New Florence. New Renaissance.

The NBA Warriors and “super workers”

In Silicon Collar I had several examples of how machines can turn employees into “super workers”

• Aided by telematics, UPS drivers on average get into less than one accident per million miles driven.
• Foxconn employees working alongside bots and precision equipment have delivered billions of high-quality electronic devices to Apple and other customers.
• Amazon’s data center employees have delivered of an unheard of 50+ price cuts as part of its AWS services

Some of the most impressive super workers profiled in the book are the coaches and players at the Golden State Warriors. 3 NBA finals in a row, and more to come according to many commentators and a whole slew of team and individual records.

I wrote in the book about how with missile tracking technology and wearables the team keep innovating

“For Kirk Lacob, Assistant General Manager of the team, part of his job is to scout and introduce technologies infused with rich data to help make his players more competitive. It's a version of automation in the sports world. It's also leading to jokes as to whether Curry is a 3-point shooting robot.” 

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More on Scheid Vineyards

I profiled automation at Scheid in all aspects of grape growing and wine making in my book, Silicon Collar and it is good to see KSBW, a Monterey, CA TV station do this story on their continued automation. 

http://www.ksbw.com/article/monterey-county-vineyard-using-robots-to-harvest-grapes-1495678323/9927126

Silicon Collar excerpt: Financial Advisers

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

As FastCompany reported, "Companies such as Wealthfront, Betterment and FutureAdvisor offer ‘robo-adviser’ services. Rather than investing money based on the decisions of a human expert, they use technology to manage a portfolio and recalibrate it on an ongoing basis. Doing so allows them to grind down fees, and poses a threat to the conventional business model of a company like Schwab, which is very much used to monetizing the wisdom of human beings."

So Schwab has responded with its own Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, which it markets as "an online investment advisory service that builds, monitors, and rebalances your portfolio—so you don't have to."

While it's still tiny—the service has $6 billion under management and a team of 300 (out of a total staff of 15,000)—it positions Schwab to compete with the start-ups as the market gradually warms up to robo-advisers.

 

 

Silicon Collar excerpt: Automation and the UPS driver

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Let's next meet Ken, the UPS deliveryman for our neighborhood. For over two decades, he has had a constant companion: The Delivery Information Acquisition Device (DIAD), which guides delivery routes, gets delivery confirmations from customers, and helps the drivers in many other ways. Without DIADs, it is highly unlikely UPS could deliver over 35 million packages a day during the peak holiday season.

DIAD was developed for UPS in the late 1980s by Motorola, and first deployed in 1990, before the iPhone or the iPad was even conceived. Its battery lasts all day—much longer than the batteries in most Apple or Android devices. Now in its fifth generation, it can communicate with both CDMA and GPRS cellular technologies to stay connected with multiple carriers.

Sensors on the UPS truck track engine performance and simulate what the driver does all week long. That data has led to reductions in excessive idling, and the now-famous UPS "no left turns" dictum on the majority of their routes (to reduce time, fuel, and accidents). It has also allowed UPS to reduce reversing occurrences by a quarter. One mile per driver per day over one year can save UPS up to $50 million in fuel costs. One minute of time saved per driver is worth half a million dollars a year to UPS, so the technologies have made them highly productive workers. They are also much safer drivers, as they log nearly three billion miles per year with less than one accident per million miles driven. UPS inducts drivers who have 25 years of incident-free driving into its "Circle of Honor." In 2016, 8,700 drivers had reached that milestone,

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Silicon Collar excerpt: Automation and the Garbage Collector

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Our county has 95-gallon garbage bin with sensors which allow for easy verification if a street has not been serviced. They are emptied into garbage trucks equipped with McNeilus AutoReach robotic arms.

Amaury, the driver operates a Republic Services truck, and he visits our street twice a week. He operates the robotic arm from the cab of his truck. In a full day he can gather over 1,200 bins, twice as many as he previously did with a human partner. Amaury no longer needs the associate dangling at the back of the truck doing a dangerous and stinky job. The contribution of the robotic arm: half the human resources, twice the production, and a much less tiring job.

The Volvo Group is planning to take such garbage collection into narrower streets and to places where the weather is not as pleasant as in my Florida county. Its Robot-based Autonomous Refuse (ROAR) project entails much more than a truck with a robotic arm. A robot carried at the back of the truck will zip around the streets and bring the garbage bins to the truck. A drone launched from the truck’s roof will scan the area and guide the robot to the bins.

The garbage bin itself is evolving and will further change the collection of garbage. BigBelly makes solar powered trash compactors, which can hold eight times more garbage than a standard bin. Volume sensors trigger the compacting mechanism and the bin communicates with a cloud-based management system which coordinates collections.

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Silicon Collar excerpt: Automation and Roofers

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

“It started with a truck equipped with a conveyor belt which rapidly moved shingles and other materials to the top of the roof. A crew stripped off the old roof and tossed the materials into another truck, which took the stuff to be recycled.

The modern roofer works with a Stanley staple gun, wears Cougar Paw shoes which help keep him from sliding on debris on sloping roofs, and uses Husky magnetic sweepers to keep the work site tidy. Our contractor, Magyar Roofing, diligently documented every step of the way with over 90 images on digital camera.

The humble shingle is designed these days for aesthetics, energy efficiency, and algae resistance. Also, and importantly for us in Florida, they are meant to handle winds up to 130 mph that accompany some hurricanes. It's not just the shingles -there are layers of moisture barrier, under-eave ventilation, and insulation that supplement the shingle protection.

As I said, I was impressed. The Magyar crew did the work over two days, and could have squeezed the job into one day if we did not have a two-tiered roof. A couple of decades ago, that work took much longer, was much less safe, and was not nearly as well documented.

The digital documentation that the contractor provided us and the inspection they arranged also helped us get a significant discount on our home insurance. Pixie dust, indeed.”

Silicon Collar excerpt: Food and beverage jobs

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

The supply chains for Tropicana (owned by Pepsi-Cola in nearby Bradenton) and Simply (owned by Coca-Cola in Auburndale) orange juice provide a glimpse of the automation needed to produce juice and illustrate how jobs in the industry have evolved.

Larger orange groves utilize robotic harvesters. The Oxbo tree shakers and pickup equipment can work day and night and collect up to a million pounds of fruit a day. Frost, which can be deadly to the crop, is easier to monitor with today's sensors. Satellite imagery is used these days to optimize picking times.

Then you get into the processing, and the steps there would humble most brewmasters—getting the aroma, color, and taste just right; the flash pasteurization; and the handling of all the by-products (including using the peel to create a form of ethanol). Next is the state-of-the-art packaging, and finally shipping, via pipeline, refrigerated rail cars, and shipping containers.

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Silicon Collar excerpt: Automation and the Architect

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Till her untimely passing in March 2016, Hadid was the lead partner of her London firm that has architected dazzling structures around the world. Her senior partner, Patrik Schumacher, has called their work “parametricism,” which he views as “a successor to postmodernism: shaping architecture with algorithms, computer design and new materials.”

Hadid's first major commission was the Vitra Fire Station in Germany, distinctive with its hard concrete structural bends. Her toughest assignment, she had said, was the MAXXI Italian National Museum of the 21^st Century Arts in Rome, which took a decade to construct and has been hailed as a masterpiece by critics. More successes followed, including the Aquatics Center for the 2012 London Olympics and the Guangzhou Opera House.

Image of one of Hadid’s works - Heydar Aliyev Center in Azerbaijan

Slow-Motion Automation

Excerpts from my column at Strategy+Business

“although most workers I encountered expressed positive sentiments about the new technologies, many prominent academics, analysts, and economists are worried sick about the new machine age.

“But there’s a case to be made that these fears are misplaced. A look back at how disruptive technologies have made their way into common use suggests that automation can take its own sweet time in displacing human labor. Research on the history of UPC codes and scanners since 1948; the ways in which cars have gradually been taking over control of driving from humans since cruise control was first introduced by Chrysler in 1958; and more recent case studies on artificial intelligence, robotics, self-service, and many other technologies and their related impact on jobs have led to what may seem to be a counterintuitive conclusion. Automation does affect many “3D tasks” — dull, dirty, and dangerous work that most humans are ultimately glad to give up. But societies absorb automation at a pace that’s much slower than technology’s evolution. And five powerful “circuit breakers” help delay and influence the trajectory of automation in surprising ways.”

The column then goes into the 5 “circuit breakers”

• Technology hype cycles
• Slow customer adoption curves
• Incumbent interests
• Tacit knowledge of workers
• Unintended consequences

Read more here

Silicon Collar excerpt: Uber driver

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Tony DiBenedetto lives a few miles from us, but the experiment he describes could easily have been done from our street or a growing number of streets around the world. DiBenedetto, CEO of Tribridge, an IT systems integrator, realized he was using his Chevy Volt less than 5% of the time.

"I started taking Uber, and I start journaling about every single trip. I did it for about 30 days, and I drew a number of conclusions that led me to sell my car.”

Next, he looked for opportunities across his company:

“I took a look at our company's T&E and our people are renting a ton of cars. So I got my whole exec team to stop renting cars, then I rolled Uber out to the whole company, and we've documented the savings. We're saving 35% on T&E because we're not using rental cars and taxis."

After the hundreds of Uber rides he has taken, I asked him if he had drawn a demographic profile of the drivers:

"Most of them were not ex-taxi drivers. I would say 50% of the people who drove me in that first month had a second job. It was everything from young kids just trying to make it, to retired people, or people who were bored. One of my drivers was a helicopter pilot who for two weeks a month worked for the big oil companies in New Orleans. The other two weeks he just didn't see himself doing nothing. He's ex-military, and so he picked up the Uber thing to basically not be bored. I thought that was interesting. The retired people were all pretty similar: They wanted to get out of the house or make a little extra cash. I'd say 5% to 10% were in between jobs. There's no question that it fills a gap in employment. It allows for people to run their little businesses, and still do Uber as a supplement. All the drivers love the flexibility."

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