“Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close”
Driverless cars, robot bricklayers and killer drones are just the start, says John Arlidge – artificial intelligence is about to transform human civilisation. But do we really want to live in a world run by robots?
Las Vegas is where you go for old-fashioned fun, but I’ve got an appointment with the future. It’s 7am and the Sun is beginning to rise over faux Paris, New York, Venice and the Egyptian pyramids when a silver BMW pulls up on the Strip to pick me up. I’m going to take Frank Sinatra Drive to Interstate 15, but I won’t be driving. No one will. The car will do it itself. I get into the “driver’s” seat, press the blue button on the steering column that “engages personal co-pilot” and take my hands off the wheel and my feet off the pedals. The car, a prototype, stays perfectly central in its lane and about 40 yards behind the truck in front, at a steady 55mph. It is – remarkably – not at all scary, so I set a course north for Seattle, the second stop on my tour of the future.
I arrive at the Amazon Go store on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street in the downtown area. It looks like any other supermarket you might duck into to pick up dinner. There are the “We prep, you cook” meal kits, jumbo jars of anything you might fancy and, this being America, a “no weapons” sign at the door. But there’s one thing missing. Checkouts. I will soon be able to walk in and out again with dinner but without paying – or fear of arrest. Sensors and cameras will monitor what I pick from the shelves, and my Amazon account, activated via my iphone when I walk in, will be charged before I’ve even reached the next block. The store is due to open any day now.
Thanks to huge leaps in machine learning, speech recognition, mapping and visual-recognition technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is, at last, walking off the pages of sci-fi books and into our lives. It’s not just robot cars and robot shops. Those Facebook photos you’re tagged in? That’s AI. So are our Netflix recommendations, Spotify playlists, and Google and Skype translators that enable us to talk to anyone in the world in any language. AI is spreading so fast, it will soon be integrated into almost everything we touch, kick-starting what many call the “fourth industrial revolution” – the first being steam engines, the second oil and electricity and the third computers. The only difference, analysts say, is this new revolution is likely to be ten times faster, 300 times the scale and have 3,000 times the impact.
AI offers some big advantages to the human race. For one thing, it will help us live longer. Traditional carbon life forms make lots of mistakes. More than 90% of the 1,810 people who die annually on Britain’s roads (1.25m globally) do so at the hands of malfunctioning humans. Remove the nut behind the wheel and
deaths will fall to near zero, carmakers predict. Automation will also help to cure us if we are one of the unlucky few who do still crash our cars or simply fall ill. Bots study X-rays, MRI scans, medical research papers and other data, and pick up signs of disease that doctors sometimes miss. Lord Darzi, the surgeon who pioneered keyhole and robotic procedures, tells me robots can also perform better surgery than humans – and he’s one of the best. “Robots are more precise, have greater range of movement in keyhole surgery and no hand tremor, which makes delicate stitching easier,” he says.
Since we’re all going to be living longer, it’s a good thing that bots will help many of us get richer. By reducing labour costs – robots work tirelessly and don’t demand raises – automation will make existing companies more profitable and help spur the creation of new ones, techno-optimists predict. Consultants at the accountancy giant PWC say AI could boost the British economy by 10% over the coming decade, adding an extra £232bn to GDP by 2030 and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Automation will also make many existing jobs more fulfilling. No one actually wants to answer the phones in a call centre.
These benefits, great though they are, are only the beginning. Andrew Salzberg, head of transportation policy and research for the taxi app Uber, believes that automation will make cities, where most of us now live, greener and more pleasant lands. Uber has collected so much data from the hundreds of millions of rides its users have taken that it knows how and when we travel. That means it can anticipate when and where we will need to go and make sure there are autonomous cars available. Salzberg argues that, soon, rides will be so abundant and – with no driver to pay – so cheap, there will be no need to own a car at all. He says the number of cars on the road could fall by more than 90%. Most of those that remain in fleets such as Uber’s will be electric. If that happens, it will not only reduce congestion and improve the air we breathe, it will transform how and where we live. “Some 20%-30% of city centres are devoted to parking,” Salzberg explains. “If you don’t need parking, streets can change. We can have more park spaces, instead of parking spaces.”
It sounds like the latest self-serving Silicon Valley woo-woo. After all, he has – shock! – forgotten to mention Uber stands to benefit to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. But then I take an Uber to the San Francisco neighbourhood of Parkmerced, between downtown and San Francisco airport, and find out that what Salzberg is talking about not only works in theory, but is
“Humanity could split into a small class of ‘superhumans’ who run the AI, and a huge underclass of ‘useless’ people”
happening. Parkmerced is the most highdensity new housing development in any Western city – 9,000 homes are being built for 30,000 residents, most of whom will dump their cars. They have no choice. The developer, Maximus Real Estate Partners, has scrapped parking. To make sure buyers can still get around, residents get Uber credits, with car-share vehicles from Zipcars available for longer rentals. Urban planners and developers in other cities are following San Francisco’s lead. Moda Living is investing £1bn creating 6,000 rental-only homes in London, Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool, where tenants will get up to £100-worth of Uber credits a month if they agree not to have a parking space.
But there’s a snag to automation. With tech, there always is. And it’s the problem innovation has raised ever since the Luddites began smashing up automated weaving looms in northern mill towns 200 years ago. Jobs. Despite all the economic growth and employment opportunities proponents say AI will generate, few doubt it will also spell redundancy for many. A new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US argues that jobs are already being lost to AI and are unlikely to come back. Between 1990 and 2007, the addition of each robot into US manufacturing resulted in the loss, on average, of 6.2 human jobs. You’ll soon see this happening on your local building site. Robots called Sam (semi-automated mason) are already beginning to replace brickies in America and will arrive here any day now. They can lay up to 3,000 bricks a day, compared with the human average of 500.
John Hawksworth, chief economist at PWC, estimates that almost a third of existing UK jobs may be automated away over the next 15 years. That’s a lot – and it’s not merely “routine” jobs. Professional jobs, once considered immune from the ravages of AI, are also threatened. Automated services such as Simpletax, Kashflow and Rocket Lawyer, which prepare annual accounts and tax returns and do simple legal tasks, are putting human lawyers and accountants out of work. Job losses could herald a new era of unprecedented inequality. Humanity could split into a small class of “superhumans” who control the AI that will run the lives of the huge underclass of “useless” people, says the historian Yuval Noah Harari. If that happens, social revolt won’t be far behind.
Silicon Valley usually turns a blind eye to the havoc its products wreak on traditional industries and communities. Monetise first, moderate later, is their mantra. But amid all the scandals surrounding hacking, trolling, hate speech, fake news, advertising scams and murders streamed live on Facebook, tech firms are on the defensive. The last thing they want is to be blamed for job losses and inequality far greater than anything wrought by globalisation. So they are already trying to persuade us that AI will be what they would call “net positive”. First, they echo Pwc’s work, arguing that AI will create far more new jobs than it will destroy. They cite the example of telecoms. Sure – each advance, from fixed lines and telex through fax to mobile phones and email, displaced some types of workers. The typing pool is a distant memory. But the increase in new jobs has more than made up for those lost. Today, millions of people work as app developers, virtual-world designers, ride-sharing drivers, social media marketers – jobs that would have been difficult even to imagine ten years ago, before AI took off.
In the short term, however, few dispute that many ordinary workers are likely to be left behind. For them, Silicon Valley proposes something radical: universal basic income. The idea is that governments would hugely increase the welfare state using tax revenue – much of it derived from the highly profitable tech firms that politicians would have to force to cough up their fair share, not dodge it, as they now try to. Everyone would receive the minimum they need to live, regardless of whether they have a job. So, if you lost your job or simply did not want one, you could do something else. “Imagine six to ten billion people doing nothing but arts and sciences, culture and exploring and learning. What a world that would be,” enthuses the Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.
Free cash and a future where work is optional does sound great. It has gained support here. Labour has set up a working group to examine it. But is there a catch? I decide to ask Steve Hilton. He used to advise David Cameron before moving to California to set up his own tech firm, Crowdpac, and co-write a book, More Human, in which he argues we should use technology to create “a world where people, not Silicon Valley, come first”. The idea of universal basic income makes Hilton so angry, he practically spits out his tea when we meet in a café. “Doing meaningful work and being rewarded for it is a basic human need. Depriving people of that is morally evil,” he says. “It’s revoltingly patronising for the ‘great geniuses’ of Silicon Valley to say, ‘We can continue our fascinating work and earn vast incomes, so we can live in our gated communities guarded by robots and drones. But, sadly, you won’t. Don’t worry, though: we’ll pay you not to work.’” He has a point. We go to work so we can take care of ourselves and our families. But jobs also enable us to learn new skills, make friends and, for many of us, find our life partner. Home brew and poetry only go so far.
Surely, though, all of us will benefit from having more time, more space, and living in the greener cities promised by men such as Uber’s Andrew Salzberg? Don’t bet on it, says Christian Wolmar, a leading transport analyst. He acknowledges fleets of self-driving cars could lead to cleaner, more sustainable cities. But they could just as easily do the opposite. “Why not live 90 minutes away from the office and work on the way there and back?” Already, New Yorkers are taking so many Uber and Lyft rides that the number of people using the subway is falling for the first time since the financial crisis, and traffic gridlock is increasing.
Smart machines have plenty of other downsides, too. Automated cars have been hacked, and the hackers have taken control of the brakes and the steering. The cyber-security experts Ioactive predict that robots working for big companies will be turned against their employers – spying on them or disrupting production lines. A hacked robo-doc in an operating theatre would be even more dangerous. And that’s before you get to the really scary stuff about machines ganging up on us, Terminator- style. Drones can shoot bullets and launch grenades. What would happen if a drone were hacked? Tech pioneer Elon Musk has said that the rise of machines smarter than us poses humanity’s “biggest existential threat... With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.” Last month, Musk and the founders of 115 technology companies signed an open letter to the UN calling for a ban on killer robots, warning of conflicts on an unprecedented scale if an arms race to build autonomous weapons continues. “Once this Pandora’s box is opened,” they warned, “it will be hard to close.”
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Sunday Times © The Sunday Times Magazine/news Syndication.
“Robots working for big companies will be turned against their employers – spying on them or disrupting production lines”