Category: All articles

Reflections on Dubai’s World Government Summit

I lived in Dubai for three years in the early 1980s. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was a very young country then, but its ambition was clear. The tallest building was the Dubai Trade Centre, at 30 stories. In fact, it was the tallest building in the whole of the Middle East at the time, and many people thought it was a folly: why build a skyscraper in the desert? It was a fair question: the road leading south from the Trade Centre towards Abu Dhabi was flanked on both sides by desert. Now the Trade Centre is a smallish...
Don’t panic!

Don’t panic!

Franklin D Roosevelt was inaugurated as US President in March 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression. His famous comment that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” was reassuring to his troubled countrymen, and has resonated down the years. If and when it turns out that machines will make it impossible for many people to earn a living, fear will not be our only problem. But it may well turn out to be our first very serious problem. Fully autonomous, self-driving vehicles will start to be sold during the coming decade – perhaps within five...

Reviewing last year’s AI-related forecasts (2017)

This time last year I made some forecasts about how AI would change, and how it would change us. It’s time to look back and see how those forecasts for 2017 panned out. A bit rubbish, to be honest – five out of 12 by my reckoning. Must do better. Machines will equal or surpass human performance in more cognitive and motor skills. For instance, speech recognition in noisy environments, and aspects of NLP – Natural Language Processing. Google subsidiary DeepMind will be involved in several of the breakthroughs.   A machine called Libratus beat some of the best human...
Putting your money where your mouth is

Putting your money where your mouth is

Robert Atkinson and I have made the 749th Long Bet shown above (and online here). Robert is president and founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. Robert’s claim With the rise of AI and robotics many now claim that these technologies will improve exponentially and in so doing destroy tens of millions of jobs, leading to mass unemployment and the need for Universal Basic Income. I argue that these technologies are no different than past technology waves and to the extent they boost productivity that will create offsetting spending and investment, leading to offsetting job...
Some AI forecasts for 2018

Some AI forecasts for 2018

1. Almost all big non-tech companies will work hard to deploy AI – and to be seen to be doing so. One consequence will be the growth of “insights-as-a-service”, where external consultants are hired to apply machine learning to corporate data. Some of these consultants will be employees of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, looking to make their open source tools the default option (e.g. Google’s TensorFlow, Microsoft’s CNTK, Amazon’s MXNet). 2. The first big science breakthrough that could not have been made without AI will be announced. (I stole this from DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.  I want to get at least...
Our wonderful future needs you!

Our wonderful future needs you!

The media today is full of stories about artificial intelligence, and there is universal agreement that it is a very big deal. But ironically, most people are not paying close attention. This is probably because the stories are confused and confusing. Some say that robots will take all our jobs and then turn into murderous Terminators. Others say that is all hype, and there is much less going on than meets the eye. And so most people shudder slightly, shrug their shoulders and get on with the business of living. And who can blame them? When you pull back from...

Putting the AI in retail: How cognitive reasoning systems could make life easier for consumers

Another guest post by Matt Buskell, head of customer engagement at Rainbird. There was a time when booking a holiday meant a single trip to the high street travel agent. Nowadays, the process of online research seems to take longer than the holiday itself. The difference, back then, was the travel agent – a human being who could look you up and down, talk to you about your preferences, and make a recommendation based on their judgement. In the world of AI, we like to call this ‘inference’. Travel agents never asked any questions like the filters and features you...

Don’t get complacent about Amazon’s Robots: be optimistic instead!

In an article for the Technology Liberation Front, Adam Thierer of George Mason University becomes the latest academic to reassure us that AI and robots won’t steal our jobs. His article relies on three observations: First, Amazon is keen to automate its warehouses, but it is still hiring more humans. Second, ATMs didn’t destroy the jobs of human tellers. Third, automation has not caused widespread lasting unemployment in the past. Unfortunately, the first of these claims is true but irrelevant, the second is almost certainly false, and the third is both irrelevant and false. Amazon has automated much of what...
In the future, education may be vacational, not vocational

In the future, education may be vacational, not vocational

This post is co-written with Julia Begbie, who develops cutting-edge online courses as a director of a design college in London. Some people (including us) think that within a generation or two, many or most people will be unemployable because machines will perform every task that we can do for money better, faster and cheaper than we can. Other people think that humans will always remain in paid employment because we will have skills to offer which machines never will. These people usually go on to argue that humans will need further education and training to remain in work –...

Future Bites 8 – Reputation management and algocracy

The eighth in a series of un-forecasts* – little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. This article first appeared on the excellent blog run by Circus Street (here), a digital training provider for marketers. In the old days, before artificial intelligence started to really work in the mid-2010s, the clients for reputation management services were rich and powerful: companies, government departments, environmental lobbying groups and other non-government organisations, and of course celebrities. The aims were simple: accentuate the good, minimise the bad. Sometimes the task was to squash a potentially damaging story that could...

Don’t just speed up the mess

Guest post by Matt Buskell, head of customer engagement at Rainbird One day back in 1999, I was sitting in a TV studio with a client. We were being interviewed about something called the world wide web. The interviewer was asking if it would change the world. It seems silly to say that now, but it was all very new back then. The interviewer asked, “do you think this technology will transform your business?” The client was Peter Jones of Siemens, who was one of the most impressive transformation leaders I have ever met. He replied “Yes, but we need...

What’s wrong with UBI – responses

Last week I posted an article called “What’s wrong with UBI?” It argued that two of the three component parts of UBI are unhelpful: its universality and its basic-ness.  The article was viewed 100,000 times on LinkedIn and provoked 430-odd comments. This is too many to respond to individually, so this follow-up article is the best I can offer by way of response. Sorry about that. Fortunately, the responses cluster into five themes, which makes a collective response possible. They mostly said this: Expanding a little, they said this: You’re an idiot because UBI is communism and we know that...

What’s wrong with UBI?

One out of three ain’t good Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a fashionable policy idea comprising three elements: it is universal, it is basic, and it is an income. Unfortunately, two of these elements are unhelpful, and to paraphrase Meatloaf, one out of three ain’t good. The giant sucking sound The noted economist John Kay dealt the edifice of UBI a serious blow in May 2016 in an article (here, possibly behind a paywall) for the FT. He returned to his target a year later (here, no paywall) and pretty much demolished it. His argument is slightly technical, and it...

Future Bites 7 – The Star Trek Economy

But later on, when humanity muddled through the Economic Singularity without too much turmoil, it turned out that the Boomers’ luck was eclipsed by that of the Millennials. During the 2020s, industry after industry succumbed to automation by intelligent machines, and unemployment began to soar. Professional drivers were the first to go, but they were quickly followed by the staff in car insurance companies, call centres, fast food outlets and most other types of retail. At the same time, junior positions in the middle-class professions started thinning out so that there were no trainee jobs for accountants, lawyers, architects and...

Future Bites 6 – Generous Google

The sixth in a series of un-forecasts* – little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. It is 2044. Around the world, machines have taken over many of the jobs that humans used to do. Professional drivers were the first big group to succumb to what is now commonly referred to as cognitive automation. Many of them struggled to cope, eking out unsatisfactory existences in the gig economy. Call centre staff and retail workers were next, and then, in the early 2030s, most of the professions started to see large reductions in employment levels too....

PwC asks: Will robots steal our jobs?

PwC has released a report (here) called “Will robots steal our jobs?” It’s not the first report on the subject and it certainly won’t be the last. But coming from the world’s second-largest professional services firm, it deserves attention. (Disclosure: PwC is an occasional client of mine.) As you’d expect, the report offers a thorough and intelligent analysis. It also arrives at some fairly radical conclusions. I have some major disagreements with it, but it is a welcome contribution. The key points Significant job losses… By the mid-2030s, PwC expects automation to cause the loss of around 38% of US...

Do you need a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO)?

Guest post by Matt Buskell of Rainbird Do you remember 1996? DVDs were launched in Japan, Travelocity became the first online booking agent, eBay and Ask Jeeves opened their online doors, and the Spice Girls had their first UK number one. It was an inflection point in technology. I spent a lot of time back then trying to convince executives that the internet was going to change the world and they needed to innovate. Not all of them got it. One large UK retailer said this about their internet strategy: “We’ve got it covered. We’ve hired a company to build...

Future Bites 5 – Drones

The fifth in a series of un-forecasts*, little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. Julia felt the blast more than she heard it. The deep rumble almost seemed to come from inside her. She had once experienced an earthquake, several years ago, and her first thought was that this was another one. But that had been in Indonesia, where earthquakes were fairly common; an earthquake in East London was unheard of. Instinctively she flicked her phone into life, and it brought her up to speed. The newsfeeds had nothing yet, but Twitter was already...