Digitalisation, ai and Robotics in the New Workplace

Boston Consulting Group 2016

Declining costs

algorithms

Robotics Data

• The total number of industrial robots in operation worldwide was 1.5m in 2014, the IFR expects 1.3m more to come online in the next two years (IFR, 2016).
• Global number of workers employed approx. 3bn (ILO, 2011).
• The IFR predicts that by 2018, the global industrial robotics market will grow by 15 percent, while professional service robotics is expected to increase by 11 percent and personal service robotics by 35 percent. By 2018, global sales of industrial robots will on average grow year on year by 15 percent—the numbers of units sold will double to around 400,000 units, with five markets (China, Japan, USA, South Korea and Germany) representing 70 percent of the total global sales volume.
• Global capital investment in Robots in 2015 was $600m
• World Gross investment in 2010 was $14trillion (World Bank)

World Robot Density

Limitations?

• Technical, mobility, flexibility
• Intelligence? Consciousness?

“computers work very differently from the human mind – computers process increasingly large numbers of information serially, while the mind involves the simultaneous interaction of different mechanisms and processes” (Daniel Dennett, 1991, Consciousness Explained)

• Turing’s two ‘tests’.

1]…a machine would be able to think if it could hold a conversation that was indistinguishable from one with a human being (Turing, 1950) 2]…a ‘halting problem’ whereby a computer using AI may never ‘know’ when it is ‘right’, and so will continue to compute

• Economics……….profits, investment, productivity, demand

Evidence 1.…..diminishing productivity

• Evidence published in 2015 by Michaels and Graetz from a dataset of companies in 17 countries gathered between 1993 and 2007, suggests that while productivity increases with robotic innovation and some semi-skilled and lower skilled jobs are abandoned, “there is some evidence of diminishing marginal returns to robot use – ‘congestion effects’ -so they are not a panacea for growth……this makes robots’ contribution to the aggregate economy roughly on a par with previous important technologies, such as the railroads in the nineteenth century and the US highways in the twentieth century.”