Articles

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...

Future Bites 4 – Simultaneous Singularities

The fourth in a series of un-forecasts* – little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. This is another optimistic one (aren’t I jolly!). The first two paragraphs might seem a tad familiar. It is 2032. Most professional drivers have lost their jobs, and although many have found new ones, they rarely pay anything like as much as the drivers used to earn. A host of other job categories are becoming the preserve of machines, including call centre operatives and radiographers. A few people still cling onto the notion that new types of jobs will...

Bill Gates says we should tax the robot which will steal your job

Bill Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots which replace human workers. He said it in an interview (here) with Quartz, a media outlet owned by The Atlantic, and staffed by journalists from The Economist, the New York Times and other publications that Dirty Donald would label as fake news. They made a nice short video (here) to promote the piece, with Gates giggling at the end about the idea of paying more taxes. It’s a neat idea, and has got a lot of people online very excited. It could help to pay for Universal Basic Income, which is...

ATMs and Asilomar

The ATM automation meme In an engaging TED talk recorded in September 2016i, economist David Autor points out that in the 45 years since the introduction of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), the number of human bank tellers doubled from a quarter of a million to half a million. He argues that this demonstrates that automation does not cause unemployment – rather, it increases employment. He says ATMs achieved this counter-intuitive feat by making it cheaper for banks to open new branches. The number of tellers per branch dropped by a third, but the number of branches increased by 40%. The...

Future Bites 3 – Abundance accelerated

The third in a series of un-forecasts* – little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. As promised, this one is more optimistic. Most professional drivers have lost their jobs, and although many have found new ones, they rarely pay anything like as much as the drivers used to earn. A host of other job categories are becoming the preserve of machines, including call centre operatives and radiographers. A few people still cling onto the notion that new types of jobs will be created to replace the old ones taken by machines, but most accept...

Future Bites 2 – Populism paves the way for something worse

The second in what looks like becoming a series of un-forecasts* – little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. The third one will be more optimistic. Honest. In the five years of President Trump, corporate taxes were slashed and federal spending on infrastructure projects was boosted. Companies and individuals were exhorted (and sometimes extorted) to buy American, and imports were cut by tariff and non-tariff barriers. The impact was profound. Initially, US GDP rose sharply as its firms repatriated hundreds of $billions of profits from their foreign subsidiaries, and jobs were created to carry...

Betting on technological unemployment

Daniel Lemire is a Canadian professor of computer science.  He believes that cognitive automotive will not cause lasting unemployment.  I believe the opposite, as I have written in various places, including this blog post and my book, The Economic Singularity. Neither Daniel nor I has a crystal ball, and we both recognise that we could be wrong.  But we have both thought long and hard about the prospect, and we are both fairly confident in our predictions.  So after chatting about the issue online for a while, we have agreed a bet. There are currently around 1.7m long-haul truck drivers in...

A dozen AI-related forecasts for 2017

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. Unsupervised learning in neural networks will be the source of some of the most impressive results. In silico models of the brains of some very small animals will be demonstrated. Some prominent AI researchers will predict the arrival of strong AI – Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI – in just a few decades. Speech will become an increasingly common way for...