AI & The Future of Work | Volker Hirsch | TEDxManchester

good morning everyone I'm here to wake you up because it's Sunday morning and I'm going to speak about AI and robots and all that sort of stuff and I I would suggest that you will be awake by the end of that talk at the very very least now knowledge is power that's what Francis Bacon famously said more than 400 years ago and I was thinking how is this actually today so let me start with a question who here knows what an exabyte is other than the fact is a very large number 10 to the power of 18 you see I couldn't picture this so the image you see behind the number that's the Library of Congress in Washington DC which is the largest library in the world unless you listen to the people from British Library who think they have about five volumes more but some that doesn't matter so much so the entire printed content of the Library of Congress can be stored on an exabyte one hundred thousand times so last year there you go last year we exchanged information over the Internet to the tune of 1,100 exabyte that's 110 million times the library the content of the Library of Congress in one year and each and every one of you in here has access to that via your smartphones that is doubtlessly in your pocket and hopefully on silent so in front of that background the question is is knowledge actually still power today now we only live we live in the edge of the computer the one you see here was one of the most powerful mainframes of its day it's an IBM machine it was so powerful actually that it this was the machine used in ground control used for the Apollo 11 mission to put a man on the moon they ran the most sophisticated programs the most complex stuff in its day and the program size was 6 mega which is actually less than 10% of candy crush saga on your phone now all this goes back to this man Gordon Moore one of the founders of Intel who is the author of Mohs law which of course isn't really a law but he basically said that roughly every 18 to 24 months the number of transistors on a chip will double and therefore it's not a straight line but it will basically mean that the computing power will double the when you when you look at the graph you would see this as an exponential one and you know it's sad to say but Moore's law is dying or internals getting slower but we're still waiting for the new chip generation we are almost three years in fear not though because there is new stuff on the horizon and that's quantum computing and I have absolutely no idea what that's supposed to do other than justin theroux who can actually explain it to you however we have a son who thankfully is a physicist he just filed his thesis on practical quantum computing things cross dude wherever you are and so he said look it's actually very simple um what is on here is accurate in other words if a really fast modern computer can read in inverted commas every book in a library a quantum computer can read every book in the library at once so we're looking at several orders of magnitude and computing power that we will be adding god knows when in ten years time in 50 years time student and all that rise in computing power allows us to to look at a lot more complex problems of computing and that is what is now known as artificial intelligence way I when I grew up this thing existed only in science fiction movies but it's very much with us today and I'm going to show you a little bit about this now if you've been reading the papers in particular over the last year or so you will also have come across the term machine learning if you are in that space you know exactly what it means if not it actually means what it says on the 10 namely the machines are coming now it starts really really harmless when you look you know this is a factory worker and you think come on you know we've had industrial robots in car factories for decades and that is true there's nothing you last summer however I stumbled across this this headline company called Foxconn was the largest manufacturer of consumer electronics in the world they build about a third of the entire consumer electronics and one including the iPhone now they announced that they would replace 60,000 workers with robots and what that is in itself a really scary big number what really really I thought was shocking was that this means that someone who makes $5 a day is now too expensive and therefore will be replaced by technology the same thing you find for instance warehouse logistics those little orange things there are robots that that drive shelves towards the poor guy who still has to pack them in an Amazon warehouse Amazon acquired that company they want to put 50,000 of those in the into their various warehouses it also works it also works for for very large packages port of LA they those things drive themselves and if you want to take it a notch darker this guy might be your next policeman he's faster than Usain Bolt and he lasts longer than only 100 meters you don't outrun him meanwhile in the parking lot of uber this friendly Dalek here is doing the parameter control and make sure that there's no bad hombres coming in and putting the virtue shame now yet a notch darker if you need a you know sniper if you're not the government you probably need to go to the dark web but you can buy this thing today I mean this is this is commercial grade killer drones there's also your thing well you know there's this other thing but this builder can build you a house for brick and mortar in two days never draws a sickie never needs a needs needs needs a day of vacation never gets ill and never has a bad back from all those bricks um but there's also like like red really fun stuff hello Tech there we go so this is a pizza delivery guy and you think hey dude this is awesome right says I'm just diving up Domino's and and and order it now if you live in Auckland New Zealand if someone is listening you can do this today because Domino's and and flirty which is a drone maker and they actually started trialing pizza delivery via drone in November of last year so you know if you think I'm talking to you about a far-flung future no these things were happening today and then you think well but you know in in dense urban environments you cannot fly a drone and fear not clicker there you go you can also get it on wheels and it will just roll along nicely on the pavement and deliver the deliver your pizza to the front or leo end live two weeks ago in Washington DC and and and Redwood City in California and if you think Pizza Pizza Pizza is is all too boring you know there is of course also a robot that can cook up to two thousand meals and you can buy these things now uber takes it or not hire not only parameter control with friendly Daleks but they actually started trialing self-driving cars to pick up real passengers in and not only in some some odd little place where no one lives but in Pittsburgh which is fairly densely anslee populated and if you don't want to ship around people but things this truck has been trialing on the roads of Nevada for the last four years now the backdrop to this is worldwide about 400 million people earn their living by shipping people or things from A to B and they're all in the process of being potentially displaced this is Sunday right we should do a bit of culture meet Emily Howell you can look everyone Spotify it's very very gentle nice piano music the thing however is Emily Howell is an algorithm sign to a label for the time being so admit and honestly listen to it because it's amazing and then last last autumn I stumbled across this headline the good folks from google deepmind deepmind his company based out of London that was acquired by Google and they they published this really complex scientific article about about wavenet which is which generates audio and that means that the next Emily Howell will actually also be able to sing and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference if that's a human being or not and you know you might have one of those since last Christmas in your in your kitchen hey Alexa play me a very nice song now the background to voice recognition and voice output is you know that's a really complex computing problem and it is there let's go one further this is the dead funny robots called Dexter and here's a very nice nice nice face but it's also here's camera so he will watch you doing things and then you will learn from that so if you fold a shirt Dexter will from you doing it learnt how to fold a shirt now that's pretty cool in itself but last summer then there were there were some guys from I think it was Carnegie Mellon who said well you know wouldn't it be cool if robots of different makes and kinds and could actually teach each other so this isn't live yet but they're in there in beta stage and they actually start to developing languages so that you know you have some robot in somewhere in Japan is that hey guys you know I don't really don't know how to fold a shirt can you help me out Dexter said I got you when I was little I trained as a lawyer and my dad said look you know I mean this is this is son become a lawyer an accountant or a doctor right it's you safe Oh guess what I'm not well I am because I fled the profession quickly enough but again last time last summer was a good good summer for a I Clifford Chan's one of the largest law firms in the world one of the big magic circle firms in London and Baker Hofstadter is a large law firm the u.s. they both deployed different AI lawyers in their practice in their bankruptcy practice in the u.s. the guys and and Clifford chances for one of the most lucrative parts of corporate law which is corporate due diligence so this is today now the end result of all this is is that you know we need two jobs will automation will take every job it can take the number of people working in agriculture in the u.s. dropped from from about 90% in the in the around 1800 to about I think about 2% by 2010 and what you can see from that is it's not the immigrants guys it's it's automation and yes I am an MBA so you might want to ask you what is it you do how many repetitive tasks are in your world to review an accountant start looking if you're in radiologists I suggest you might want to retrain it's very very you know anything that has repetition in there the Machine could in theory and I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow but a machine can in theory do this better faster cheaper and without without any any vacation leave now however we are being told right is not only doom and gloom there's new clickers in town there is new jobs for you and when I read through this list I know like what the heck even is this what is a memory augmentation therapist and what on earth do you learn if you want to become a diffractive optics modeler as funny isn't it but you know this is an actual job ad from 2015 where someone was looking for a diffractive optics mullah who knows what TLDR means everyone else needs to speak more with the kids guys it's too long didn't read in other words if something is so long that you couldn't be bothered to read you look at the short summary so Ray Kurzweil is um as a future religious tour whatever you call those beeping he's a scary record and being very very accurate in his predictions I've summarized this for you so he basically says all this malarkey about faster computing that I spoke to you about will lead to a faster innovation because we can deploy all that power that will effectively then means that we should be faster and better to finding solutions to like really hard problems things like diseases and hunger and energy crisis it said will all be solved which eventually will lead to immortality unless you're really Catholic them probably not bodies will eventually become obsolete and then the last step is that we will be one interconnected hive mind I got knows what he was smoking then but but you know when you think it through that there is actually possibility and no matter what you think about this it means that change is coming and change is accelerating you are very likely living in an age today where this is slowest it will arguably accelerate through now this is nothing new right change alone is eternal perpetual in a mortal there's a Schopenhauer like hundreds of years back what I do what I can tell you however is to just sit here and hope it won't happen is a bad idea is a really bad idea now where do we go from here I think there is a big case to be made to rebuild society because the whole demarcation line between capital and labor might be a bit unhinged but that's an entirely different talk there's a couple of tactical steps that can take away a little bit of you of your fear the big one is education now as a stopgap should human machine collaboration you know there's certain things that machine's are actually struggling with things that that aren't standardized things that you know tactility and dexterity etc so you know you can do that but it's not only in in in manufacturing it's also you may have may recall last spring or so there was an AI alphago that beat the world's best ever like the Roger Federer of go and with an amazing array of neural networks however those were all trained on humans so he could arguably not have done it without humans and when you speak to scientists every day they use massive computers and data sets to actually do that and then and then and then go with it so there is that collaborative side however longer-term let's have a look at what is specifically human because we can find that and define it and then nurture it then we can arguably find a way to inoculate ourselves against that machine revolution and not end up like the poor folks in the matrix so there are things that are made with love there are things that carry emotional value now this is the pattern my wife cut who's a tailor to make me this jacket and despite the fact that she's bi beloved wife but if you are going through that process of a bespoke jacket and you know that this to the last buttonhole this was handmade by highly skilled craftsperson who do this not only for the money but because they actually love this this is something that a machine will struggle to replicate empathy is another one machines can actually recognize that but they but they don't of course feel it so any any any any job any action everything that requires empathy that's a good place to be creativity's is one you know there's a hundred thousand monkeys they'd hack on keyboard and eventually Ulysses will come out that is not creativity that's brute force computing and again genuine creativity is a hard one to mimic for a machine and the last one is critical thought now all of these things all of those four things that have just shown you cannot be found on a curriculum in school they are however arguably the cornerstones that we will need in order to to provide a meaningful education to our kids so that we can also educate them for jobs that we have actually no idea what they will be but those those are the cornerstones that that you know give us a little bit of hope in order to do that however we need to ride that train rather than jump in front of it and with that I bid you farewell thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 504,409

Rating: 4.6960335 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Technology, AI, Development, Future

Id: dRw4d2Si8LA

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2017