4 items tagged "robots"

  • 2016 wordt het jaar van de kunstmatige intelligentie

    Artificial-intelligence.jpg-1024x678December is traditiegetrouw de periode van het jaar om terug te blikken en oudjaarsdag is daarbij in het bijzonder natuurlijk de beste dag voor. Bij Numrush kijken we echter liever vooruit. Dat deden we begin december al met ons RUSH Magazine. In deze Gift Guide gaven we cadeautips aan de hand van een aantal thema’s waar we komend jaar veel over gaan horen.Eén onderwerp bleef bewust een beetje onderbelicht in onze Gift Guide. Aan de ene kant omdat het niet iets is wat je cadeau geeft, maar ook omdat het eigenlijk de diverse thema’s overstijgt. Ik heb het over kunstmatige intelligentie. Dat is natuurlijk niets nieuws, er is al ontzettend veel gebeurt op dat vlak, maar komend jaar zal de toepassing hiervan nog verder in een stroomversnelling raken.

  • Routinebanen worden opgeslokt door robots en artificial intelligence

    Robots en artificial intelligence zijn anno 2016 al ver genoeg ontwikkeld om een relatief groot deel van het fysieke voorspelbare werk en dataverwerkingstaken van mensen over te nemen. Bovendien zal technologische vooruitgang ervoor zorgen dat steeds meer taken van mensen worden overgenomen, wat ofwel leidt tot meer tijd voor andere taken, of een vermindering van het aantal menselijke werknemers.

    Automatisering en robotisering bieden de mensheid de mogelijkheid om zich te bevrijden van repetitief, fysiek werk, dat vaak als onplezierig of saai wordt ervaren. Hoewel het verdwijnen van dit werk zal zorgen voor positieve effecten op aspecten als gezondheid en werkkwaliteit, heeft de ontwikkeling ook negatieve effecten op de werkgelegenheid – zeker in banen waarvoor weinig vaardigheden gevraagd worden. De afgelopen jaren is er veel gesproken over de omvang van de bedreiging die robots vormen voor de banen van menselijke werknemers en een recent onderzoek van McKinsey & Company gooit nog meer olie op het vuur. Volgens schattingen van het Amerikaanse consultancykantoor zal op korte termijn tot wel 51% van al het werk in de Verenigde Staten zwaar worden getroffen door robotisering en AI-technologie. 

    Analyzing work activities

    Het onderzoek, dat is gebaseerd op een analyse van meer dan 2.000 werk-gerelateerde activiteiten in de VS in meer dan 800 arbeidsfuncties, suggereert dat voorspelbaar fysiek werk in relatief stabiele omgevingen de grootste kans loopt om te worden overgenomen door robots of een andere vorm van automatisering. Voorbeelden van dit soort omgevingen zijn onder meer de accommodatie en horecabranche, de maakindustrie en de retailsector. Vooral in de maakindustrie zijn de mogelijkheden voor robotisering groot – ongeveer een derde van al het werk in de sector kan als voorspelbaar worden beschouwd. Kijkend naar de huidige automatiseringstechnologie zou tot wel 78% van dit werk kunnen worden geautomatiseerd.

    Maar het is echter niet alleen simpel productiewerk dat kan worden geautomatiseerd, aangezien ook werk op het gebied van dataverwerking en dataverzameling met de huidige technologie al kan worden gerobotiseerd. Volgens berekeningen van McKinsey kan tot wel 47% van de taken van een retail salesmedewerker op dit gebied worden geautomatiseerd – al ligt dit nog altijd veel lager dan de 86% automatiseringspotentie in het data-gerelateerde werk van boekhouders, accountants en auditors. 

    Automation is technically feasible

    In het onderzoek werd ook in kaart gebracht welke functies de meeste potentie voor automatisering hebben. Onderwijsdiensten en management lijken, kijkend naar de huidige technologie, de vakgebieden die het minst getroffen zullen worden door robotisering en AI-technologie. Vooral in het onderwijs zijn de percentages automatiseerbare taken laag, met weinig dataverzameling, -verwerking en voorspelbaar fysiek werk. Managers kunnen wel enige automatisering verwachten in hun werk, vooral op het gebied van dataverwerking en verzameling. In de bouw en landbouwsector is er sprake van veel werk dat als onvoorspelbaar kan worden beschouwd. De onvoorspelbare aard van deze werkzaamheden beschermt arbeiders in deze segmenten, omdat deze taken minder eenvoudig te automatiseren zijn.

    McKinsey benadrukt dat de analyse zich richt op het vermogen van de huidige technologieën om taken van mensen over te nemen. Dat dit technologisch mogelijk is, betekent volgens het consultancybureau niet dat deze werkzaamheden ook daadwerkelijk zullen worden overgenomen door robots of intelligente technologie. In het onderzoek wordt namelijk geen rekening gehouden met de implementatiekosten van deze technologie, of naar de grenzen van automatisering. Daardoor zullen werknemers in bepaalde gevallen goedkoper en beter beschikbaar blijven dan een gerobotiseerd systeem.

    Met het oog op de toekomst, voorspellen de onderzoekers dat met de komst van nieuwe technologieën op het gebied van robotisering en kunstmatige intelligentie er ook meer taken geautomatiseerd kunnen worden. Vooral technologie die het mogelijk maakt om natuurlijke gesprekken te voeren met robots, waarbij de machines menselijke taal kunnen begrijpen en automatisch kunnen antwoorden, zal volgens de onderzoekers een grote impact hebben op de mogelijkheden voor verdere robotisering.

    Bron: Consultancy.nl, 3 oktober 2016

     

  • The mobile revolution is over. Get ready for the next big thing: Robots

    barbieThe computer industry moves in waves. We're at the tail end of one of those waves — the mobile revolution. What's next? Robots.

    But not the way you think.

    The robot revolution won't be characterized by white plastic desk lamps following you around asking questions in a creepy little-girl voice, like I saw at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That might be a part of it, but a small part. Rather, it'll be characterized by dozens of devices working on your behalf, invisibly, all the time, to make your life more convenient.

    Some people in the industry use the term "artificial intelligence" or "digital assistants." Others talk about "smart" devices. But none of these terms capture how widespread and groundbreaking this revolution will be. This isn't just about a coffee maker that knows to turn itself on when your alarm goes off, or a thermostat that adjusts to your presence.

    (And "Internet of Things" — please stop already.)

    This is about every piece of technology in your life working together to serve you. Robots everywhere, all the time. Not like the Roomba. More like the movie "Her."

    Where've we been?

    Every 10 or 15 years, a convergence of favorable economics and technical advances kicks off a revolution in computing. Mainstream culture changes dramatically. New habits are formed. Multibillion-dollar companies are created. Companies and entire industries are disrupted and die. I've lived through three of these revolutions.

    • The PC revolution. This kicked off in the 1980s with the early Apple computers and the quick-following IBM PC, followed by the PC clones. Microsoft and Intel were the biggest winners. IBM was most prominent among the big losers, but there were many others — basically, any company that thought computing would remain exclusively in the hands of a few huge computers stored in a data center somewhere. By the end, Microsoft's audacious dream of "a computer on every desk and in every home" was real.

    • The internet revolution. This kicked off in the mid 1990s with the standardization of various internet protocols, followed by the browser war and the dot-com boom and bust. Amazon and Google were the biggest winners. Industries that relied on physical media and a distribution monopoly, like recorded music and print media, were the biggest losers. By the end, everybody was online and the idea of a business not having a website was absurd.

    • The mobile revolution. This kicked off in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. Apple and Samsung were the biggest winners. Microsoft was among the big losers, as its 20-year monopoly on personal computing finally broke.

    A couple of important points:

    First, when a revolution ends, that doesn't mean the revolutionary technology goes away. Everybody still has a PC. Everybody still uses the internet. It simply means that the technology is so common and widespread that it's no longer revolutionary. It's taken for granted.

    So: The mobile revolution is over.

    More than a billion smartphones ship every year. Apple will probably sell fewer iPhones this year than last year for the first time since the product came out. Huge new businesses have already been built on the idea that everybody will have an internet-connected computer in their pocket at all times — Uber wouldn't make sense without a smartphone, and Facebook could easily have become a historical curiosity like MySpace if it hadn't jumped into mobile so adeptly. This doesn't mean that smartphones are going away, or that Apple is doomed, or any of that nonsense. But the smartphone is normal now. Even boring. It's not revolutionary.

    The second thing to note is that each revolution decentralized power and distributed it to the individual.

    The PC brought computing power out of the bowels of the company and onto each desk and into each home. The internet took reams of information that had been locked up in libraries, private databases, and proprietary formats (like compact discs) and made it available to anybody with a computer and a phone line.

    The smartphone took those two things and put them in our pockets and purses.

    Tomorrow and how we get there

    This year's CES seemed like an "in-betweener." Everybody was looking for the next big thing. Nothing really exciting dominated the show.

    There were smart cars, smart homes, drones, virtual reality, wearable devices to track athletic performance, smart beds, smart luggage (really), and, yeah, weird little robots with anime faces and little-girl voices.

    But if you look at all these things in common, plus what the big tech companies are investing in right now, a picture starts to emerge.

    • Sensors and other components are dirt cheap. Thanks to the mobile revolution creating massive scale for the components that go into phones and tablets, sensors of every imaginable kind — GPS, motion trackers, cameras, microphones — are unimaginably cheap. So are the parts for sending bits of information over various wireless connections — Bluetooth LTE, Wi-Fi, LTE, whatever. These components will continue to get cheaper. This paves the way for previously inanimate objects to collect every kind of imaginable data and send simple signals to one another.

    • Every big tech company is obsessed with AI. Every single one of the big tech companies is working on virtual assistants and other artificial intelligence. Microsoft has Cortana and a bunch of interesting behind-the-scenes projects for businesses. Google has Google Now, Apple has Siri, Amazon has Echo, even Facebook is getting into the game with its Facebook M digital assistant. IBM and other big enterprise companies are also making huge investments here, as are dozens of venture-backed startups.

    • Society is ready. This is the most important point. Think about how busy we are compared with ten or twenty years ago. People work longer hours, or stitch together multiple part-time jobs to make a living. Parenting has become an insane procession of activities and playdates. The "on-demand" economy has gone from being a silly thing only business blogs write about to a mainstream part of life in big cities, and increasingly across the country — calling an Uber isn't just for Manhattan or San Francisco any more. This is the classic situation ahead of a computing revolution — everybody needs something, but they don't know they need it yet.

    So imagine this. In 10 years, you pay a couple-hundred bucks for a smart personal assistant, which you install on your phone as an app. It collects a bunch of information about your actions, activities, contacts, and more, and starts learning what you want. Then it communicates with dozens of other devices and services to make your life more convenient.

    Computing moves out of your pocket and into the entire environment that surrounds you.

    Your alarm is set automatically. You don't need to make a to-do list — it's already made. Mundane phone calls like the cable guy and the drugstore are done automatically for you. You don't summon an Uber — a car shows up exactly when you need it, and the driver already knows the chain of stops to make. (Eventually, there won't be a driver at all.)

    If you're hungry and in a hurry, you don't call for food — your assistant asks what you feel like for dinner or figures out you're meeting somebody and orders delivery or makes restaurant reservations. The music you like follows you not just from room to room, but from building to building. Your personal drone hovers over your shoulder, recording audio and video from any interaction you need it to (unless antidrone technology is jamming it).

    At first, only the wealthy and connected have this more automated lifestyle. "Have your assistant call my assistant." But over time, it trickles down to more people, and soon you can't remember what life was like without one. Did we really have to make lists to remember to do all this stuff ourselves?

    This sounds like science fiction, and there's still a ton of work ahead to get there. Nobody's invented the common way for all these devices to speak to each other, much less the AI that can control them and stitch them together. So this revolution is still years away. But not that far.

    If you try to draw a comparison with the mobile revolution, we're still a few years from the iPhone. We're not even in the BlackBerry days yet. We're in the Palm Pilot and flip-phone days. The basic necessary technology is there, but nobody's stitched it together yet.

    But when they do — once again — trillion-dollar companies and industries will rise and fall, habits will change, and everybody will be blown away for a few years. Then, we'll all take it for granted.

    Source: Business Insider

  • Why Robots Aren't here to Replace Humans, but to Complement Them  

    Why Robots Aren't here to Replace Humans, but to Complement Them

    You’ve heard the saying “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life,” right? Well, I hate to say it, but that’s me. I never dreamed that I would wind up in a field that combined all of my interests, but somehow that happened. Through my research at the MIT Media Lab I get to apply my legal and social sciences background to human-robot interaction. Which yes, does mean that I mostly get to play with robots all day. It’s as fun as it sounds, but it’s also much deeper than that. The transformations in robotics and AI, all driven by the vast power of data, are completely reshaping the world around us and our place within it. So, it’s crucially important that as a society, we understand how to address the human-robot relationship and anticipate the difficult questions that we could face in the future, from technology law and policy to AI ethics.

    Defining What a Robot Really Is

    If any of you have read my new book, I live by Illah Nourbakhsh’s rule that you should never ask a roboticist what a robot is. But in the latest episode of Data Brilliant, Joe DosSantos asked me to define a robot (don’t worry, he’s read my book and he did it on purpose to test me). And it was a pretty good place to start, because the answer is: It’s complicated. It may come as a surprise to many that, despite what Google Images would have you believe, there is no universal definition of a robot.

    Here's why. A lot of roboticists define a robot as a physical entity that can sense its environment and can make a decision based on the data that it has collected to then act on this environment. Sounds pretty good right? But then, doesn’t your phone do that? It even lights up and vibrates to act on its environment, yet no roboticist would call a smartphone a robot. So therein lies the complication. But lack of a dictionary definition shouldn’t stop us from thinking about what automated technologies mean for our future. In fact, it can be helpful for us to set aside some of our preconceived notions of robots.

    The Relationship Between Human and Machine

    As automation, AI, and robotics continue to become entrenched in our daily lives - from the data Spotify collects to show us recommended playlists and podcasts, to the navigation app on our phone or car - data continues to be a hugely powerful force within our society. But as Joe rightly pointed out when we spoke, that doesn’t necessarily mean that robots are going to take over our world and steal our jobs. Yes, machines are getting smarter, but their intelligence is different to that of you or me. Unlike robots, humans are creative, adaptable, and they can deal with uncertainty. And most importantly, combining forces and using machines to augment our intelligence and skills is much more effective than trying to recreate human ability.

    That’s why I compare our relationship with robots to our relationship with animals. We've used animals throughout history to help augment our work. From transportation to field work to using canaries as gas leak sensors in coal mines. As entities that can sense, think, make autonomous decisions, and learn, animals are a great analogy for how we should be thinking about robots. It’s certainly better than comparing them to humans, because the true potential of this technology is to partner with us, not to replace us.

    By the way, just as we grow emotional connections to certain animals, we also do with some robots. Joe asked me about a workshop I ran with my colleague Hannes Gassert, where we gave people cute baby dinosaur robots to play with and then asked people to hurt their robot. Nobody would. These robots weren’t living, they didn’t have emotional feelings or the capacity to feel pain, yet no person in the room wanted to do anything to cause them physical harm. And that told me a lot about how we treat robots differently than other devices, and how it’s useful to be aware of this as we deploy robots into shared spaces.

    Ultimately, our old Terminator-style narrative around robots is still a pretty widely held view within mainstream society. But I believe if we can set it aside, we take some agency back from the robots. It frees us to think more long term and creatively about how we want to integrate these technologies into our world, and how to do so in a more inclusive way that supports everyone.

    Author: Kate Darling

    Source: Qlik

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