eouiell.icu

Automation can be divisive. It excites half the population and scares the other. But whether we like it or not, automation will be at the heart of our next digital transformation. Unlike the previous waves of automation, however, the future ones might strip away more jobs than they create, at least in the short term.

Our friends at Fortunly crunched the numbers and found that 25% of jobs in the United States are at high risk of automation. The transportation, manufacturing, and storage industries are the most exposed.

Despite the immediate negative impact of automation on the workforce, its potential to elevate customer service is too good to pass up. Robots of different forms are expected to speed up the delivery of products, provide greater conveniences, offer deeper personalization, and promote a higher quality of service.

How will businesses, economies, and societies gain from automation? What challenges will they face?

Promises

Artificial intelligence is going to take marketing to new heights. When it becomes sophisticated enough, AI will help marketers target individual people with dynamic landing pages and programmatic ads. Computers will aid marketers in presenting the best pieces of content at the times and on the days with the highest chances of consumer exposure.

When it comes to big data and analytics, machine learning is already playing a vital role in understanding heaps of information and complex statistics. Compared to humans, computers glean actionable and measurable insights from data without relying on guesswork.

Chatbots allow on-demand customer service 24/7. Thanks to their access to relevant data, these digital representatives can produce quality answers to specific questions.

Furthermore, autonomous vehicles hope to promote better fuel economy, while reducing accidents and pollution.

The goal of every automation project is to raise efficiency and therefore productivity. History shows that production-rate increases and labor-cost decreases are instrumental in lowering the prices of goods, keeping inflation low, driving up wages, and setting the stage for sustained economic growth.

On the societal level, productivity gains can translate to prosperity. Will wealth be distributed equally? That is another story. Nevertheless, automation is key to unlocking the production potential of companies around the globe. In implementing automation, companies will collectively contribute to a country’s revenue, one way or another.

Challenges

Technologists have made commendable advancements in the past few years. But there are several reasons why automation is not developing as fast as desired.

First – talent shortages.

Shortage of talent has always been an issue in any technological domain, and automation is no exception. It is still hard to find competent personnel who will properly implement automation technology. The need for vocational and technical training to develop the necessary skills could not be more pronounced.

Second – cost.

Automation development and implementation is not cheap. Until computerized labor, in general, becomes more affordable than manual labor, much like innumerous cases in the past five decades, businesses will not consider automation very cost-effective.

Third – data availability.

Automated systems can’t perform the tasks they are designed to with information lacking in quality and/or quantity. As long as enough people fear the implications of compromised data privacy and security, certain technologies might not generate intended results.

The Bottom Line

In our automated future, there will certainly be winners and losers. Although robots will never replace humans in all areas, we might see significant worker displacement and dramatic changes in certain communities.

These serious issues should be discussed and addressed as early sooner rather than later. But we should not allow them to jeopardize automation development allowing the Fourth Industrial Revolution to veer off course.

Wrinkles are always a big enemy of all beauty pursuer. In order to maintain young, many people spend every penny to take care of their skin by buying various skin care products, such as antioxidants, retinoids, and peptides, which are advertised to have the effect of protecting or repairing the skin.

There are even more and more people who choose to inject dermal fillers. Autologous fat or collagen is a relatively safe filling material, but these are difficult to achieve, and it is difficult for these materials to penetrate into the dermis. Thus, the effect of injection usually lasts only a few months. Moreover, frequent injections can also cause a lot of pain.

Exosomes are small vesicles (30-150nm in diameter) containing complex RNA and proteins, mainly derived from multivesicular bodies formed by intracellular lysosomal microsomes. They have received extensive attention in recent years due to its function of mediating cell-to-cell communication and regulating the characteristics of target cells. For example, exosomes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells can significantly reduce the expression levels of matrix metalloproteinases and senescence-associated β-galactosidase (SA-β-Gal), while increasing the expression level of collagen in human dermal fibroblasts.

The human epidermis is 50-120 microns thick and the epidermis-dermal thickness is 2−5 mm. Topical treatment of exosomes can reach the epidermis and be absorbed by the human skin. However, efficiency is largely limited due to its poor ability to penetrate the stratum corneum.

Needle-free syringes have been widely used for anesthesia and vaccination due to their safety and efficacy, especially for patients with needle phobia. A needle-free syringe can easily deliver phospholipid vesicles to the skin and can be used as a cosmetic device for exosomal delivery.

This kind of exosome therapycan be traced back to researchers at North Carolina State University who published a research in the ACS Nano journal. The study found that treatment of human skin cells with exosomes of stem cells increased collagen levels and made the cells younger; more importantly, they developed a needle-free device of exosomes therapy, using air jets to deliver the drug into deeper layers of the skin, which can reduce wrinkles caused by exposing to UV light.

In the study, the researchers exposed mice to UVB light for 8 weeks, which accelerated aging and led to wrinkles. The researchers applied exosomes of human skin fibroblasts to certain mice using needle-free syringes. After three weeks, the treated mice showed significantly finer, lighter wrinkles than untreated mice or mice receiving topical retinoic acid, a standard anti-aging drug. Exosomes-treated mice had thicker skin, more collagen as well as less inflammation than the untreated groups.

“This study shows the potential of exosomes in anti-aging treatments,” says a senior scientist in Creative Biolabs, a company providing comprehensive, end-to-end exosome services to support exosome applications in diagnostics and novel therapeutics development. “People can use exosome production developed from donated skin cells from anyone. What’s more, the treatment can also be operated without needles, since exosomes are small particles that can be transported by jet injection.”