Re:Balance -- Jim Peterson

“Rise of the Robots” – Part Three -- Cognitive Technology Threatens Us All

A reader’s skeptical comment on the second of this series -- here Part I and Part II -- on the ominous messages for the accounting profession in Martin Ford’s prize-winning book of last year, Rise of the Robots, was that, "The elephant in the room (is) that automation is nowhere close to being able to make complex judgments which are routine in the type of audit and accounting jobs that are relevant to the people who read GC,” asking if, by analogy, I was “seriously trying to argue that an attorney, currently working at a firm, needs to worry about their job prospects due to automation?"

Rather than shooting at the messenger, a deeper look at Ford’s discussion may be in order. Although that may likely only increase the level of unease and upset.    

To round out the picture of the speed with which high-functioning drones and robots will displace the jobs and careers of the humans in traditional audit, Ford focuses on the ever-expanding pace with which Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence and cognitive technology can be expected to displace the higher-order roles of human expertise and professional judgment.

His proposition, in summary, is that any professional’s position is at risk, who sits at a desk and interacts with either words or numbers, or teams up with software that is self-learning and therefore likely to dispense promptly with its human collaborator.

As Ford himself puts it:

        "If you find yourself working with, or under the direction of, a smart software program, it’s probably a pretty good bet that –- whether you’re aware of it or not –- you are also training the software to ultimately replace you."

For the rest of the piece, please continue at Going Concern for August 24.

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“Rise of the Robots” – Part Two -- And They’ll Audit Better, Smarter, Cheaper

“The ‘smarter’ machines get, the more and more jobs they’ll replace. Including mine. And yours.”
    -- Reader Comment

Martin Ford’s prize-winning “Rise of the Robots” (2015) underlies this three-part set of guest posts for Caleb Newquist's Going Concern, looking at the prospects that drones, robots and cognitive technology will rapidly displace jobs and careers at all levels of the Big Audit model, and that the speed with which those learning organisms will surpass that of even high-judgment humans is dramatically under-appreciated.

The span of initial reader reactions included the expected denial and resistance -– “the obligatory weekly robot article” and “tired of this argument” –- part of the automation dialog since the dawn of the Industrial Age when artisanal weavers led by Ned Ludd burned factories and destroyed looms in England out of their anxiety over an uncertain future.

More substantively, this part starts with the comment (compressed and emphasis added) that “Automation has been here forever… Since we who are still here have adapted in the past, I assume the majority of us will continue to adapt in the future.”

That’s a reader stating the “induction fallacy” -– namely, that past conditions are not only expected to continue, but provide guidance as to the likelihood that conditions will not change -– both a common and instinctive human reaction, and in general quite misleading. (For those so inclined, see the insightful if eccentric Nassim Nicholas Taleb in “The Black Swan” (2007) and, better, Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant "Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011).)

    Not “This time it’s different” –- but “The future is already arriving”

To start, the MOTS skepticism needs to be dispelled. The fatal accident on May 7, 2016 involving a Tesla Model S in “autopilot” mode, where the car’s system was somehow blinded and unable to recognize a white truck turning across its path, will not slow down the arrival of driverless vehicles. Quite the contrary -– now unleashed, the genii of technology will not be re-captured. The discussion has already shifted from capability to liability and responsibility. It’s no longer “if?” -- but “how?” and “how soon?”

For the rest of the piece, please continue here at Going Concern for August 11.

 

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“Rise of the Robots” – It’s Time for Accountants to Be Afraid

             “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.

 

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