro está que ahí hay mucho curro de ingeniería, de investigación y de momento de mantenimiento también. Pero muchísimo menos que la producción que sustituye, porque es serializable. Que se lo digan a los que montan iphones en Foxconn.

El otro día leí que toyota quiere desrobotizar algunos procesos de fabricación debido al aumento de errores y fallos en sus productos.