Outback adventure:
Ever wondered what life will be like in 30 years’ time? With robots taking over and devices controlling our daily existence, Genevieve Gannon discovers the future looks vastly different to the world we know.
an Aussie photographer’s journey
Dawn breaks one morning in the year 2050. An elderly woman lays in her nursing home bed, unable to get up. The door opens and a clinically white android machine wheels to the bedside to check her blood pressure and heart rate, which are being monitored by sensors in her pillow. The computerised carer then gives the woman her breakfast, a perfectly nutritionally balanced parcel of food “printed” by a food generator that has been receiving data on her nutrient levels. Noting all is well, the machine gently lifts the woman’s body from her bed. Outside, a driverless car waits to take her to visit her family.
Of course, none of this is real – yet. However, therapeutic robots, tailored foods, and driverless cars – perhaps drone-like flying cars – are closer than we think. Robots can already perform delicate surgeries and are used in the treatment of mental health patients. Robots that care for the elderly, diagnose disease, suture wounds, wash our bodies and clothes, cook food and manage our lives could soon be as unremarkable as traffic lights.
Some say we’re on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and networked devices are poised to transform society the way steam power once did. Experts predict that by 2020 more than 200 billion devices will be connected to the internet and responsive to speech.
“The front door will answer you. The flower pot will answer you. Every device will be networked,” University of NSW Artificial Intelligence Professor Toby Walsh says.
The world is likely to be completely transformed by 2050.
Nine billion souls will walk the earth, creating unique challenges to food security, and forcing us to rethink food production – which will need to almost double. Artificial intelligence and robotics will be integrated as seamlessly as electricity. Healthcare will revolve around personal data collected by home appliances. Think contact lenses that monitor your blood sugar, or a mirror that plays your favourite song if it thinks you look blue. The very nature of work may change.
The way we live will alter on a micro-level, but this will reverberate into the macro. As technology changes around us at an unprecedented rate, tech leaders such as Tesla CEO Elon
Voice recognition capability and AI devices, such as robots, will quickly spread and become commonplace. Justin Lee, LG smart product planning team leader
Musk are warning the next era may bring danger and disruption. The Centre for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has predicted that five million Australian jobs – roughly 40 per cent – will be automated within the next 10 to 15 years, though this is fiercely debated. Economists say the estimate doesn’t account for the new jobs that will be created.
But does all this advancement mean our lives will be improved? That’s the question many are now grappling with. What will happen if robots take jobs currently performed by humans? Will there be widespread unemployment? Will robots be able to think for themselves? Moreover, will they be dangerous? The Weekly spoke to a host of experts about what we can expect in the years to come. Things are changing so quickly, they said, that even they couldn’t say how far we’ll advance in the next three decades.
Or, as Professor Walsh puts it, “We tend to over-predict what we can do in the short term but under-predict what we’ll do in the long term.”
Hard at work
IBM released the personal computer in
1981. Now, more than one in three people on earth carry a smartphone – which is essentially a tiny computer.
According to a CEDA report:
“The extension of computerisation into almost all aspects of human activity threatens to radically reshape the workforce of tomorrow.”
Integration and computerisation will change everything, from the way we eat and go to the doctor, to how societies work. There have been calls for the introduction of a universal wage, a sort of basic allowance to compensate for the fact that all of our jobs will eventually be done by robots and algorithms.
“Jobs that involve low levels of social interaction, low levels of creativity or low levels of mobility and dexterity are more likely to be replaced by automation,” the CEDA report says.
Artificial intelligence will infiltrate every aspect of our lives. New homes are already being built with smarthome capability in mind, and the advancement of AI will bring the spread of more innovative robotic products, LG’s smart product planning team leader Justin Lee says.
“Voice recognition capability and AI devices, such as robots, will quickly spread and become commonplace,” he says.
Companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are already selling in-home connected assistants that respond to voice commands. Panasonic’s Wonder Life-BOX concept centre in Japan shows us what homes of the future could look like. An operating system called “The Partner” will be connected to everything, from the mirrors to the walls.
“Just stand in front of the mirror and The Partner will understand not only the condition of your body but also your feelings. If you are tired and tense, The Partner will cheer you up with suitable lighting and background music,” the concept site says.
Melbourne University Professor
Jeff Borland says history shows new technology does not translate to human obsolescence, and that such fears arise because humans are biased to think they live in special times.
“There’s no evidence at the moment that the current technology revolution is having an effect that is more transformative than periods of rapid technological change in the past,” Professor
Borland says. “Productivity rises so income rises, so people spend that income on extra goods and services or new kinds of goods and services.
Until humans discover that they don’t want to consume extra stuff, it seems that is the response to new technology.”
He likes to use his father, a plumber, as an example. When he was starting out, if he wanted to put in a sewer, he had to dig the drain by hand, the earthenware pipes had to be cemented together. But when bobcats and plastic pipes were introduced, installing a sewer took one-tenth of the time.
Rather than being bad for plumbers, it made the cost of the work cheaper, meaning people could afford more. “What happens is, people say,
‘wow, it’s a lot cheaper to put in a bathroom, we’ll get two or three bathrooms, or we’ll spend the money we saved on making our house bigger in some other way.’”
One vision of the future sees us overrun by free-thinking robots. A more optimistic view has technology keeping us healthy, with our homes and devices constantly monitoring and caring for our wellbeing. Panasonic’s Homes of the Future feature a “clean entrance”, described as “a virus sensor [that] detects polluted air inside and outside the house … Detection at the entrance prevents the spread of viruses,” Panasonic says.
Home, sweet connected home
The rest of our devices – including some that don’t exist yet – will keep an eye on us throughout the day.
“Your fitness watch will automatically monitor many of your vital statistics: your pulse, your blood pressure, your sugar levels, your sleep and your exercise,” Professor Walsh says. “Your toilet will automatically analyse your urine. Your smartphone will regularly take selfies of you, in order to understand better your health.”
It’s likely that by 2050 smartphones will have been superseded by more sophisticated health devices. Google announced in 2014 it was developing a smart contact lens with “chips and sensors so small that they look like bits of glitter” and an antenna “thinner than human hair” to measure glucose levels in tears. The purpose of the project is to help diabetes sufferers, but the technology could have other applications.
A taste of tomorrow
The total health support system extends to food. The CSIRO wants people to be able to wake up to a meal formulated to perfectly complement biological markers measured by sweat sensors in your pillow. The food will be tailored not just to your daily dietary needs, but to your genetic predisposition to absorbing minerals and nutrients.
Food scientist Amy Logan explains: “We’re envisaging a biosensor that’s capturing information from a person as they sleep, then that’s being sent to a food generator which is intelligently being able to know what food and nutrients needs to be delivered to that person that day.”
By 2030 they hope to have a prototype food generator which will become as common as a kettle. The “food” would supplement regular meals, not replace them. The CSIRO is examining a range of different technologies that could be used in the food generator. “We’re also looking down the track at whether we could synthesise meat,” Dr Logan says.
The world saw a glimpse of this future in 2013 when scientists cloned a burger patty. Food critics who tasted it described it as dry and lacking flavour, but the technology to clone animal protein has evolved rapidly. Bill Gates and Richard Branson have invested in a “clean meat” company that grows meat in a lab by feeding oxygen, sugar and nutrients to live animal cells. Australia’s meat industry is investigating ways to farm real animals more efficiently. “For red meat, 3D printing represents an exciting opportunity to add value to current secondary cuts, trims and by-products by developing ‘meat ink’,” Meat and Livestock Australia says. The concept involves creating an “ink” from parts of the animals we would never eat. The meat is then reconstituted using a 3D printer to create a meat product that is a far more efficient use of the animal and more palatable than a plate of off-cuts. The technology also has great potential to improve nutrition for the elderly by making animal protein easier to chew and digest.
If beef that comes from printers and petri dishes sounds unappetising, perhaps a barbecued bug is more your speed. Insect protein has been touted as a sustainable and nutritious alternative food source, with a United Nations Food and Agriculture report titled Edible Insects hailing creepy crawlies for their “huge potential” to enhance food security in 2050 and beyond at low environmental cost.
“Insects are a highly nutritious and healthy food source with high fat, protein, vitamin, fibre and mineral content,” the report says.
Omega-3 levels in mealworms are comparable to fish and higher than
cattle and pigs, and “cricket flour” is gaining popularity as a high-protein alternative to regular flour. What’s more, it’s gluten-free.
Driving change
In one vision of 2050, every vehicle on the road will be autonomous.
The need for traffic lights will be eliminated because the cars will talk to each other. They may even be flying through the air. “Humans won’t actually be able to drive in among all of these autonomous cars because the human reaction times won’t be good enough to be able to slot into the road,” Professor Walsh says.
Honda Australia’s communications manager Scott McGregor says recent advances in the car industry have been astounding. “The rate of change we’ve seen in autonomous technology in the last five years is more than we’ve seen in the last 100 years,” he says. “We’ve got radar cruise control that can maintain a set distance from the car in front and autonomous braking – these sorts of things are real right now.”
The most advanced vehicle on the market right now is rated level three (conditional automation). Honda plans to be selling level four (high automation) vehicles by 2025, seven short years away. As for level five, Scott says it’s difficult to say whether a fully autonomous, driver-not-needed scenario is likely, but there’s no doubt technology will improve.
Many manufacturers believe that removing human error could eliminate road deaths all together – but there are other benefits to autonomous vehicles as well. Since there’s no need for your vehicle to wait for you while you work, parking in cities will no longer be a problem – the cars could go back home, or even act like a taxi, earning you money while you work, Professor Walsh says. Boeing has taken this idea even further with a concept video depicting a world of integrated drones where your autonomous vehicle is collected by a drone, so that it can be driven or flown to your destination. “The pace of change in terms of technological advancement is all moving very, very quickly,” Scott says.
I, robot
Of course, the one thing that perfectly encapsulates the potential and the uncertainty of the future is robots. Simple robots are slowly making their way into the market. Sony has unleashed a robotic dog, Aibo, equipped with AI technology that enables it to learn tricks and recognise its owner’s face and voice. The pup more closely represents the thinking companion we picture when we hear the word robot than the omnipresent “Alexas” and “partners” and is just the tip of a new intelligent robot epoch.
“Aibo can form an emotional bond with members of the household,” Sony says of the product, available in Japan.
Simple companion robots have been gaining popularity for their therapeutic benefits and are becoming more sophisticated. Alzheimer’s Australia has praised the “PARO seal” – a responsive, robotic furry seal – for the way it calms and comforts dementia patients, indicating this is likely to be a growth area.
Researchers at The University of South Australia are developing technology that would enable companion robots to autonomously help older people who live alone to get up safely after a fall.
“Our research hopes to give the next generation of robots the eyes and judgement of a physiotherapist or physical trainer,” researcher Kalana Ishara Withanage explains.
Such optimism is not universal. Forty-six per cent of Australians fear technology will take over in the future and 70 per cent of future jobs will be done by robots and artificial intelligence, according to market research company Ipsos data.
Tech writer and bestselling author of The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, says we are still more than 30 years from humanoid robots, and we have more to gain than fear from AI.
There are still many limits to what AI can achieve. For one, it requires large data sets in order to learn. By comparison, humans can learn from a very small number of data sets. Kevin says you only have to look at a toddler to see how easily the human brain learns. That is a leap AI programmers are yet to make, he said in a recent tech forum run by IBM. “We’ll reprogram the AIs if we’re not satisfied with their performance,” he wrote on his blog.
Professor Walsh says AI objects are a long way from having the competence to act outside its closed and narrow worlds. The truth is technology is advancing so rapidly, by 2050 everything in this article may seem laughably old-fashioned.
Our research hopes to give the next generation of robots the eyes and judgement of a physiotherapist or physical trainer. University of SA researcher Kalana Ishara Withanage.