UBER’S RIDE COULD BE A SHORT ONE
The late Marvin Minsky, pioneer in artificial intelligence and designer of the first computer-controlled robots, once silenced an exuberant symposium of British Columbia’s brightest graduate students in computer science with one question.
Everything is changing so fast that by the time you graduate everything you learned will be obsolete, he said. Have you thought about what comes after computers?
As Metro politicians, taxi-drivers, unions and the public fret over the looming potential of Uber to disrupt traditional business models, we might all do well — including Uber enthusiasts — to ask ourselves a similar question. What’s the great disrupter on the horizon for Uber?
Possibly it’s already here, even as Uber jockeys for a role in the so-called sharing economy that many believe is inevitable. For example, what’s the future of an Uber driver in an economy that relies on automated self-driving vehicles? Some experts predict that this technology is itself poised to eliminate almost four million driving jobs virtually overnight. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers predicts that self-driving cars will comprise 75 per cent of the traffic stream by 2040. So the Uber driver might have a short career.
When the PEW Foundation surveyed leading experts on robotics, artificial intelligence and network communications in 2014, some warned that autonomous robots and automated systems could impact up to 50 per cent of jobs. A study by Oxford University scholars in 2013 identified 47 per cent of the jobs in the U.S. as having potential for automation — including many white collar jobs in business and the professions. Already there are more than 1.5 million robots operating worldwide. That number is expected to grow to 25 million by 2025. All of which raises another of those Minsky-like questions. What’s the future of workers and employment income in a world where machines can work more cheaply, efficiently and tirelessly? And what’s the future of the traditional market when manufactured goods can be mass produced and distributed — think 3-D printing on a global scale — at a fraction of present per unit costs? We are clearly in an accelerating curve of creative destruction in the economic models with which we’ve been comfortable. Will we soon have the uncomfortable task of rethinking the meaning and value of work, income, social status? Governments, corporations, universities and the public must begin thinking hard about collaborative ways to manage inevitable change.