Experts find one third of British workers will be replaced by robots in the next ten years Oxford University research shows that creative and spiritual jobs will be safe but millions will lose out to computerisation. The research, led by Oxford Associate Professor of Machine Learning Dr Mike Osborne, predicts that humanoid robots like the Japanese nursing-care model pictured above will perform only a small minority of the roles taken over by machines. Most of the jobs lost will in future be undertaken by artificial intelligence embedded in a wide variety of machines that look nothing like humans. For example, Dr Osborne said that driverless cars will replace taxi-drivers.
USA warning
He warned that the United States has even more jobs at risk than the UK. Forty -seven percent of Americans – almost half of all workers – will find their jobs no longer exist in the next twenty years. Those whose jobs are ‘safest’ are primary school teachers, priests or other faith workers and occupational therapists. Most at risk are telesales agents, insurance sales people, factory workers and cleaners. Those involved in hi-tech computer- or engineering-based roles will need to demonstrate creativity, for example by making and designing products. The ideal combination for a future-proof job, according to the researchers, is mathematical skill with artistic flair.
Interstellar
Interstellar a space film made by a team creating the job vacancies of the future
Presenting his findings at the Future Shock conference in London, organised by the NESTA think tank, Dr Osborne gave the example of Hollywood special effects company Double Negative, the company that created the spacescapes for the blockbuster movie Interstellar . Double Negative’s managing director Alex Pope told the conference that he recently visited Singapore, where school and college leaders asked him what skills were needed for a lucrative job in special effects creation.
“I told them they should teach mathematics and physics in the morning and life-drawing in the afternoon” he said
“And when I went back a year later they were doing just that.”
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The problem with that approach in a British context is that school students are traditionally made to choose between arts subjects and science subjects. So a future where both are required in order to gain employment requires a new strategy. NESTA is proposing that education policy be urgently revised to include at least one compulsory arts subject at GCSE and A Levels or within the new English Baccalaureate (EB) school leaving certificate. The researchers have also mapped Britain’s hi-tech and creative industries and discovered – unsurprisingly – that they are concentrated in different regions, with a strong hi-tech cluster around Aberdeen in North East Scotland serving the oil and gas industry, and a long belt of computer-based companies along the M4 corridor west of London. But creative jobs are clustered in London, Brighton, Bristol and the North West. NESTA proposes that new ‘creative clusters’ should be funded alongside the hi-tech industries to re-balance the UK workforce.
Speaking on PassW0rd with Peter Warren on Resonance 104.4FM, the radio show about technology in society, Dr Osborne explained why people involved in creative occupations such as musicians and artists will not be replaced by smart machines in the foreseeable future. Listen here to the full interview:
Dr Osborne believes that robots or artificial intelligence will take many decades of development before they can handle creative tasks, or those that require empathy with human beings. Yet scientist Mark O. Riedl at Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States has devised a new test to prove that artificial intelligence can be made to think creatively. He calls the test Lovelace 2.0, referencing an earlier variant and both named after Ada Lovelace, the mathematician who helped Charles Babbage to create the first computing machine in the nineteenth century. Riedl claims the new test is designed to make human evaluators skeptical and suggest a possible scenario: ” Create a story in which a boy falls in love with a girl, aliens abduct the boy and the girl saves the world with the help of a talking cat”.
Chattiest
Some Artificial Intelligences (AIs) can already tell stories and invent jokes, based on phrases they have learned through many interactions with humans. They are the chatbots that ‘talk’ in text to the lonely and the bored, and one has now passed the Turing Test of being able to convince most of the judges that it is human, not machine.
‘Eugene’ the Turing Test winning chatbot takes his place alongside the 2014 Loebner Prize winner, Bruce Wilcox’s ‘Rose’. She showed some creativity and human foibles in her winning conversations at the contest. It was held in Bletchley Park, the wartime code-cracking centre where Alan Turing – inventor of the Test – cracked the Nazis’ Enigma code, shortening World War ” and saving an estimated 14 million lives. This is an example of Rose interacting with a human judge:
Human: “The car wouldn’t fit into the parking space because it was too small. What was too small?”
Rose: “I’m not a walking encylopedia you know”
Human: “What is your favourite chocolate bar?
Rose: “My favourite bar is The Parlour in San Francisco. It’s my favourite bar because it looks like bars from the early 1900s.”
‘Rose’ has won a solid gold medal from the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, yet still would not fool most humans for long. She could probably find employment in a call centre or telesales team, but is unlikely to crack the necessary formula of tech + creativity = career job.
Watson 2.o
More relevant in the employment market is IBM’s new generation of self-teaching autonomous robots. At its research and development centre in Stuttgart, Germany IBM is producing a new super-smart machine called Watson 2.0. The original Watson was the computer that competed in American TV’s general knowledge quiz show Jeopardy, beating all human contestant and winning the $1 million prize. Watson 2.0 goes a step further: it can learn new techniques, store them in the Cloud then pass them on to other robots in a sort of robopedia knowledge bank, accessible to other machines across the world. IBM computer architect Jorge Rodriguez explained on the PassW0rd Radio show on Resonance 104.4FM…
Rodriguez is aware of the self-teaching robots’ ability to take away thousands of jobs from humans, but he argues that new, more fulfilling and higher-paid jobs will be created because robots must be programmed updated and maintained by humans. He quotes the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence lab Marvin Minsky:
Marvin Minsky
“Once the computers get control, we will never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets”
FI Editor Peter Warren has co-authored a major report on the rights and responsibilities of robots Can we make the digital world ethical? It has been presented to the EU, the French Senate and the British Labour party and is available on request.
Oxford University research shows that creative and spiritual jobs will be safe but millions will lose out to computerisation. The research, led by Oxford Associate Professor of Machine Learning Dr Mike Osborne, predicts that humanoid robots like the Japanese nursing-care model pictured above will perform only a small minority of the roles taken over by machines. Most of the jobs lost will in future be undertaken by artificial intelligence embedded in a wide variety of machines that look nothing like humans. For example, Dr Osborne said that driverless cars will replace taxi-drivers.
