Robots at the Gate: Humans and Technology at Work

03 Impact Series Robots at the gate: Humans and technology at work Technological advances are generating fears of a jobless future. At the same time, major economies are seeing historically low unemployment rates and wage growth is puzzlingly low. Find out how technology is changing the nature of work, not eliminating it. Foreword Welcome to the third report in our Impact Series, in which we analyse the wide-ranging impacts of technological advancement on how people work today, and possibly will work in the future. April 11, 2018 Humans have often had a cautious relationship with new This report explores the confluence of current technological technology, particularly when it causes widespread disruption advancements and whether machines are about to in the workforce. Yet historically, technological advances permanently replace humans in the workplace, while also have not resulted in fewer jobs available to humans, but digging deeper into two automation-related quandaries: the rather have led to the creation of new opportunities. Farriers absence of wage inflation despite record low unemployment and saddlemakers were hit hard when cars replaced horse in major economies, and low labour productivity despite carriages, but the petrol stations, mechanics, motels and technological advancements. related industries that sprung up created new, yet different, I hope the insights delivered by our Research analysts will types of jobs. More recently, the smartphone is a great help stimulate the debate needed to ensure global societies example of technological advances creating new forms of are able to adapt and thrive as the nature of work continues work. Twenty years ago, mobile app developer was not a job; to evolve. today, millions of such developers are at work around the world. There is a growing sense that the age of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning is ushering in a new era of opportunity, but also great uncertainty and dislocation. The fact that robots are coming ever closer to acting and thinking like humans shines an acute light on what technological advancement Jes Staley could mean for the lives of working people. Chief Executive Officer, Barclays 3 Technology and the future of work Over the centuries, technological progress has evoked both In the past few years, the debate has been renewed. fear and fascination, especially in terms of the impact on Technological luminary Bill Gates has suggested that it might labour. Even as the Industrial Revolution forever changed be time to tax robots. The idea of a basic universal income has the trajectory of human progress, leading voices of the 19th resurfaced, with Finland launching a two-year pilot last year. century remained divided on how it could affect workers. Elon Musk of Tesla and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg engaged One of the most influential economists of all time, David in a public war of words a few months ago on the risks and Ricardo, flip-flopped on the issue. In 1821, he stated that while opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI).1 Futurists such he had previously felt that using machinery in production as Ray Kurzweil have been relentlessly optimistic about the was a general good, he was now more worried about the impact of a new generation of technological improvements. substitution effect on labour. And the discussion was not The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for always academic – the Luddite movement was an early Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well example of workers resorting to violence to protest the use as think tanks such as the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), of technology in textile factories. have all published studies discussing how advances in machine learning and robotics could fundamentally As the decades passed, the Industrial Revolution led to a reshape the global workforce. visible, massive improvement in living standards. But the debate – on how technology affects work and whether it Meanwhile, central bankers from around the world believe is an unequivocal positive – continued to wax and wane. technology is one reason why super-low unemployment rates It reared its head again in the 1960s, when US President have failed to cause sharp rises in wage inflation. After taking Lyndon Johnson set up a commission to study the impact of a few decades off, the age-old debate – on how technology automation on jobs. The commission noted that “technology will change the future of work – is back with a vengeance. eliminates jobs, not work.” But it did acknowledge that the To understand this phenomenon, we first look at ways in pace of technology on the workforce was severe enough which human skill-sets differ from machines. that the government considered radical measures such as “guaranteed minimum income” and “government as the “ The basic fact is that technology employer of last resort.” eliminates jobs, not work.” – From 1966 report by the US National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress The evolution of work over 250 years Figure 1 The evolution of work over 250 years 1800 1900 2000 Source: Barclays Research 1 https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/01/02/artificial- intelligence-end-world-overblown-fears/985813001/ 4 5 Waiting for the next generation media. Every social media site has added thousands of content moderators in recent years, including titans such as Facebook The concept of a sentient machine that can do everything and Instagram. One would expect these technological leaders humans can and more has been part of pop culture for to use machines for this purpose, so why do they keep decades, especially since the first Terminator movie in 1984. hiring human moderators? Because machines are unable to But there is an even longer history of mankind’s fascination distinguish between what humans instinctively know as right with the concept of an all-powerful Artificial Intelligence. In or wrong. Aaron Schur, senior director of litigation at Yelp, 1957, the US Navy developed an early generation AI called recently noted that machines cannot understand if a user is Perceptron using early-stage artificial neural networks. After a posting a racist review or merely describing racist behaviour.4 press conference by its creator, Frank Rosenblatt, the New York One is objectionable, the other is not. Times reported that the US Navy expected this new machine to be able to “walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be Context is key, but computers cannot understand it. Decades conscious of its existence.”2 Six decades later, we are still ago, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart made the same waiting for that next-generation AI to arrive. point. When describing his threshold test for “hard-core pornography,” he famously uttered the phrase, “I know it Even as machines made significant inroads into the when I see it.” Humans know how to make such subjective workplace, humans have historically retained a huge judgments. Machines don’t. advantage in two areas: Sensorimotor skills Humans’ main advantages over robots Humans can process input from their senses in the physical Figure 2 world and perform tasks based on that input. A robotics Humans’ main advantages over robots researcher at Carnegie Mellon, Hans Moravec, famously articulated this in what is now called Moravec’s paradox. Cognitive functionality He pointed out that higher-level reasoning takes far less computational resources for a machine than even low-level sensorimotor skills. Machines have progressed to the point where they can convince us that we are talking to a human, but even very advanced robots are far clumsier physically than a young child. Marvin Minsky, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, noted that the most difficult human skills to re-create in a machine were those that were unconscious to us, such as the ability to do simple tasks such as unscrew a jar lid or walk over uneven terrain.3 Cognitive functionality The other area where humans are superior relates to our capacity to learn, perceive, understand context and make decisions based on often incomplete information. Consider something as simple as content moderation, the task of making sure that objectionable views are not posted on social Sensorimotor skills 2 “New device learns by doing”, The New York Times, July 8, 1958 – while Source: Barclays Research the NY Times link is not available, please see a digital link to a 1996 paper where the NY Times article is quoted – https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ f3b6/e5ef511b471ff508959f660c94036b434277.pdf 4 https://www.law.com/therecorder/sites/therecorder/2018/02/05/5- 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox takeaways-from-tech-leaders-content-moderation-conference/ 6 Polanyi’s Paradox In 1966, philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote a book called The Tacit Dimension, which argued that human knowledge is often “tacit” – learned by us through cultural memory, tradition, etc. Humans learn from experience – indeed, that has arguably been the driver of humanity’s progress over the centuries – while machines do not. As a result, humans have skills and abilities that are second nature and easy for us to do, but extremely difficult for computers to imitate. Polanyi’s paradox states that we “know more than we can tell.” Many of the tasks that humans perform without thinking every day are because of our tacit knowledge, which is difficult to articulate. But if we cannot describe this knowledge, how can we codify it in a way that machines can understand? After all, computers are the very definition of literal; they do not understand sarcasm or have intuition. They do exactly what humans tell them to, which is why they need simplified environments in the physical world and precise information in both the physical and digital worlds to function. But if that first step – of telling a computer exactly what to do – is not possible, the advantages humans possess could remain in place indefinitely.

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