The long read: could a robot take your job?

Mass unemployment is one outcome predicted by the rise in Artificial Intelligence but changing the way we educate our children should prevent this doomsday scenario.

The rise of the robot. Technological advances mean robots are being increasingly trained and programmed to do the jobs of humans. Ute Grabowsky / Photothek via Getty Images
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On board the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, now a museum ship in San Francisco, is a small exhibit that graphically demonstrates exactly why all our lives are about to be changed, forever.

On July 24, 1969, the Hornet was sent to the Pacific to recover the Apollo 11 astronauts following their return from the Moon. Hidden among the lunar memorabilia displayed on board the ship is a chart comparing the capabilities of the Apollo 11 guidance computer with those of the Apple iPhone 5: the 2012 iPhone was 1,270 times faster, had a processing memory 250,000 times larger and a storage capacity two million times greater.

It was also 286 times lighter than the 32 kilogram space machine and could be carried around in your back pocket.

This is the heart of the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, which is about to unravel all our certainties of work, leisure and social cohesion. The next “giant leap for mankind” is upon us, and the only question is, which of us will it leave behind?

It is the astonishing advance in computing power that is driving the evolution covered in the 2014 New York Times bestseller The Second Machine Age.

The first machine age was the Industrial Revolution, “the sum of several nearly simultaneous developments in mechanical engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, and other disciplines”, wrote Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, academics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) focused on the digital economy.

In the 18th century it was the steam engine. Today it is the computer that, having irrevocably altered how we communicate, is now powering a radical revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

And the pace of that change is breathtaking.

Back in the distant past that was 2004, two top-flight United States economists published The New Division of Labor, a book that looked at the consequences for employment of the development of AI and robotisation. It concluded confidently that complex tasks such as driving were beyond computers and, at the time, they seemed to be right.

That same year Darpa, the organisation that commissions research for the US defence department, offered US$1 million (Dh3.67m) to anyone who could build an autonomous vehicle capable of traversing a 230-kilometre course from California to Nevada.

Only nine of the 15 machines developed for the challenge managed to even cross the start line. The rest of the field "went haywire at or just beyond the starting chute", sniggered Popular Science magazine.

An assortment of small rocks, fences, slopes and bushes quickly took out the others and the “winner”, a Humvee modified and operated by team from Carnegie Mellon University, travelled just 12km before lurching off the road and catching fire.

Popular Science had a good chuckle. But just 10 years on, no one is laughing about autonomous vehicles.

Last week Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric car, announced he was hiring 1,200 additional software engineers to develop Autopilot, his autonomous control system, with the aim of putting driverless cars on the road by 2018.

Google, meanwhile, is even farther up the road. For the past year, 53 of the company’s self-driving cars, each carrying a human being in the driver’s seat just in case, have covered a total of 1.3 million miles on the roads of California and Texas.

Last week, the company revealed that in that time its cars had been involved in just 17 minor accidents – all caused by other cars, driven by humans.

Suddenly, we are at a tipping point. In November, Toyota announced it was investing $1 billion over the next five years in a new research and development centre in Silicon Valley, dedicated to the development of robotics and AI, while at Detroit’s international car show last week, Volvo unveiled its C26 autonomous concept.

This means that anyone who drives for a living can look forward to losing their job – and they won’t be alone. A sobering paper published by two Oxford University academics in 2013 ranked 702 jobs “according to their probability of computerisation”.

It will upset only telemarketers to learn that, with 99 per cent certainty, their occupation is among a dozen jobs at the front of the queue for robotic replacement.

Many jobs have already gone. At the last count, online retail giant Amazon – which in March won permission from the US federal aviation authority to start testing door-to-door delivery drones – had 30,000 robots storing and fetching goods at 13 distribution centres.

Shifting palleted goods around a warehouse is one thing. But what is surprising is the wide range of the 400 jobs on the Oxford list deemed to be more than 50 per cent likely to be lost to computerised machines.

In addition to drivers of all sorts, they include sports umpires, loans officers, real estate agents, cooks, secretaries, manicurists, assorted clerks, couriers, shop staff, musicians, security guards, sailors, oil and gas derrick operators and roustabouts, aircraft mechanics, dental hygienists, police officers …

Not for nothing are the runaway developments in computing, artificial intelligence and advanced robotics known collectively by experts in the field as “disruptive innovation”.

Many of the jobs in the UAE, from those in the service sector to some of the more technical occupations for which Emiratisation is preparing a new generation of nationals, can be found on the hit list. Airline pilots, for example, are said to be at 10 per cent risk of replacement, while the prospects for nuclear power reactor operators are at 95 per cent risk.

The attractions for employers are obvious. Using robots for highly technical jobs saves the costs of training, salaries, healthcare insurance and accommodation. Robots will never go sick, have accidents or mental breakdowns, or require expensive cover for maternity leave, and, when they do reach the end of their useful working life, have no use for a pension.

Capitalism is undoubtedly the co-driver of this revolution, but therein lies a window of opportunity for countries such as the UAE, where labour costs are currently lower than in many other parts of the world: no one is going to adopt robotics or AI while doing so is more costly than employing humans to do the same thing.

Access to a pool of cheap labour is not a reprieve – as with all technology, the cost of robotics will fall rapidly – but it is a valuable stay of execution.

Economies that are not swept away by the initial tidal wave of change have an opportunity to radically rethink education policies, training their people to swim and thrive in the uncertain new economic waters.

Countries that get it right, say experts, will float to the top of the food chain. Get it wrong, and “technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead”, predict Brynjolfsson and McAfee in their book.

There is no time to waste. A recent study by RBC Global Asset Management concluded that, as the cost of labour in developing countries was rising, so the cost of automation was already declining, leading to “a convergence of unit costs of robots compared to labour”. Automation, says RBC, is now in a “self-propelling spiral”.

So what to do? As usual, follow the money.

In 2013, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report that listed 12 technologies with “significant potential to drive economic impact and [societal] disruption by 2025”.

They were: mobile internet, automation of knowledge work, the internet of things, cloud technology, advanced robotics, autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles, next-generation genomics, energy storage, 3D printing, advanced materials, advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery, and renewable energy.

This list should be taken to heart by everyone, from students hoping to find employment when they leave university to government policymakers hoping to keep their economies globally competitive – and their people content. “By the time [these] technologies … are exerting their influence on the economy in 2025,” concludes the McKinsey report, “it will be too late for businesses, policymakers, and citizens to plan their responses.

If mishandled by policymakers, the social consequences of the robot revolution could be grave, says the Brookings Institution, and it is vital to start re-thinking social contracts now.

“If we end up in a situation where many people are unemployed or underemployed for significant periods of time, we need a way to provide health care, disability and pension benefits outside of employment,” says Darrell West, Brookings’ director of governance studies.

It will, he says, be necessary to adopt “flexicurity”, or flexible security – the separation of the provision of benefits from jobs, and the offering of health care, education and housing assistance “on a universal basis”.

This, of course, is in part the model of the social contract under which the UAE currently operates. But for some years now UAE policymakers, looking beyond the era of oil, have been working towards the goal of Emiratisation, which envisages nationals training for and taking over many vital jobs – in exchange for the benefits that the state bestows.

In the UAE, in other words, the rise of AI and robotisation could challenge the logic of Emiratisation.

The solution to such threats for countries everywhere, says McAfee, a founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, is to tear up the education playbook and start again.

“Our education system is in need of an overhaul,” he says. “It is frustrating that our primary education system is doing a pretty good job at turning out the kinds of workers we needed 50 years ago.”

London tech guru Sarah Wood has firm ideas about what we should be teaching our children. In 2006 she co-founded Unruly, a company that seeks to create advertising campaigns algorithmically guaranteed to go viral. The biggest brands have flocked to Unruly’s door – and in September the company was snapped up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for £114 million (Dh593m).

But Unruly has a problem. It says its secret weapon is “passionate people” – but “finding the right people is our number one challenge”, Wood told the BBC last month. “If you speak to start-ups around the UK, you’ll hear the same thing,” she said. “There is a chronic shortage of skills.”

Her comments were directed at the British education system but have resonance for all countries struggling to equip their children for the future.

“The education system hasn’t managed to keep pace with the growth of the digital economy, which requires lots more computer science graduates, more engineers, people who are numerate and confident with data,” she says.

Fittingly, perhaps, a report published this month suggests young people everywhere may be more attuned to – and concerned about – the looming consequences of the new machine age than their governments. In a survey conducted across nine developed and developing countries, international technology consultancy Infosys found that overall, more than 40 per cent believed that their education was not preparing them for work.

Tellingly, confidence about the technology-dominated future was strongest in three of the so-called developing Bric countries – Brazil, India and China – and lowest in the UK, France and Australia.

Ultimately, though, responsibility for the future of today’s young people lies not with schools or universities, but with themselves. In a rapidly evolving technological landscape, concludes Infosys, the most important life skill they can learn is the ability to keep learning.

“Students need to understand that education alone should not be expected to fully prepare them for a job, because the skills they need to be successful in their work will continually change as industries transform,” says Vandana Sikka, chair of the Infosys Foundation.

“Their success, therefore, will depend on their ability to learn … they must have a mindset of learning for life.”

Jonathan Gornall is a regular contributor to The National.

thereview@thenational.ae