Robots are Coming

It’s intuitive that automation will take low-wage jobs.

But the White House, in its annual economic report of the president, has broken down just how much that is so. 

There’s an 83% chance that automation will take a job with an hourly wage below $20, a 31% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage between $20 and $40, and just a 4% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage above $40.

The White House used the same data that underlines other research in the field of labor and robots to arrive at the conclusion.

The key question is what happens when a robot takes one of these low-wage jobs. 

Traditionally, innovation leads to higher income, more consumption and more jobs, but the question is whether the current pace of automation may in the shorter term increase inequality. 

One study found that higher levels of robot density within an industry lead to higher wages in that industry, the White House notes. 

However, that could be because the absence of lower-skills biases wage estimates upwards.

The White House says the findings demonstrate the need for training and education to help displaced workers find new jobs.

In other parts of the world... for instance, British high streets and factories will be transformed over the next two decades as millions of jobs are replaced by robots, a new report warns. 

Eleven million jobs across the UK economy are at high risk of being automated by 2036, with the retail and transport sectors most vulnerable, according to Deloitte. 

It came as Sir Roger Carr, the chairman of BAE Systems, warned that humans could become “mere spectators” to their destruction unless governments do more to police the development of autonomous weapons. 

Deloitte, one of the "Big Four" accountancy firms, said rapid advances in technology and the popularity of online shopping meant more than 2m jobs in the wholesale and retail sector - or almost 60pc of the current retail workforce - had a high chance of being automated by 2036. 

Experts warned that self-checkouts and shelves stacked by robots would become a common sight in UK shops, with the pace of automation "likely to accelerate". 

Factory workers also face being replaced en-masse, the report said. A total of 1.5m jobs in the transport sector - or 74pc of the current workforce - are at high risk of automation in the next 20 years.

Time passes

Buying Up America

Chinese companies have been buying up foreign businesses, including American ones, at a record rate, and it's freaking lawmakers out.

There is General Electric's sale of its appliance business to Qingdao-based Haier, Zoomlion's bid for the heavy-lifting-equipment maker Terex Corp., and ChemChina's record-breaking deal for the Swiss seeds and pesticides group Syngenta, valued at $48 billion.

Most recently, a unit of the Chinese conglomerate HNA Group said it would buy the technology distributor Ingram Micro for $6 billion.

And the most contentious deal so far might be the Chinese-led investor group Chongqing Casin Enterprise's bid for the Chicago Stock Exchange.

To date, there have been 102 Chinese outbound mergers-and-acquisitions deals announced this year, amounting to $81.6 billion in value, according to Dealogic. 

That's up from 72 deals worth $11 billion in the same period last year.

And they're not expected to let up anytime soon. Slow economic growth in China and cheap prices abroad due to the stock market's recent sell-off suggest the opposite.

"With the slowdown of the economy, Chinese corporate companies are increasingly looking to inorganic avenues to supplement their growth," Vikas Seth, head of emerging markets in the investment-banking and capital-markets department at Credit Suisse, told Business Insider earlier this month.

A decade ago it was virtually nothing. Now, annual investment by Chinese companies in the United States exceeds American investment in China. 

“Chinese outward investment is the mother of all global trends,” Thilo Hanemann, director of research firm Rhodium Group, said at a recent event in New York sponsored by the Columbia Business School Asian Alumni Club.

Between 2005 and 2014, Chinese FDI global totals grew tenfold, from $12.26 billion to an estimated $120 billion. 

Purchases by state-owned enterprises, which dominated in the early years, are now eclipsed by those from privately owned Chinese companies, which is responsible for two-thirds of current investment.

To be sure, other countries spend far more in the United States than China does.

In fact, investment in the United States by China represents only .5 percent of the total US inbound investment flow. 

Still, the east-to-west trend is unstoppable, said Anthony Mak, who heads the Hong Kong Trade Development Council for the New York and Eastern US region.

Sunday Funnies

TOO CUTE

T. G. I. F. Solitude

Perhaps THE CURE-ALL

Homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine created in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann based on his doctrine of like cures like (similia similibus curentur), a claim that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people.

After a thorough evaluation of 57 scientific reviews that encompassed 176 studies on 68 illnesses, a panel of health experts has once again concluded that homeopathy is at best a placebo (when it's not being potentially harmful).

Homeopathy, which one of the panel members referred to as a “therapeutic dead-end,” is based on the idea that “like cures like” (a questionable proposition to start with). 

Thus, its practitioners claim that if you take a substance that causes a sickness or similar symptoms of a sickness, then dilute it—to the point where the result is plain water—you create a cure. 

There's no mechanism that can possibly explain this, but some tout the idea that water has memory that can retain therapeutic information after dilution has removed every last molecule of the “healing” substance.

These are centuries-old ideas, and we now know they defy basic knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology. 

Accordingly, they've long been dismissed by the vast majority of modern scientists and physicians. All that hasn’t stopped homeopathy believers.

In 2007, about 3.3 million Americans spent $2.9 billion on the industry. In the UK, the National Health Service picks up a $5.74 million (£4 million) check for two homeopathic hospitals and various water treatments. 

The numbers, while puzzling, may appear harmless at first. 

People have the right to spend their money on what they wish, and there is no inherent danger in drinking a bit of water. 

But there is potential for homeopathy to injure patients, according to the expert panel, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

“People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness,” the NHMRC concluded. 

To read entire article, click here...

THEREFORE: Homeopathy is a pseudoscience – a belief that is incorrectly presented as scientific. Homeopathic preparations are not effective for treating any condition; large-scale studies have found homeopathy to be no more effective than a placebo, suggesting that any positive feelings that follow treatment are only due to the placebo effect and normal recovery from illness.

It's Just a Water Leak

A radioactive water leak has halted plans to re-start a reactor at a nuclear power plant in western Japan.  

This would have been the fourth to come online after a nationwide shutdown, its operator recently said.

Kansai Electric Power said some 34 litres (8.8 gallons) of cooling water containing radioactive substances leaked out from the reactor at its Takahama plant 380 kilometres (236 miles) west of Tokyo.

"Resumption procedures related to the incident have been suspended as we are still investigating the cause," a company spokesman said, adding that there was no impact on the environment outside the plant.

The government and utility firms have been pushing to get reactors back in operation nearly five years after a huge earthquake and tsunami caused a disastrous meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The accident forced all of Japan's dozens of reactors offline for about two years in the face of public worries over the safety of nuclear technology and fears about radiation exposure.

Last month, another reactor at Kansai Electric Power's Takahama plant was switched on, but the accident stalls plans to bring the next one online which have already met with stiff opposition from local residents.

The Fukui District Court in December overturned an injunction preventing a re-start of the two reactors which had been won by residents, who argued it was not proven to be safe despite a green light from the national Nuclear Regulation Authority.

Two reactors in the southern prefecture of Kagoshima, operated by Kyushu Electric Power, restarted in August and October 2015, ending the two-year hiatus in nuclear power generation.

But many Japanese remain wary and thousands of former residents have refused to return to areas hit by the Fukushima meltdown over fears of radiation exposure.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (福島第一原子力発電所事故 was an energy accident at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, initiated primarily by the tsunami of the Tōhoku earthquake on 11 March 2011. 

The damage caused by the tsunami produced equipment failures, and without this equipment a loss-of-coolant accident followed with three nuclear meltdowns and releases of radioactive materials beginning on 12 March. 

 It is the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and the second disaster (after Chernobyl) to be given the Level 7 event classification of the International Nuclear Event Scale.

It' Just a flash drive Gov...

End of Sterilization

MAHENDRAGARH, India — This is what family planning in India often looks like: Women in their 20s, mostly farmers’ wives, gather at dawn on the stairs of a district hospital. 

Hours later, a surgeon arrives. 

His time is short. He asks the women to sit in a row on the floor of the operating room and then, in operations lasting a few minutes apiece, uses a laparoscope to sever their fallopian tubes, ensuring they will never again bear a child.

For decades, India has relied on female sterilization as its primary mode of contraception, funding about four million tubal ligations every year, more than any other country. 

This year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi will take a major step toward modernizing that system, introducing injectable contraceptives free of charge in government facilities. 

The World Health Organization recommends their use without restriction for women of childbearing age.

New birth control options have long been advocated by international organizations, among them the United States Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

They say Indian women — often worn out, anemic and at higher risk of death because they bear children young and often — urgently need methods to delay or space pregnancies.

The number of lives touched by such policies is enormous and growing. India will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, and by 2050 it is expected to gain 400 million new citizens, more than the population of the United States.

Paradoxically, here in India, the keenest opposition to these newer methods of birth control — ones seen in the West as empowering women to control their fertility — has come from some women’s activist groups that distrust the safety of these methods and believe that profit-hungry Western pharmaceutical companies are pushing them. 

Despite growing evidence of the safety of the injectables and their increasingly widespread use across South Asia, these groups have continued to oppose them. 

And it is Mr. Modi’s socially conservative Bharatiya Janata Party that has broken with decades of resistance to injectables. 

The shift in policy has come in part because the government is less concerned about opposition from civil society groups, most of them more closely aligned with the previous ruling party, the Indian National Congress. 

Officials were also spurred by a medical disaster in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, where 13 women died in 2014 after undergoing tubal ligation at a high-volume government “sterilization camp.”

HumP Day Art

The Art of Csaba Markus

The Art of Lynn Rank Henry

 

 

Stepping Down

HONG KONG — China’s top securities regulator, Xiao Gang (above), has been forced out, the official Xinhua News Agency announced on Saturday, after facing stinging criticism for amplifying the country’s stock market turbulence.

The move reflects the increasing pressure on the Chinese leadership to bolster confidence at home, as questions mount about Beijing’s ability to manage the economy, the currency and the markets.

Just days ago, Prime Minister Li Keqiang castigated the country’s financial regulators for their handling of a steep plunge in stocks since last June and an erosion in the value of China’s currency.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission, led by Mr. Xiao, 57, has taken a big dose of blame for the problems.

He attracted significant criticism for allowing a speculative bubble to form, in which share prices more than doubled in a year. 

When it burst last summer, those shares gave up all of their gains, hurting millions of families who had borrowed heavily to buy stocks.

As stocks sank, the regulator also intensified the market mayhem. 

Two measures, intended to stabilize stocks, have been widely blamed for producing a week long rout in China’s stock markets during the first week of January that unsettled investors around the world.

Mr. Xiao defended himself in a long statement on his agency’s website in mid-January, analyzing the causes of his country’s recent financial sector difficulties. 

He said the turbulence in China’s markets, including another nose dive in share prices last summer, was partly caused by the inexperience of investors and the immaturity of the local market.

But he also conceded that recent troubles reflected an “imperfect trading system, flawed market mechanisms and inappropriate supervision systems,” together with an exodus of seasoned personnel from his agency.

Mr. Xiao, who also lost his post as the regulator’s Communist Party leader, will be succeeded as chairman and party leader by Liu Shiyu, 54, chairman of the Agricultural Bank of China and a former deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, according to the news agency.

Mr. Liu was trained in engineering at Tsinghua University, but started a career in the state banking sector in the 1980s, according to the news agency.

The Siege is On

A single road, like a fragile umbilical cord, connects rebel areas of Syria's second city Aleppo with international relief from Turkey. 

Those who remain are stockpiling arms and supplies -- bracing for their redoubt to be completely blockaded by the Syrian regime.

In the Turkish city of Gaziantep, charities are preparing to send aid south of the border to a Syrian city where 250,000 to 300,000 people are still living despite the relentless violence, too poor to escape or too invested in the fighting's outcome to run away.

"The siege by regime forces is not yet a done deal," said Assad Al-Ashi, head of the NGO Baytna Syria, adding that one road to Aleppo's west remains open.

"But it is under fire from all sides so it is still dangerous. It can be cut off at any moment," he said.

"Preparations are in full swing to get ready for a full siege," Ashi added.

"Syrian humanitarian organizations -- there are around a hundred on the ground -- are stockpiling everything they can inside the city.

"The local council in Aleppo has formed an emergency body to prepare for the siege. In the event of a total siege, Aleppo could last for a year, probably more," he estimated.

President Bashar al-Assad's army began large-scale offensives against the Aleppo rebels in February, backed by an intense campaign of Russian air strikes.

Bombardment by bombardment, strike by strike, fears that the city faces complete encirclement have taken hold, with thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting.

Insurgent groups can still reach the other rebel stronghold of Idlib in the northwest. From there, the Aleppo fighters have stockpiled hundreds -- perhaps even thousands -- of tonnes of weapons and provisions like flour, oil, sugar and medical supplies.

The siege of the southern city of Homs -- where the rebels held out for three years before finally surrendering -- provides a grim example of what Aleppo could face.

"But Aleppo won't be like that," said Manhal Bareesh of the Syrian opposition.

"The rebel zones are much larger and better defended. They are building trenches and tunnels so they can continue to move around. The siege will never be completely watertight." 

Many hospitals and clinics, often targeted by air strikes to demoralize civilians and fighters, have been moved to basements, as have some schools. Read more:

New kind of hammer

Move Back Home!!!

If you were to ask Iranians about the lifting of economic sanctions and many of them will tell you it’s too early to judge the impact this will have on their country’s economy and their everyday lives.

But as we found out on our recent visit to Tehran, some tech entrepreneurs are not waiting around to find out what comes next. 

They’re getting started already.

Takhfifan, which means “discount” in Farsi, is an online retail startup run by Nazanin Daneshvar.

The tech venture is a lot like an Iranian version of Groupon. Takhfifan brokers steep discounts with a variety of Tehran retailers on everything from sunglasses to candy to knock-off Starbucks mugs.

Consumers order online, and they appear to love the deals: Daneshvar’s startup has seen 100-percent annual growth. 

“Basically we are offering deals, daily deals, coupons vouchers, flash sales, promotions, anything that is related to discounts,” Daneshvar says. 

She wears a long black cardigan over a white blouse, with a hijab that looks more decorative than obligatory.

Daneshvar went to grad school in Tehran, then landed a job in London as a developer with a company trying to break into the Iranian market.

But Daneshvar says economic sanctions killed any chances of that happening.

“So, I moved back,” she says. And she got her first idea for a startup.

“My parents were living in a flat on the third floor and they were carrying all these groceries [up and down the stairs] all the time," she says. "And I just thought, ‘Maybe we should do something similar to Europe.’ So, I started the first online grocery shopping.”

Daneshvar’s maiden voyage as a tech entrepreneur took off so quickly it crashed and burned.

It was a simple home-delivery venture: A customer orders groceries through an app, and they get delivered to the customer’s home. But lots of media attention made things complicated.

“We were on all the big brand newspapers,” Daneshvar says. “In one hour we got over 5,000 orders from everywhere in Tehran. And then it was just myself with one delivery guy, and it was just, ‘Oh, my God, this is just not going to work.’”

After that trial, Daneshvar took another job outside the country, this time in Germany. And that’s where she dreamed up the idea for Takhfifan. 

She thought an Internet-based shopping program of some sort would work in Tehran.

Four years ago, Takhfifan went online. 

As of a year ago, the startup used one corner of a four-story building in north Tehran. 

Now it's using the whole building, including the basement, which functions as a warehouse for goods on sale.

Last year, Daneshvar was invited to California for a tech conference. She even got to meet with an executive from Groupon.

“I started explaining, this is how we do it,” she says. “And then it was, ‘I can’t believe it. You are exactly copying us.’ And I was just joking with them, ‘No, you are copying us!’”  Read more:

Age of Robots

The father-and-son authors of The Future of the Professions predicted radical change in the sector. 

But the tense skepticism in the room dissipated as each senior partner or director quietly acknowledged he or she would be a survivor, even if algorithms and artificial intelligence swept away the consultant or solicitor in the next seat.

This cohort may well reach retirement unscathed — and without much incentive to alter how they work. 

As Richard Susskind said afterwards, “it’s hard to convince a room full of millionaires that they have got their model wrong”. 

But change is coming. The main difference of opinion is over its pace and extent.

You can already ask Kim, a legal “virtual assistant” launched by Riverview Law, for help managing your caseload, or get Ross, IBM Watson’s “super intelligent attorney”, to research the entire body of law in seconds. 

A report by The Law Society, the trade body for solicitors in England and Wales, expects the impact of this type of automation to level off by 2020. 

Take financial journalism. Three years is typically spent as a trainee building confidence and skill by churning out news about corporate earnings. 

This is precisely the type of report that, quite rightly, Associated Press now produces automatically, in partnership with a company called — ominously for all columnists — Automated Insights.

Another parallel is aviation, where crashes often trigger fears that autopilots are undermining human skills. 

Interviewed last year about the 2009 Air France crash, Delmar Fadden, Boeing’s former chief of cockpit technology, told Vanity Fair that, having automated 98 per cent of pilots’ routine work, “we really worry about the tasks we ask them to do just occasionally”.

The answer is not to halt the march of the robots. Indeed, technology is part of the solution. 

Novice astronauts are not trained by sending them on repeated costly moonshots. 

They practice the tasks and challenges they will face in carefully designed simulations, until they are finally ready for the launch pad.

As Prof Susskind points out, law students at the University of Strathclyde play out real-world legal problems in a fictional virtual community called “Ardcalloch”.

Knowledge can be imparted in other ways, including simply by working closely, apprentice-style, with senior colleagues. 

Most will value the guidance received as a beginner from experienced editors and writers but no longer are they needed to write five similar corporate earnings stories a day to achieve mastery. 

Newbies can acquire specific skills through working, under close supervision, on a sample of the basic tasks they once spent years slogging through.

We are living in a different age and sooner or later this age will cause serious and unanticipated implications for everyone.

I'll take this curtain please