“They’re coming – for your job.”
That’s the ominous message for everyone benighted enough to believe in job security under the Big Audit model, as delivered by Martin Ford in last year’s Financial Times business book of the year, “Rise of the Robots.”
It's my pleasure to take up this topic as a guest on Going Concern, Caleb Newquist's important platform for the profession.
Ford’s book brings focus to the question posed here at Going Concern in July, about KPMG’s partnership with Watson, IBM’s cognitive learning technology platform:
“What happens when the cognitive technology realizes that the bright human beings aren’t so bright?”
As a quick tour of the field increasingly occupied by the machines, “Robots” opens with a survey of the speed and spread of industrial robotics deployment – according to Ford’s source, the International Federation of Robotics, some 230,000 industrial robots were installed in 2014, with an estimated annual growth rate of 15% projected through 2018.
For additional context, these four pieces of recent news:
- Walmart’s June announcement that it is testing flying drones to handle its massive warehouse inventories – the goal to do “in a day what now takes employees about a month.”
- The use by a Lowe’s store in Silicon Valley of a prototype inventory checker built by Bossa Nova Robotics, that uses computer vision to recognize bar codes on shelves and a laser to show items out of stock, “automatically perform(ing) a task that humans have done manually for centuries.”
- The agreement of the British government, announced in July, to cooperate with Amazon’s exploration of drone delivery of packages of up to five pounds – 90% of its sales.
- PwC’s announcement in May of the launch in Poland of a commercial drone division – its leaders observing, with a complete lack of either irony or self-awareness, that “the addressable market value of drone powered solutions is over $127 billion.”
For the rest of the piece, please continue at Going Concern.
Thanks for sharing in this dialog. Please share with friends and colleagues. Comments are welcome, and subscription sign-up is easy and free -- both at the Home page.
Comments