PEEK AT LIFE IN 2028 SHOWS HOW LITTLE TIME WE HAVE LEFT TO PREPARE FOR BRAVE NEW WORLD
▶ Rapid technological developments mean the nature of our existence will soon be altered. Jonathan Gornall looks at how the future is taking shape
It is the sound of a favourite song playing quietly on her personalised radio station that wakes her. As she stretches and yawns, the blinds, sensitive to her still-surfacing consciousness, ease open slowly to allow just enough sunlight into the apartment.
“It’s 9.25am on a beautiful Dubai morning, Fatima,” says the disembodied voice of Simon, her virtual assistant. It’s April 7, 2028, and it’s 33°C and climbing out there. Oh, and happy birthday.”
She smiles. She had chosen his British accent because it reminded her of the happy six months she had spent studying data analysis and algorithm design at the University of Oxford Online.
“Have you remembered you’re meeting Sayeed and Kelly at the mall at 10.30am?” Simon asks.
As her feet touch the bedroom floor, Fatima hears the satisfying sound of the coffee machine starting up in the kitchen. She walks to the picture window and the blinds open fully.
She loves the UAE, to which her family moved from Iraq when she was only five years old, and she never tires of the breathtaking view of the city from the 28th floor of her apartment building on Dubai Creek. A few storeys below, a neighbourhood police drone drifts past.
As she walks past the open bedroom door, she sees the robo-cleaner gliding over the tiled floor of the living room.
The lift, summoned by Simon, is waiting for her as she leaves the apartment. In the foyer she waves to the virtual concierge, which is busy cleaning the floor and watering the plants.
Fatima still misses Abdullah and glances across at the abandoned front desk and the old office chair, lying on its side behind it, where he used to sit.
Outside she climbs into the waiting driverless electric pod and settles into one of the plush seats for the 10-minute journey to the mall. Joining the highway, the pod merges seamlessly with the hundreds of others, travelling in perfect formation at a steady 70kph.
It has been five years since the last vehicles driven by humans disappeared from the city’s roads. Traffic lights and traffic police – and congestion, speeding fines, parking tickets, Salik and road deaths – are a thing of the past.
Fatima does not miss her car, or the cost of keeping it, but she does occasionally wonder what happened to that sweet Pakistani man who used to clean it.
She can just about remember travelling on the Metro, a novelty she had loved as a child, but which is now used only by the few manual workers left in the city. Robots have taken over most of the construction jobs.
The pod stops at the mall entrance nearest to where she has arranged to meet her friends.
In the mall, a hover-sedan approaches and offers to carry her. Fatima is tempted but waves it off. She needs the exercise.
On her way to meet Sayeed and Kelly, she ducks into her favourite clothes shop.
“Show me that new floral summer dress that’s on offer,” she says. The virtual assistant makes small talk while the display robot brings the item to the front of the rack. Fatima wonders how things worked out for that nice Filipina girl who used to work here.
“OK, thanks, I’ll take it,” she says, and hurries out of the shop. The system knows her size.
Whether this vision of a Dubai just 10 years from now strikes you as utopian or dystopian, there seems little doubt that, give or take the odd robot, it is an unstoppable reality hurtling down the track.
The only question, as a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development makes clear, is how many and what type of jobs will be swept away by the rising tide of artificial intelligence that is about to engulf the world.
At first glance the report brings good news. Fewer people are going to find themselves out of work as a result of AI and automation than previous studies have claimed.
The risk of automation is concentrated on low-skilled jobs such as cleaners. Those preparing food are also at risk. Assemblers and agricultural labourers were included, as is anyone involved in basic clerical work. But that is an improvement on previous estimates.
In 2013, researchers at the Oxford University caused shockwaves when they estimated that 47 per cent of all jobs in the US, and 35 per cent in the UK, were likely to disappear over the next 20 years. The rest of the world faced employment carnage on a similar scale.
But not so, says the organisation, whose mission is “to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world”. Only 10 per cent of jobs in the US, and 12 per cent in the UK, it insists, are at risk.
So most of us can breathe a sigh of relief?
No, says Calum Chace, an Oxford philosopher who speaks and writes extensively about artificial intelligence.
“All the OECD has done is take the original work Oxford did, riff on it and make
There is a very strong likelihood that many more jobs will be eliminated than created and we need to prepare for that
CALUM CHACE
Oxford philosopher
different assumptions,” says the author of Surviving AI and his new book, The Economic Singularity.
“To come out with a confident report saying there’s no need for anybody to worry, that it’s all going to be OK, is foolish and irresponsible because the elephant in the room is that we just don’t know.”
Take automated cars. In 2007 the US defence research agency Darpa staged the first competition for vehicles operated by artificial intelligence, offering a $1 million prize for finishing a 240km route in the Mojave Desert.
The best performer, a converted Humvee, managed only 11.78km before getting stuck on a rock. But a decade on, self-driving cars are doing a much better job than humans and Dubai is already testing autonomous electric pods.
“No one really saw that coming 20 years ago,” Mr Chace says. “But the reality is that machines are getting smarter much faster than we expected.”
Certain jobs, he says, are already obviously doomed. Drivers, retail and call-centre staff will disappear relatively soon.
Other jobs will be replaced by machines, he says, “when it is economical to do so. Once somebody cracks how to make a machine that can flip a burger, 100 per cent reliably and much better and cheaper than a human, simple economics will make all burger joints use it, because otherwise they’ll go broke”.
But trying to figure out exactly which jobs will go, and precisely when, “is a mug’s game, because we just don’t know. We have to do it, of course, to try to make sense of what’s happening and to plan, but we will probably be wrong”, Mr Chace says.
In a sense, he says, what happens over the next five years or so does not matter.
“The big question is, will AI over the course of a generation eliminate most jobs or create lots of new ones, or is it going to stay roughly the same?”
His view is that “there is a very strong likelihood that many more jobs will be eliminated than created and we need to prepare for that”.
Economists, or perhaps the machines that could replace them, have their work cut out.
“A world where machines do all the jobs could be a world where humans do more important things, like playing, learning and having fun, but paying for that is going to be tricky,” Mr Chace says.
There is a danger that, as the working rich grow richer and the unemployable poor slip deeper into poverty, social cohesion will break down and social instability will follow.
“Dubai probably won’t suffer at all because it’s got this relief valve – it can send loads of people home,” says Mr Chace, who attended the World Government Summit in the city in February and was impressed by the UAE’s determination to be a leader in the fields of AI and automation.
“But the countries they go back to probably will suffer, and that’s why we have to figure out how to run economies in which most or many people are not able to work.”