Wolf Money(Man vs Machine)
Man vs Machine
Manpower shortage in Singapore is quite acute. Almost all industries, especially in sectors like retail, f&b, security, cleaning and transportation, are facing shortages of manpower. I have a few friends running businesses in various sectors that are known to have high staff turnover. One was lamenting about the difficulties of finding new workers and retaining old staff in the retail industry. He disclosed a junior staff could earn close to 3.5k-4k with commission. I am taken aback by the revelation, given his retail shop serves an upmarket segment where walk in customers were fewer as compare to a normal retail setting. The job is not a difficult one, answering a few inquiries and doing some data entries. There are stories of him having gone through the full spectrum of training with new hires, only for the new staffs to call it quit within a week. I can empathise with his frustrations.
A few friends are in the F&B. The personnel shortage is not new to the sector. Given F&B is not a sexy industry where everyone wants to make a career out of it. The situation is so acute, some businesses operating in F&B had to reduce operating hours because there are no staff to operate. The situation is dire with the owners having to chip in their time to run their business during weekend. In Singapore, given our ageing society, we will face what the Japanese are facing now in a decade: a serious lack of workers. The lack of workers is unlikely to improve given there are a host of other difficulties not limiting to improving career prospects and working conditions. The strict rules on work permits and S-passes are another hurdle for businesses to expand.
Businesses in those industries can help themselves by redesigning work scope, improving working conditions, having flexible working hours and increasing compensation to improve their attractiveness to potential employees. Unfortunately, even with those improvements, businesses in those industries are always swimming against the tide of high workforce turnover. Self-service, automation and robotics are likely to play a major role in fulfilling the gap.
Recently, 7-eleven operated a fully autonomous shop in Esplanade MRT. Customers scan their credit card to go in. They will be charged based on the items they took out of the shop. The improvement in technology in the area of cameras, deep learning and multi-sensors allows payment to be done remotely. It is a game changer in the world of fast retailing. It allows greater efficiency without a need for a human. A remote cashier is another option. As reported in NY Times, cashiers from the Philippines are manning the cash register in New York remotely.
Artificial Intelligence
Given the advancement in AI, I wouldn’t be surprised more industries will adopt robotics to aid them in reducing manpower needs. As shareholders push for more profits, manpower reduction through technology will achieve the desired result of increasing profit margin. The machine vs human war is just starting. Literally all workers in all industries will get disrupted except for a few jobs involved in machine learning. There are chatters about autonomous vehicles replacing drivers in Singapore. Korea has successfully implemented autonomous driving on their road. I am sure we will see them on our roads within the next 5-10 years once they sort out the legal framework in autonomous driving. We are seeing more deployment of robots in the area of security and in the cleaning sector due to lack of manpower.
I once asked an Indonesian friend, a very smart guy, about AI 7 years ago. He was way ahead of his game having graduated with a master’s degree in AI from the UK 7 years ago before AI became a buzz word in the tech world. I asked him how you explain AI in the simplest term to a layman? He replied “It is like a parent training a baby”. The human gives all the parameters for the machine(machine learning/baby) and it gets intelligence exponentially with all the information fed. He warned artificial intelligence is not perfect due to human bias. When human are involved in training the machine, there will be bias which can’t be eliminated. The AI is still at an infant stage of development. It will be as intelligent as its human creator or even surpassing it within the next 4 years as predicted by Elon Mask.
Artificial intelligence has made an impact in the arts and creative sector. In the future, I might render the service of ChatGPT but for now I am taking on the task of writing my blog solo. With ChatGPT, the upside, you get excellent sentence structure and squeaky clean error-free English. The downside, the blog will lose its authenticity. Imperfect English is part of the package. The human quest for knowledge shouldn’t stop with AI, it should aid us in our quest to be smarter. If humans aren’t perfect, why should our writing be? Let’s embrace the imperfection.
Please consider following us on telegram for the latest update on Lone Wolf investor by clicking on the link below. No form filling, no payment required, no collection of data, no data mining, no hard selling, no obligation.
https://t.me/joinchat/oCgkD3sQFRMzMWM1
Disclaimers
All investments is highly speculative in nature and involves substantial risk of loss. We encourage our reader to invest very carefully. We also encourage reader to get personal advice from your professional investment advisor and to make independent investigations before acting on information that we publish. Much of our information is derived directly from information published by companies or submitted to governmental agencies on which we believe are reliable but are without our independent verification. Therefore, we cannot assure you that the information is accurate or complete. We do not in any way whatsoever warrant or guarantee the success of any action you take in reliance on our statements. All information provided are for education only. Buyer beware,do you own due diligence.
Comments
Post a Comment