The following article on Ai (artificial intelligence, ) was contributed by regular writer Dan Copping from London.
The Humans Are Dead by Flight of the Conchords.
Robots may never take all our jobs
The potential of foresight
What is a robot? Wikipedia defines it as “a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically”. Robots have existed for decades. They’ve been evolving for decades and they will continue to evolve for decades. The only limitation is the complexity of the actions that the robots are able to complete.
It doesn’t take a futurist, a technologist or even a journalist to work out that robots are getting smarter and more able-bodied every year. They’re also doing so a heck of a lot faster than we are.
That last sentence is probably the most worrying part. Think about it. It’s 2070. Your grandson wants to replace his iPhone, except your grandson’s IQ is 140, while his phone’s IQ is over 500 and it was running several hundred apps in the background while it sat the test. It’s a safe bet that his phone will be replacing him, not the other way around.
It might not happen overnight but if his phone can produce reports, negotiate contractual terms, mow the lawn and stimulate his girlfriend faster and more effectively than he can, a certain amount of replacement is bound to take place.One of the most powerful arguments against the world’s police forces becoming Robocop and the world’s dancers becoming Roboboogie is that humans will simply find other things to do. If for example, your robot housekeeper has an argument with your robot toaster, you might be required to weigh in and settle the dispute, not because you have the best answer or understand the language that the two are speaking but simply because you’re the homeowner and it’s ultimately the quality of your toast that is being argued over. How do we know that it will still be our toast though? What’s to stop robots buying our houses and using our food as a fuel source?
Humans are currently capable of anticipating and preparing for almost all aspects of the future better than robots. This means that in theory, as we increasingly anticipate a machine takeover, we will still have plenty of time to legislate against any excessive use of unemployment-creating robotics before our existing way of life is destroyed. There may still be task-specific and even industry-specific unemployment in the short-term as emerging technologies replace certain jobs but we will have the opportunity to create laws and organisations that protect against the obsolescence of the entire national labour force. Will we take that opportunity?
When looking for an indication of how humanity handles the macro issues that threaten it, environmental damage is an example that we might turn to. We have known about the possible implications of greenhouse gasses and resource depletion for generations and yet the general consensus seems to be that not enough is being done to combat the threat. Many scientists are worried that because large bodies of water and ice take centuries to respond to changes in temperature, the effects of our current actions may be devastating, yet hard to forecast and even harder to stop, yet we are taking action. We are innovating.
Fortunately, the onset of our substitution with the inhuman cast of the Transformers movies is likely to be more rapid and more obvious than climate change. It may be more comparable to the development of nuclear weapons or genetic engineering. Easy to spot. Relatively straightforward to outlaw. Potentially devastating and hard to completely insure against but so was SARS and humanity seized control of the disease relatively quickly.
Will robots take all our jobs? Maybe but maybe not. We’ll see them coming. In fact, we’ve already started thinking about it.
If you're new, Dan Copping is a very good writer and commenter on this blog, and elsewhere. Dan is approximately twenty years younger than me. We do not always agree. That is ok.
To be relevant to this particular post, one way that Dan is good is because he teaches me to accept new things. He's part of a generation that was born when the Internet was a baby. He, and it, grew up together. He's forward thinking, accepting of a future that will look very different from today in very many ways. I have qualms, especially about how my children will earn a living. I want them to have an income, and a purpose in life.
"I never really was that good in school
I talked too much, I broke the rules
Teachers thought I was a hopeless fool, alright
I don't know how but I made it through Just one of those things that you gotta do I always had a knack for telling the truth
Still wondering why I'm here Still wrestling with my fear But oh, He's up to something And the farther on I go I've seen enough to know that I'm not here for nothing He's up to something."
Excerpt from "Wait and See", sung by Brandon Heath
It's this AI thing, Artificial Intelligence. I saw the writing on the wall when my gifted son was very young. As he, and his sister grew, I cautioned them to work hard at school , do as well as they could, because manual, unskilled jobs would be disappearing. What I got wrong was the speed of that. I thought we had more time, (pretty much what the pundits are saying about North Korea's nuclear capability). Instead of happening in ten years time, the day of the smart machines and robots is now.
Now. A robot in Australia can do the job of a human, at a rental to the business owner, of only $15 au per hour, apparently. That's less than the minimum adult wage, plus entitlements. If the rental drops, it could conceivably get lower than the youth wage. Is this why there are now keypads for you to put your order at McDonalds? Will the cooks and customer service staff be phased out?
"While he expects the number of jobs to increase, the danger is they may not be better jobs. Those working for machines will experience the most disruption." Taken from an ABC article listed at the bottom of this post. "Those working for machines" ... say what now? What? Who is deciding that we should work FOR machines, and who is letting them decide that?
This came in the post for Acerules' party.
It's secondhand, 2nd half of last century, I'm guessing, silverplated, held together with three screws. The central screw down its hollow core, has a number 48 on the top. This is for a human being to read, someone assembling the candelabra, that others had used machines to make. Humans like us. In the days before the industrial revolution, the whole thing would have been painstakingly made by hand.
"Early in the morning factory whistle blows,
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes,
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,
It's the working, the working, just the working life.
Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain,
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain,
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,
The working, the working, just the working life"
Excerpt from The Factory, sung by Bruce Springsteen. 1978
Doesn't every able person in the world deserve the right to work? Who is standing up for that right? Don't we all have a purpose in life, a contribution to make?
Here's what I wrote to a friend the other day, in response to a mine closure in Africa where people were put out of work:
"I despair of the way the world is going, in particular with automation, or A I . I read about it and it's scary stuff. As a therapist we were taught the advantages to humans of the value of work. If corporations go on unchecked, there will be little to no work, even in the third world. Robots are getting cheaper all the time. I taught my kids about this from when they were young, to work hard and get scholarships, as no entry level jobs will remain, no unskilled work......Now it's already happening.
Take the retail sector. Amazon is racing ahead unchecked, overrunning the markets of more and more countries, putting stores out of business. Robots will pack the order, robots will ship it, driverless cars will deliver it, automatic text message or such will tell you it's at your house. Complaints will be handled by chat bots.
I see great social unrest in the future by the disenfranchised . Hmm, I feel a blog rant coming on."
I would make a correction to that , drones will deliver packages. Today I received two eBay packages for Acerule's birthday party next year. (See my Venetian Party series of posts for that.) The driver brought them to my door, he was the usual man who's done it for years, he smiled, was briefly chatty, and cheerful. After my daughter went to school today, his was the only (non-online) conversation I had until I went to the shops in the afternoon. If I was a "shut in" , perhaps old, more disabled, or just lonely, that might have been my only IRL (in real life) contact with a human all day, therefore of great importance.
From one package, some gold lace for my costume, (it's more golden than that IRL.)
and a vest for my husband's costume
for the party, and probably made in China by people, but is that still true?
I would like to know something, Big Business. If vast amounts of people of my generation and younger are not working, how will they afford your products? Are you only going to produce goods and services for financially secure baby boomers and older? They are living longer, but they can't live forever, what then? If they are financially supporting their children, what disposable income will they have left to purchase your stuff?
I admire, and try to emulate Dan's optimism. I will be honest, it's an uphill struggle for me, even though I try to stay abreast of things. As a parent, what I really wanted were clear answers about what jobs might be there for my kids. Here's a current article on that, that probably everyone should read. It's a bit more optimistic than I've been feeling, but it generates infinite questions, too. Like this one: why are governments seemingly asleep in all of this?
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. " Warren Bennis
Some years ago, the government, in its wisdom, decided to stimulate the birth rate in Australia to provide a generation to work and pay taxes. These taxes, it was said, would pay for the needs of the ageing baby boomers generation, the largest amount of people to simultaneously age in this country. They used the taxes of my generation, to pay out a "baby bonus" to encourage births.
In addition, the government increased immigration. Those people were also supposed to work and pay taxes.
What they didn't factor in with all of this, was the rise of robots and computers designed to replace workers. At my local Woolworths, many checkout points are now unmanned. At our nearest Kmart, almost all checkouts are self serve only. My bank has a "hole in the wall" Automatic Teller Machine outside. On local farms, huge equipment does the work of ten people, with only one operator. These are the visible robots. We don't see all the ones in workplaces off limits to us.
I read that the use of robots in the workplace is poised to explode.
So, if the generation that was born because of the baby bonus, is not working, because robots are doing the jobs, how are they going to pay taxes to support the aged? Also, who will pay their unemployment benefits and other social necessities, like schools and hospitals?
Just wondering.
Very good interview on the topic of robots taking jobs in the future and the future of Australian jobs:
