tedxnus - being human (slides + notes)
TRANSCRIPT
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
We are surrounded by technology. But how did we got here? We have been 2.6 million years inventing ways to work less.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 2
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
We didn’t invent to have the latest coolest gadget. We invented to work faster and with less effort. In the beginning we invented mechanical tools like axes and fire.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 3
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
But technological transformations were not fast, and they took thousands of years to spread. Communication was not fluid.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 4
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Then we invented language. The invention of language was the biggest cognitive transformation of all times. With language we could build complex ideas.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 5
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
We could communicate and work in groups performing complex tasks.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 6
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
After language we invented writing that expanded our mental power. Suddenly we could store knowledge and share it with others in a different place and time.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 7
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It also gave us another tool of creative expression. But with any new technology there is always opposition.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 8
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Socrates was worried about what writing would do to our society. He though that the written word didn’t capture all the complexity of language. People would lose their memory if they could write.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 9
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Later we mixed mechanical power with cognitive creating the printing press. The printing press can spread knowledge faster. More people can have access to knowledge.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 10
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
But the real exponential transformation came with the industrial revolution. Steam power transformed our society from an agrarian society with strong craftsmanship to a manufacturing society.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 11
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
A mass production and mass consumption society. A society where we may not have what we want but we will have much more of it. This is a very important moment because here we forgot that our main goal was to work less.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 12
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As you can imagine these machines found strong opposition. A machine could take the job of 10, 100 or even a 1000 people. But mass markets and mass consumption left the 20th century with more people working than ever before. We basically started inventing jobs because everybody needed one.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 13
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Later we started making multipurpose machines. Intelligent machines that could do more complex tasks. With computers we moved from a manufacturing to a service economy. Machines now were at mechanical and cognitive tasks.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 14
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Now machines are getting better and better. They are stronger and smarter than us, and they are taking our jobs one by one.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 15
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Self driving cars. Have no accidents, faster commutes, for only 10% of the cost. Driving as a job will disappear and human driving will be banned because it’s too dangerous.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 16
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
This is a vertical farm. It produces 100 times more food per square meter with 40% less power, 80% less waste, and 99% less water.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 17
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Today chicken feed produces 2 times more meat than 20 years ago with the same chickenfeed.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 18
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
McDonald's employees asked for 15$ an hour as a response McDonald's invented a robot.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 19
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
You want a burger? The burger robot can produce them at 10% of the cost. It can make 360 per hour.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 20
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
This is the food tablet. You order and pay from your table. Reduces labour by 40%. It produces 100% accuracy and much faster. You don’t have to wait for the waiter, the waiter is right there.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 21
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This is the robot hotel in Japan, operated by robots. Yes that’s a dinosaur robot. Robots are cheaper and faster than humans. They can work 24 hours, and they don’t get sick.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 22
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
But you may think. All these are blue collar jobs. What about white collar jobs?
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 23
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Meet Ellie the psychologist. She understands what you say. Interprets your tone of voice, and your facial expression. People are more comfortable, and open to a machine than to a real person. You don’t want to tell your secrets to a person, but to a machine it’s OK.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 24
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Radiologists were too expensive. So hospitals used to send images to India to be analyzed. Now the analysis is done by an algorithm. Computers do the analysis and write the report.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 25
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In wall street 70% of the work is done by algorithms.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 26
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
This is the robot pharmacist. It has delivered 2 million prescriptions with no errors. A human would have made 20,000 errors
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 27
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Robots also write many articles and reports faster, and better than humans
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 28
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
But you still think that there are less jobs because of the crisis. Wake up this is not a crisis. This is a new order where robots take our jobs.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 29
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Kodak was the big photo company. In its time employed 145,000 people. Instagram is the photo company now, and it employs 11 people.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 30
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Airbnb has 1.5 million listings and only 1600 employees. That is as if 1 employee was running a 1000 room hotel.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 31
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Uber has 300,000 drivers, owns no cars, and employs 1,500 people. In the future they will use self driving cars, and have no employees.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 32
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
So what happens now?
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 33
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
When we see that Deep Blue beats Kasparov.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 34
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Watson beats the jeopardy masters
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 35
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and AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol. We may want to rethink our strategy
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 36
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Machines are going to get better and faster, taking more and more jobs. They will take between 30 and 60% of the jobs in the next 17 years.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 37
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We are obsolete, unnecessary, outdated. But unnecessary for what? for the work that we didn’t want to do in the first place. After 2.6 million years we have made it. We invented our way out of work. But now technology is a problem, and a solution.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 38
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
We could choose to stop working. But it’s not that easy. It’s not that easy because we have lost track of our initial goal. We are in a collective amnesia where we don’t know what to do if we lose our 9 to 5 job.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 39
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Today, we invent jobs that are meaningless, and don’t produce anything. Entire departments could be substituted by the computing power of a smartphone. We are failing as a society to recognize this, and we are paying in antidepressants.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 40
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Less jobs mean marginalization. Your job defines you. If you don’t have a job, you are nothing. Unemployment means depression, drug abuse, suicide, violence. Jobs have been the glue of our society.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 41
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And even if you keep it together your life sucks. You are stuck, you cannot plan your future. You are trying to make it to the end of the month, and there is no possible long term plan.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 42
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We need to go back, and find what it means to be human. We invented technology to avoid work. It’s time for us to explore.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 43
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
It’s time to go back, to find out how can we have more meaningful lives. Be it through art, exploration, or leisure. We need to build stronger communities, with a meaningful purpose. We need to explore our human experience in deeper ways.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 44
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
But to do this we need to secure subsistence. We cannot condemn society to fall into a vicious circle. If all the jobs are taken by robots, that leaves humans with no jobs and no income.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 45
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
So unless robots start buying things and going on vacations, soon there will be no market. Nobody buying the products, and services that robots produce.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 46
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
We need a model that is not based on work and wages. There are many ideas like the basic income, where everybody gets a salary independently of their work, or negative taxes, and we should be thinking about implementing them.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 47
TEDxNUS The Tipping Point
Although it looks like everything is going to be done by robots. There are still many complex problems to be solved. When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, he realized that working together with a machine the results could be better. Humans working with machines can improve prediction results by 25%. Better than only computers or only humans. We need to acknowledge our limitations, and embrace technology to solve our big problems. We need to learn how to learn, and how to do it fast because changes are going to be super fast.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 48
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We need to solve problems like: Global warming
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 49
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Resistance to antibiotics
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 50
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Production of clean energy
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 51
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And infectious diseases. These are urgent and complex problems.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 52
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This should be our mission as humans. Work with machines to solve this crucial problems.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 53
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We are in front of the most incredible of revolutions. A revolution that will empower us to exponential growth, in the arts and sciences, in innovation and creativity. Let’s make this final transition to reach the next frontier of the human experience.
J. Sepulveda PhD. MBA • [email protected] • TEDxNUS 2016 54