THE LAST WORD
with John
Sherrocks Will the rise of the robots herald a new golden age in the world of work or will it leave most of us behind as artificial intelligence takes over in even more fields of expertise?
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EWS that robots will have taken over a third of Britain’s jobs by 2035 will no doubt have been welcomed by some employers — those envisaging a world in which sick leave, overtime pay and petty office politics were a thing of the past. After all, not even in the imaginations of the most gifted of science-fiction writers have robots ever demanded the right to join a trade union. For these bosses the digital revolution heralds a return to the ‘heydays’ of Margaret Thatcher’s rule — just without striking workers. Low-paid, repetitive posts are at greatest risk with people earning less than £30,000 a year five times more likely to see their jobs taken over by technology than those paid £100,000, according to a joint report from Deloitte and the University of Oxford. But what if we end up with the Terminator rather than R2-D2? I kid you not. Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla motors, fears a world in which artificial intelligence (AI) reigns supreme. And he’s not alone. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is also warning that there are “no fundamental limits” to what machines may be able to accomplish in the future. “One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,” wrote Hawking in The Independent. There is, of course, the possibility that all this speculation will come to nought. I can remember back in the 1980s when we were awash with high hopes of a three-day working week thanks to the advent of computers in the workplace. The only ‘problem’ humans would face, we were told, was working our how best to fill all the spare time we’d have on our hands. And it wasn’t just gullible journos like me who were taken in — canny property developers started planning the massive leisure parks that would be an essential component of our transformed lives. As it turned out, technology did herald a new dawn but instead of having to spend a lot less time working, we’ve all ended up putting in many more hours. Based on the disruptive effect technology is already having in the workplace, I’ve little doubt that in two to three decades time things will be radically different. The only question I have is: will things be
62 BUSINESS MONTH 1 December 2014
better or worse for mankind? Machines have been displacing humans ever since the Industrial Revolution. Self-service tills in supermarkets are now making cashiers redundant, just as ATMs did within banking. And it’s not just relatively unskilled jobs that are in the firing line — computers are increasingly replacing highly trained workers in fields such as architecture, medicine, teaching, science, transportation, journalism and the law. After all, why would anyone want to pay lawyers to review documents when software can do the work faster and at a lower cost? Some believe that not even directors are safe now that Hong Kong-based Deep Knowledge Venture has possibly set the ball rolling with the appointment of a decision-making algorithm to its board. Supporters of the onward march of AI argue that while some jobs will disappear brand new ones will emerge. Furthermore, increased productivity will grow the overall pie, reducing the need for people to even have to work for a living. The only pie I can see in this reasoning is in the sky. Instead, I agree with American economist Paul Krugman who is warning that “we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.” For while the Industrial Revolution did prove to be a catalyst for the creation of new jobs, there can be no certainty that the digital revolution will have the same end result. When social network giant Facebook acquired Instagram for $1bn in 2012 the photo-sharing service had just 13 employees. At its peak photographic company Kodak had a global staff of 130,000. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, contends that the advances in computer technology are largely behind the world’s sluggish employment growth of the past 10 to 15 years. There is a widely held view that today’s technology provides us as individuals with the information and the means to forge our own opportunities — to unleash within each of us the creativity and possibility that has given birth to digital-sharing economy successes such as Airbnb and Uber. World Wide Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee believes the internet provides a massive creative space where people “have the ability to start a new industry if you can dream it up”. For what it’s worth, I concur with this
train of thought, but as the father of three school-going children I also have grave concerns that our current eduction system is not equipping the next generation with the skills and the wherewithal needed to fully exploit these opportunities. There needs to be a greater focus on stimulating the cognitive strengths of flexibility and creativity within youngsters. It’s only with less rote-learning and more critical thinking that tomorrow’s workers will be able to successfully compete with robots. As Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University, notes: “Curricula that foster creativity — by developing children’s intrinsic motivation for originality, encouraging their intellectual risk-taking and cultivating their metacognitive ability to self-reflect — might be a good place to start.”
We could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots