web viewdon’t take my word for it. ask alexa, ... elon musk has said that the rise of machines...

What will happen when robots take our jobs?No job is too dull for smart technology. Will AI make us happier and richer — or enslave us? John Arlidge reports

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DOM MCKENZIE

The Sunday Times, August 27 2017, 12:01am

Las Vegas is where you go for old-fashioned fun, but I’ve got an appointment with the future. It’s 7am and the sun is beginning to rise over faux Paris, New York, Venice and the Egyptian pyramids when a silver BMW pulls up on the Strip to pick me up. I’m going to take Frank Sinatra Drive to Interstate 15, but I won’t be driving. No one will. The car will do it itself.

I get into the “driver’s” seat, press the blue button on the steering column that “engages personal co-pilot” and take my hands off the wheel and my feet off the pedals. The car, a prototype, stays perfectly central in its lane and about 40 yards behind the truck in front, at a steady 55mph. It is — remarkably — not at all scary, so I set a course north for Seattle, the second stop on my tour of the future.

I arrive at the Amazon Go store on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street in the downtown area. It looks like any other supermarket you might duck into to The Sunday Times Magazine: What Will Happen When Robots Take Our Jobs? (8.27.17) P a g e 1 | 13

escape the rain and pick up dinner. There are the “We prep, you cook” meal kits, jumbo jars of anything you might fancy and, this being America, a “no weapons” sign at the door. But there’s one thing missing. Checkouts.

Shop of the new: the cashless Amazon Go “robostore” in Seattle

I will soon be able to walk in and out again with dinner but without paying — or fear of arrest. Sensors and cameras will monitor what I pick from the shelves and put in my basket, and my Amazon account, activated via my iPhone when I walk in, will be charged before I’ve even reached the next block. The store is due to open any day now.

Thanks to huge leaps in machine learning, speech recognition, mapping and visual-recognition technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is, at last, walking off the pages of sci-fi books and into our lives. It’s not just robot cars and robot shops. Those Facebook photos you’re tagged in? That’s AI. So are our Netflix recommendations, Spotify playlists, and Google and Skype translators that enable us to talk to anyone in the world in any language. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Alexa, your Amazon Echo voice-controlled butler. If you don’t have one yet, you’ll soon be able to ask Apple’s Siri to order one and have it delivered the same day, anywhere you find yourself. (Amazon is trialling drone deliveries.)

The Sunday Times Magazine: What Will Happen When Robots Take Our Jobs? (8.27.17) P a g e 2 | 13

hThe latest jobs being taken on by robots

AI is spreading so fast, it will soon be integrated into almost everything we touch, kick-starting what many call the “fourth industrial revolution” — the first being steam engines, the second oil and electricity and the third computers. The only difference, analysts say, is this new revolution is likely to be 10 times faster, 300 times the scale and have 3,000 times the impact of the others, because once computers invade the physical world and start making autonomous, intelligent decisions, the opportunities are limitless. The trendspotter and futurist Faith Popcorn prefers simpler language: “We’ll be merging, morphing and mating with the bots.” (She’s not joking about the mating bit. Google “sex robot”.)


The experimental Amazon store does have some human workers in itDAVID RYDER / NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX / EYEVINE

Fembots aside, it’s thrilling stuff. But the pace of change is making many wonder whether this new force will, overall, be good for us, our families, our homes and the companies we rely on for our livelihood. For all the magic that self-driving cars and virtual butlers promise, could smart machines outsmart us and start pushing us around, before finally pulling the plug on us?

Yuval Harari, author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, thinks so. If we create robots that can do everything better than us, we could “lose our economic and political value”, he warns. David Autor, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wonders if “robocalypse is upon us”. So should we welcome the bots or fear them?

AI has some big advantages. For one thing, it will help us live longer. Traditional carbon life forms make lots of mistakes. More than 90% of the 1,810 people who die annually on Britain’s roads (1.25m globally) do so at the hands of malfunctioning humans. Remove the nut behind the wheel and deaths will fall to near zero, carmakers predict. Martin Lundstedt, the boss of Volvo, whose USP has always been safety, says his vision is that “no one is killed or injured in a new Volvo by 2020”.


Automation will help to cure us if we are one of the unlucky few who do still crash our cars or simply fall ill. Bots study x-rays, MRI scans, medical research papers and other data and pick up signs of disease that doctors sometimes miss. Back in Britain, thanks to another piece of AI — the autopilot of a Virgin Boeing 787 Dreamliner — I meet Lord Darzi, the surgeon who pioneered keyhole and robotic procedures. In his office at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, he tells me robots can also perform better surgery than humans — and he’s one of the best. “Robots are more precise, have greater range of movement in keyhole surgery and no hand tremor, which makes delicate stitching easier,” he says.

Since we’re all going to be living longer, it’s a good thing that bots will help many of us get richer. By reducing labour costs — robots work tirelessly and don’t demand raises — automation will make existing companies more profitable and help spur the creation of new ones, techno-optimists predict. Consultants at the accountancy giant PwC say AI could boost the British economy by 10% over the coming decade, adding an extra £232bn to GDP by 2030 and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Automation will also make many existing jobs more fulfilling. No one actually wants to answer the phones in a call centre.


hGearing up for the driverless revolution

And that’s all before we get to the nirvana of never having to drive, thanks to autonomous cars created by BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes, Ford, VW, the Tesla pioneer Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley rivals Google and Apple.

These benefits, great though they are, are only the beginning. As it grows, AI will rewire where and how we live, improving our lives and homes — or so its proponents hope. To find out how, I head back across the Atlantic to San Francisco, where most AI research is being done, to meet one of the pioneers.


Rise of the machines: look, no hands — an autonomous BMW

Uber’s Andrew Salzberg is fiery. The taxi app’s head of transportation policy and research talks as fast as a machinegun and he beams charts onto any wall he can find in the company’s HQ on Market Street, the city’s main drag. Through the barrage, the message eventually becomes clear. Automation can make cities, where most of us now live, greener and more pleasant lands.

Uber has collected so much data from the hundreds of millions of rides its users have taken that it knows how and when we travel. That means it can anticipate when and where we will need to go and make sure there are autonomous cars available. Salzberg argues that, soon, rides will be so abundant and — with no driver to pay — so cheap, there will be no need to own a car at all. He says the number of cars on the road could fall more than 90%. Most of those that will remain in fleets such as Uber’s will be electric. If that happens, it will not only reduce congestion and clean the air we breathe, it will transform how and where we live.

“Some 20%-30% of city centres are devoted to parking,” Salzberg explains. “If you don’t need parking, buildings can change, streets can change, homes can change. We can have more park spaces, instead of parking spaces.”


It sounds like the latest self-serving Silicon Valley woo-woo. After all, he has — shock! — forgotten to mention that Uber stands to benefit to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. But then I take an Uber to Parkmerced, halfway between downtown and San Francisco airport, and find out that what Salzberg is talking about not only works in theory, but is actually happening.

Parkmerced is the most high-density new housing development in any western city — 9,000 homes are being built for 30,000 residents, most of whom will dump their cars. They have no choice. The developer, Maximus Real Estate Partners, has scrapped parking. To make sure buyers can still get around, residents get Uber credits, with car-share vehicles from Zipcars available for longer rentals. “This is the cutting edge of something huge,” says Glenn Durfee, who has put his money where his wheels were. He has just sold his Toyota and moved into a townhouse apartment with his wife, Alicia.

Urban planners and developers in other cities are following San Francisco’s lead. Moda Living is investing £1bn creating 6,000 rental-only homes in London, Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool, where tenants will get up to £100-worth of Uber credits a month if they agree not to have a parking space. In London, automated cars could free up as much as 20 square miles, 3% of the 600 square miles that make up Greater London, for new homes.

So far, so safer, better Automated World 3.0. But there’s a snag. With tech, there always is. And it’s the problem innovation has raised ever since the Luddites began smashing up automated weaving looms in northern mill towns 200 years ago. Jobs.

Despite all the economic growth and employment opportunities proponents say AI will generate, few doubt it will also spell redundancy for many. A new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States quantifies the The Sunday Times Magazine: What Will Happen When Robots Take Our Jobs? (8.27.17) P a g e 8 | 13

problem in stark terms. Its authors, the economists Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Pascual Restrepo (Boston University), argue jobs are already being lost to AI and are unlikely to come back. Between 1990 and 2007, the addition of each robot into US manufacturing resulted in the loss, on average, of 6.2 human jobs. You’ll soon see this happening on your local building site. Robots called Sam (semi-automated mason) are already beginning to replace brickies in America and will arrive here any day now. They can lay up to 3,000 bricks a day compared with the human average of 500 — all without fag breaks.

John Hawksworth, chief economist at PwC, estimates that almost a third of existing UK jobs may be automated away over the next 15 years. That’s a lot — and it’s not merely “routine” jobs. Professional services, once considered immune from the ravages of AI by smug white-collar workers, are also threatened. Automated services such as SimpleTax, KashFlow and Rocket Lawyer, which prepare our annual accounts and tax returns and do simple legal tasks, are putting human lawyers and accountants out of work. Even bosses are catching a whiff of their own professional mortality. “Chief executive officers feel reasonably confident we are not going to be replaced by artificial intelligence,” Inga Beale, CEO of the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, said recently. “But I’m sure there will be a time.”

The job losses could herald a new era of unprecedented inequality. Humanity could split into a small class of “superhumans” who control the AI that will run the lives of the huge underclass of “useless” people, says Yuval Harari. If that happens, social revolt won’t be far behind, the president of the New America foundation, Anne-Marie Slaughter, recently argued. “Remember, the first industrial revolution gave us Marxism,” she said.


Sam the robo-brickie is six times faster than a human

Silicon Valley usually turns a blind eye to the havoc its revolutionary products wreak on traditional industries and communities. Monetise first, moderate later, is their mantra (if anyone bothers to complain). But amid allegations that they facilitate secret communication by terrorists and all the scandals surrounding hacking, trolling, hate speech, fake news, advertising scams and murders streamed live on Facebook, tech firms are on the defensive. The last thing they want is to be blamed for job losses and inequality far greater than anything wrought by globalisation. So they are already trying to persuade us that AI will be what they would call “net positive”.

First, they echo PwC’s work, arguing that AI will create way more new jobs than it will destroy. They cite the example of telecoms. Sure — each advance, from fixed lines and telex through fax to mobile phones and email, displaced some types of workers. The typing pool is a distant memory. But the increase in new jobs has more than made up for those lost. Today, millions of people work as app developers, virtual-world designers, self-drive car researchers, designers and makers, ride-sharing drivers, social media marketers — jobs that not only did not exist, but would have been difficult even to imagine 10 years ago, before AI took off. “We will have more and better jobs,” predicts Marco Annunziata, chief economist at the giant US firm General Electric.


Most will involve working with robots to create what analysts call “augmented intelligence” jobs. Collaboration, techno-optimists predict, will kick-start “a renaissance, a golden age” in which we will “solve problems that were in the realm of science fiction”, the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, likes to say — and he knows a thing or two about predicting the future.

Ordinary workers will be left behind. Not every taxi driver in Blackburn can become a robo-nurse in Woking

In the short term, however, few dispute that many ordinary workers are likely to be left behind. Not every former taxi driver in Blackburn can become or wants to become a robot nurse supervisor in Woking. For those who lose out, Silicon Valley proposes something radical: universal basic income.

The idea is that governments would hugely increase the welfare state using tax revenue, much of it derived from the highly profitable tech firms that politicians would have to force to cough up their fair share, not dodge it, as they now try to. Everyone would receive the minimum they need to live, regardless of whether they have a job. So, if you lost your job or simply did not want one, you could do something else. “Imagine 6bn-10bn people doing nothing but arts and sciences, culture and exploring and learning. What a world that would be,” enthuses the famed Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen (see the interview).

Free cash and a future where work is optional and no one goes without does sound great. It has gained support here. Labour has set up a working group to examine it. But, like most free offers, is there a catch? I decide to ask Steve Hilton. He used to advise David Cameron before moving to California to set up his own tech firm, Crowdpac, and write a book, More Human, in which he argues we should use technology to create “a world where people, not Silicon Valley, come first”.

The idea of universal basic income makes Hilton so angry, he practically spits out his metropolitan tea, which is what San Francisco hipsters call builders’ tea, when we meet in a downtown cafe. “Doing meaningful work and being rewarded for it is a basic human need. Depriving people of that is morally evil,” he says. “It’s revoltingly patronising for the ‘great geniuses’ of Silicon Valley to say, ‘We can continue our fascinating work and earn vast incomes, so we can live in our gated communities guarded by robots and drones. But, sadly, you won’t. Don’t worry, though: we’ll pay you not to work.’ ”


He has a point. From an early age, we learn that jobs are central to family life and society as a whole. Waking up early and going to work is what our mum and dad do or did, what we do and what we tell our children they will do, too. We do it because it means we can take care of ourselves and our families and join the ranks of the “strivers” who politicians and newspapers tell us are morally superior to the “shirkers” living on Benefits Street. Jobs also enable us to learn new skills, make friends and, for many of us, find our life partner. Home brew and poetry only go so far.

Surely, though, whatever happens to jobs, all of us will benefit from having more time, more space and living in the greener cities promised by men such as Uber’s Andrew Salzberg? Don’t bet on it, says Christian Wolmar, a leading transport analyst. He acknowledges fleets of self-driving cars could enable us to be more productive and live more sustainably. But he points out they could just as easily do the opposite. “Why not live 90 minutes away from the office and work on the way there and back?” he says. Sprawl — and pollution — would increase.

It might be a good idea to do away with parking and build more homes in our cities, as at Parkmerced, but lots of robot cars could increase congestion and pollution. It’s already happening. New Yorkers are taking so many Uber and Lyft rides that the number of people using the subway is falling for the first time since the financial crisis and traffic gridlock is increasing.

Smart machines have plenty of other downsides, too. Computers that act in a flash on fresh data, to trade stocks and shares faster than humans, have caused unexpected market crashes when they flood exchanges with buy or sell orders. Automated cars — a Toyota, a Ford and a Jeep in the US — have been hacked and the hackers have taken control of the brakes and the steering. The cyber-security experts IOActive predict that robots working for big companies will be turned


against their employers — spying on them or disrupting production lines. A hacked robo-doc in an operating theatre would be even more dangerous.

There is an even bigger problem: how relaxed are we about artificial intelligence, really? Arriving at Heathrow and using a facial-recognition machine, not a human immigration officer, to match our face to our passport photograph is one thing. But would you feel comfortable putting your children in a driverless car to take them to school? An electronic butler such as Amazon’s Echo sounds jolly, until you wonder whether the little “Big Brother” in the corner is, in fact, snooping on everything you do. This is not an academic question. Police in Arkansas investigating a domestic killing recently seized an Echo unit to see if it recorded the attack.

And that’s before you get to the really scary stuff about machines ganging up on us, Terminator-style. It’s closer than you think. AI weapons have arrived. Drones can shoot bullets and launch grenades. What would happen if one were hacked? Elon Musk has said that the rise of machines smarter than us poses humanity’s “biggest existential threat ... With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation.”

Last week, Musk and the founders of 115 technology companies signed an open letter to the UN calling for a ban on killer robots, warning of conflicts on an unprecedented scale if an arms race to build autonomous weapons continues. “Once this Pandora’s box is opened,” they warned, “it will be hard to close.”

These are not the concerns of shoppers in Seattle. They can’t wait for the day when the prototype autonomous BMW becomes real and drives them to the Amazon Go store on Blanchard Street. Standing on the rain-flecked pavement, I watch through the glass as staff armed with “beta participant” badges test the robostore where people will soon be queuing up not to have to queue up. With no “unexpected item in the bagging area” and no threatening security guards because shoplifting is impossible, it looks and feels like the future.

And it’s going to get even more futuristic/creepy. Amazon is working on facial-recognition technology, so the store can greet each customer personally as they walk in and tell them about that day’s special offers on the food it knows they like. “Hello, John. It’s 50% off doughnuts today.”

Ghost shops? Ghost cars? Ghost everything? Welcome to the second machine age. If you don’t like the sound of it, there is something you can do to protect your future, if you have the time. Retrain as a psychiatrist. No one will ever let a robot into their head.

Will they?


web viewdon’t take my word for it. ask alexa, ... elon musk has said that the rise of machines...

Documents