MSP123 [] Gen-C: The Automation Nation

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's Friday, my name is Jia Sanu and on last week's show, MSP looked into some of the tech-related accessibility and privacy concerns that have arisen over the course of the past few months. This week we take a look at how the pandemic and technology are accelerating the changes in the way we work. Something I know you wanted to talk about last week, but didn't have the time for, which was office design.

So Matt, shall we start there? Hey, Jaffy, yeah, you know, often we don't pay a lot of attention to the way that offices are designed. So it's clear to many of us, I think that our employers don't pay much attention to it beyond, you know, cramming desks together and giving people some power points and lighting and maybe cool them down enough that they don't have an aneurism while they're working. But for a lot of people, I think, you know, that pretty much describes the environments that they've spent a lot of their working lives in.

But at the other end of the spectrum, you have all of these, you know, expensively kitted out offices, design spaces or whatever they call them, that are often much prettier to look at than they are functional to work in. One of the great exceptions that I've had the opportunity to experience is Nissan's design factory in Tokyo. That was designed with innovation, utility and comfort in mind, because the staff are expected to pass on those same traits in the work for the company in designing the exteriors and interiors of cars. So, you know, it was full of cozy offices that walls could be rolled back and suddenly you're in a warehouse so that the staff could effectively be working next to the full-size prototypes that they were designing.

Or by contrast, you know, they could secrete themselves away in many libraries with the latest design books and journals, and they had all these amazing views over rolling hills and forests. Which probably doesn't describe the environment. Most of our listeners have spent their working lives in. Well, exactly.

And, you know, even for the employers that occupy that middle ground, you know, maybe they've read some of the material about environment, social behavior or maximizing productivity. You know, so they've tried to create a workplace that balances comfort and efficiency, but there's still going to be that element of getting bumps on seats. So, what's the best way to accommodate the maximum number of people in the smallest space possible without actually compromising their work? And that comes down to money.

It would be fantastic, you know, if we all had an acre of land around our desk, maybe a couple of grazing sheep, an apple tree or two, and, you know, it was a 15 minute stroll through the meadows to your interdepartmental meetings. But as we know, companies typically pay rents based on the square footage of the premises that they occupy. So, you're far more likely to be apologizing to your colleagues 10 times a day for knocking the back of their chair as you walk past them, than you are to be chatting about SWOT analysis by a bubbling brook. I feel that we've strayed quite a long way from Generation C and office design realities.

Hey, I'm just trying to set a scene here, you know, painting a picture. We've all been staring at our wall for weeks. I'm just, you know, trying to introduce an element of pastoral care into the show. Now, a friend of mine who lives in Switzerland amongst the lakes, hills, and the bubbling brooks that I've been describing, he works for a computer-aided design company.

Now, you'd expect the company's cloud services to be very popular right now, people like industrial designers, car makers, architects, of course, engineers. There's no shortage of professions that need remote solutions for 3D design and collaboration tools at the moment. But what I found interesting was that he mentioned that a lot of their clients have been coming to them and asking for help in redesigning their offices. Which brings us back to the new normal?

Yeah, because we're seeing, you know, this gradual opening up around COVID-19, people are going back to work around the world. But the offices they're returning to aren't necessarily the offices that they left in mid-March or April. And that takes us back to my friend in Switzerland, because now companies are redesigning their offices around other purposes. They're asking for assistance to create traffic flows in the office, so the employees will move in a single direction, so you don't get people, you know, walking past one another.

Workspaces are being reconfigured to accommodate social distancing requirements, and it's the same with meeting rooms and common areas. And they're doing this at a time where they may be experiencing a drop in revenues or payment collections. And of course, while most of them are mid-tenancy with the properties in the spaces they occupy. Essentially, you have all these financial and practical reasons that prevent companies from simply increasing their footprint.

Yeah, and these, you know, effectively spur of the moment requirements are incredibly complex. You know, look at your own, or maybe remember back to your old workspace. How easy would it be to move it to change those power points and those land connections and configurations to calculate how much space each employee now needs with social distancing. You know, how wide thoroughfares between desks or cubicles now have to be.

So these are the kind of things that you need experts, or at least the software of experts to help you model. And it's not just the physical space. I think one of the things that interested me most was that companies are also asking for help in calculating airflow. They're trying to find out is the air being cleaned and recycled often enough that it poses a minimal infection risk.

They're asking, you know, what are the potential viral loads that an infected employee could breathe out, and what infection risk would pose to the rest of their staff, given the current airflow levels they have within their space. And surely that's other than beyond for most companies. Sure, but you know, look at workplaces beyond offices like retail stores. Now, those are often in malls or climate controlled buildings.

And also we're in, you know, very uncharted territory legally as well. I'm sure there will be plenty of test cases in the future, but we haven't legally established these new norms of protections in workplaces and stores and the places we go to shop. So it might be covered in some countries on municipalities, but global companies have to think about global practices, not just to minimize interruptions to the actual work, but for the health of the people they employ. So we've already seen plenty of news stories about workers who claim that they've been given insufficient levels of personal protective equipment by their companies.

And I think we'll also see challenges that ask white collar companies if they had been doing enough to protect their workers. You know, did they analyze floor space? Did they look at airflow? If they didn't do those things, then why didn't they?

You know, where are the limits of liability for companies whose workers contract COVID-19 in the workplace or from colleagues in the workplace? So we are in this very strange new area. We don't know how safe we are at work, and our employers don't know how safe they are from the people they're employing. Which is why you see us accelerating towards automation?

Yeah, one of the things we've heard through this crisis is the risk of food ripening and then rotting in fields without a labor force to harvest it. So in the UK, for example, there's a scheme called Feed the Nation where furloughed workers can volunteer to go and pick berries and vegetables and whatever else is growing in the fields. We've seen similar projects in other countries. In fact, I think a lot of people won't be aware that Jeff volunteers to pick rice every day after he finishes work here in the studio.

I mean, I say volunteers, the farms in the fields are mine and the guards escorting him are armed, but they've never once had to draw their weapons on him. And yet, with employment practices like that, you still want to auto me. Well, very often when we see supply-side interruptions to goods, they tend to be caused by external factors, war, political instability, collapse of infrastructure, natural disasters. With this disaster, it's very much been people that are the bottlenecks.

When you look at something like coal mines, for example, those are largely automated. But unless they're humans to drive the lorries and the drains or workers to load the ships, even clerical people to process export paperwork, then that coal just sits in the place that it's mined. So we're seeing these knock-on effects further down the chain related to human activity. But by and large, we haven't seen a shortage of energy.

It's quite the opposite. Fossil few prices have slumped against falling demand. I mean, I'm just trying to use an example that people understand. I mean, I guess I should have stuck with food.

The point I was trying to make is that the physical world is largely the same as it was before this disease. It's the humans who are sheltering in place. And that sheltering has had the knock-on effect that everything we use to do has stopped or at least slowed down, except for the people judged to be in essential industries, you know, people like health workers, restaurant staff, delivery riders. And creative directors?

No, not creative directors. I may do a little something on the effects of the pandemic on advertising on our spin-off show, MSPX, but I wouldn't make anyone sit through 20 minutes of that here. What I think most companies have quietly resolved to ensure is that people don't become the weakest link in that supply chain in future. The shape of automation to come stay tuned.

You're listening to MSP on BFM 89.9 But films, man, BFM 89.9, the business station. Welcome back. You're listening to MSP before the break. Matt, you were once again unfairly targeting the advertising industry that pays most of your wages.

As you sound like a glitching machine, maybe you are the right person to ask, what is this new world of automation would look like? Well, I like the way you appeal to my supposed expertise, but then wrap it in an insult. I think you've just invented something called humble ragging, potentially, I guess, the flip side of the humble brag. But one of the stories we covered last year, I think, was an experimental rapping and boxing machine that Amazon was trialing that could send out orders at a phenomenal rate.

I remember the machine had to be fed by human workers, even if the orders themselves had been picked up by the robots. Yeah, if I remember rightly, because the things we order from sites like Amazon very massively in size, they're very difficult for a robotic arm to pick up and sling on to the backing arm. So robots like things that are orderly. They are getting better at that fine granular control.

But when it isn't automatic and learned, then it is a big issue. You can program the arm to pick up an egg or you can program it to pick up a chainsaw and it will use the appropriate amount of force to stop it damaging the item. But if someone orders an egg, a chainsaw, and let's say, I don't know a vase. What kind of people do you know that order eggs, vases, and chainsaws?

Well, obviously the eggs are for breakfast and the vase and the chainsaw are because you've taken up the new pandemic hobby of extreme flower arranging. But the people aren't the point. The point is that people order all kinds of weird and bizarre combinations of things. So a robot that is programmed to pick up specific items, struggles when it comes to the realities of human behavior, things we do naturally are flexibility, our adaptability.

So you have this weird break in the chain, although it's probably just going to be a temporary one, but you have a machine that picks the order, but a person or persons have to sit between the machine who picks and the machine who packs, taking from one and feeding the other. So the joke we made at the time was that humans have become slaves to the machine. You literally have to meet an inhuman standard because the machines can operate tirelessly 24 hours a day. You know, I genuinely can't remember what point you're trying to make it.

Well, the point is that people have been shown up for the week link that they are, at least from a business perspective during the past few weeks. That's a bit harsh, isn't it? From a human perspective, yes. But try looking at it from the other side for a minute.

Let's say you're Amazon or some other company and you have all these robots fulfilling client requests. The technology isn't quite up to speed in one area, which is feeding the orders to the packing machine. So you need people. Suddenly a global calamity hits, but you're still OK, because your workers are classified as essential.

You do worry that some workers are going to get sick, so there is a supply issue. Also, your warehouse is your hubs. They're not optimized to limit the spread of the virus. And your human workers are pretty unhappy with their conditions.

And at the same time, the companies are under enormous pressure to get all of those goods out to the people. Well, precisely, you know, we talked in an earlier show about the pandemic flipping retail around, because suddenly digital online retail is now the norm. So there has also been enormous pressure from governments for these logistics and shipping and online retail companies to meet consumer demand from everything from the ubiquitous toilet paper to the aforementioned chainsaws. So as a business, do you plan for this as that 100 year flood, or do you assume that this could be the new normal?

You've already been pushing towards automation. Do you carry on progressively, or do you double down and phase out that weak link? So it's the same with self-driving vehicles. Do you plan for a future where the delivery truck can break down, but the driver can't?

Are we seeing similar moves to autonomy in agriculture? Well, as I said earlier, you know, one of these scare stories that we've heard is that people could end up going hungry because crops can't be harvested, because the people who harvest that food, who are often foreign or domestic migrant workers, haven't been able to migrate to those places to do those jobs. So we could be looking at farmers losing crops, and of course the income associated with that, and then not being able to plant the next year's crop. So we have this enormous vested interest in food production being much more machine autonomous than it currently is.

So if we go back to those self-driving vehicles, we have autonomous agricultural and construction vehicles already coming into service when you see those vast planes of wheat in Australia, increasingly they're being targeted for AI or remote controlled combined harvests to harvest that wheat. So you can do a lot of these broad strokes in agriculture with automation already. But it's still difficult to pick some crops with machines. Again, you know, it's that sense of granular control, or simply the decision that this fruit is ready, but the one next to it may need another day or two.

And then there are issues like weeding. How does a robot recognise which bit is the weed and which is the crop? So we're seeing increasing innovation in automated agriculture, not least in urban farming solutions, where intensive and hydroponic agriculture tended by AI and robots is promising to bring food production back to our population centres and shorten those farm-to-table distribution chains, that we've seen becoming so critical over the past few weeks. And this is where you talk to us about something interesting like asparagus.

Nearly! Koi Flower, an Indian startup called AutoRoboculture in Gandinagar, has come up with a prototype robot device that calls Nindamani, that uses AI to identify and remove weeds in Koi Flower feeds. Now, we're not talking about some straw chewing version of Robocop. They've kept the machine part quite simple.

It moves around on wheels between the rows. There's a camera that identifies weeds and a robo claw that pulls them out of the ground. Obviously the AI is helping it to identify the weeds. The idea is to create a machine that is cost-effective for Indian farmers who were already suffering from labour shortages even before this pandemic.

So this machine helps to meet that labour shortage, and it should help to reduce their dependence on expensive and environmentally questionable chemical weed killers and sprays in the future. The company will also plan to incorporate GPS or LIDAR into the machine so that they can be truly autonomous on a farm. And they're also in the planning stages to expand the crops to other staples like tomato and okra, as well as cash crops like peanuts and cotton. But this is just one of the whole raft of new agricultural automation innovations.

What about the world of white collar automation? Well, now that we're all living online, we mentioned in a show a couple of weeks back that every company is trying to get its e-retail arms up and running. Those interactions you used to have with brands that just had a basic website operating. Now you go onto those sites and there's some super sophisticated chatbot at the bottom of the page.

And it goes to show you how far and how quickly that technology has come along. Because for basic retail questions, you barely notice that it isn't a human being. And the more we train them, the better they get. Well to an extent, obviously that depends who supplies your chatbot and probably more importantly, who supports or provides the AI to that company for that chatbot.

It'll be a while before we see how deeply this kind of automation has affected current businesses and whether the always on robot approach actually increases or maintains sales and of course lead generation. But something I've been doing a lot with clients is a little simpler. It's looking at their infrastructure and internal processes, looking at all the things that were previously compiled manually and asking, well, can someone just write a script for that and automate it? And it's not even about reducing human headcans.

It's trying to build in those efficiencies and redundancies so that information can flow easily while staff work off-site. But there is an element of will these jobs come back? Sure. Even that example I mentioned before the break, you know, redesigning office traffic flows, those are already tasks that can be automated to a large degree.

You upload a floor plan, a UK in your requirements and the AI spits out various versions with a percentage correlation that goes back to your original request. And of course, unlike a human designer, you can ask it to keep spitting out different versions and tweaks and permutations. One of my favorite automation examples from the last few weeks are those UV sterilizing robots that we've seen doing deep cleaning work at hospitals. They're great because it means that a human life isn't put at risk to clean those areas.

But after the pandemic, are you likely to put that robot back in the cupboard and get a human cleaner back? I'd say it's probably very unlikely. And it's a pattern we're seeing repeated across many different industries. Yeah.

I mean, China has developed automated restaurant kitchens. We're seeing more drone delivery and drone patrolling services, both from flying and rolling drones. Companies that can automate are running to do so. And the corollary of that is that more money is being poured into startups and cloud solutions that will allow us to automate more tasks that humans routinely do now.

So what happens to all those people that technology has made it job made them jobless now? I said last week that we'd talk about income replacement schemes like universal basic income. And as usual, I've whitted on for far too long and blown it. So maybe we'll come back to this again on another show further down the line.

But we've seen all sorts of governments floating income replacement schemes during this pandemic. Interestingly, the UK has one of the most far-reaching schemes at the moment. But what will really be the issue is what happens when governments try to end those schemes. As I said, the pandemic has shown a lot of companies that it really doesn't make much sense to have human workers if it's something that a machine can do.

And it's no longer just a straight cost benefit issue. It's now a business interruption issue. You don't switch a factory off and come back three months later with your human workforce, switch everything back on, and everything just starts working. At the same time, and this is very simplistic economic analysis, by the way, at the same time, you need people to have an income to buy your products and actually keep that system moving.

And income, but not necessarily a job. Well, this is the dilemma. Can a great recession be averted by paying the unemployed not to work, which relies, of course, on governments levying taxes from companies and giving that money to people like you and me to buy the things the companies paying the tax are actually producing? Again, it's a very simplistic economic analysis.

Well, you're listening to Matt on MSP, not Rosha, and on Ring It and Sense. So in a very literal way, you are getting what you pay for. But universal basic income has had a chequered history in recent pilot schemes. It has tended to improve happiness, but it hasn't necessarily helped people back into the workforce.

Now, there are lots of complex reasons behind that. But now we have a very different scenario. We may actually find that companies become increasingly human-averse. In that they actively avoid hiring people?

Well, yes, which means we're going to need some very creative solutions to put money into people's pockets. It might mean massive expansions of the not-for-profit or government employment sectors. It might mean expansions in infrastructure and public works projects. We might have to look at things like charitable and community-based work, people who actually see volunteering as a career.

It could even mean that Netflix pays you to stay at home to watch its worst reality programming. And that's pretty much what most of us are doing already, just without being paid to do it part. But what I think we aren't going to go back to is this idea of business as usual. I think that whatever happens next, we've already entered the age of the automation nation.

Well, we may be living in the new norm. I feel we're still getting the same old man amity, scaring us as usual. Thanks, Jeff. You've been listening to MSP, eps123 can download the podcast on the BFM website, or you can also download previous episodes on the app.

You've been listening to MSP. My name is Jeff. I'm together with Manamatic. We have a 89.9.