Q: WILL A ROBOT TAKE YOUR JOB? As the rise of artificial intelligence strikes fear into the working population, we find comfort – especially for professional women
Despite the pessimistic projections of an inevitable AI takeover, the outlook may not be so bleak for humans after all
On the BBC’s website is a risk-prediction tool, based on an influential 2013 report carried out by the University of Oxford. Type in your profession, and you get a percentage score for the likelihood of its automation in the next 20 years. It will make particularly alarming reading for telephone salespeople, legal secretaries and chartered accountants, whose chances of imminently being replaced by a machine are rated as 99 per cent, 98 per cent and 95 per cent respectively. As a journalist, I appear to be relatively safe, with a risk factor of just eight per cent; yet on the day I sit down to write this article, I learn that a computer has been programmed to generate Shakespearean sonnets on demand. Can copy creation at the touch of a button be far behind?
The trouble is that nobody knows; for the fourth industrial revolution is transforming the world of work at unprecedented speed.
Our parents expected to have jobs for life, often at a single company; our children must be somehow prepared for professions that don’t even exist yet. And even the experts disagree wildly on what the future holds. Some believe that human existence will become a Utopian dream, in which all the routine drudgery, from filing tax returns to scrubbing the bathroom, is taken care of by artificial intelligence, leaving us free to lead lives of leisure. Others warn of a terrifying future of mass unemployment and consequent civil unrest, with vast power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of technocrats.
‘I don’t feel it’s a Doomsday scenario,’ says Dr Hannah Fry, associate professor in the mathematics of cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at
University College London, and the author of a new book, Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine. ‘These arguments and questions have been going on as long as computers have existed. Technology advances, and we feel we have something to lose; but there are things that we fundamentally crave as humans, and they come to the fore. Skype exists already, yet we still congregate. We want social interaction.’
Moreover, she says, despite the hype, in most cases the technology is simply not advanced enough to replace a human agent. ‘People see a video of a car driving itself down a motorway, and think we’re heading for a future with no taxi drivers, no lorry drivers… But there are so many steps in that process. Driving in Silicon Valley is a fundamentally different experience from trying to drive through Soho at 3am, negotiating the drunks and the bicycles. Machines are still really prone to making mistakes. It’s not about handing over control, it’s about trying to create a human/ machine team to do things quicker and more efficiently.’
She quotes a recent challenge that saw a pathologist pitted against computer teams from around the world to find the tumours within 400 biopsy slides of breast tissue. The computers proved better at spotting tiny anomalies within cell groups, but were more prone to flagging up false positives. By contrast, the pathologist diagnosed more accurately, but overlooked some cell anomalies. The solution, then, is for mass pre-screening to be performed by algorithm, and for a pathologist to carry out the final check on any suspicious slides. This technique elevates the overall accuracy of diagnosis to 99.5 per cent, as well as saving doctors many hours of tedious donkey-work.
‘You can name on one hand the jobs that have been completely displaced by technology,’ agrees Tiffani Bova, the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce. ‘It’s all about being able to adapt. If I look back over my career, I’m not doing anything now that I was doing 10 years ago, yet all of my previous roles have led me to what I’m doing now. What matters is staying curious and being willing to try new things.’ The most important role for today’s CEOs is to persuade their understandably apprehensive workforce to be open to such adjustments, which is why she believes that female leaders, who are more naturally empathetic, may have an intrinsic advantage. ‘We are in a unique position. We have the ability to be really great communicators of what the company needs to do and why.’
‘The approach that will struggle is the stereotypical masculine, emotion-free way of leading,’ says Maria Grazia Pecorari, the president of digital, global portfolio and marketing at BT’s Global Services division. ‘Technology levels the rational playing field. Digital shifts the focus towards customer- and experience-centric ways of working and ways of winning in the marketplace. This makes attributes such as empathy, creativity and human understanding increasingly critical. As a result, technology does not neutralise our humanity, it actually increases its importance.’
Furthermore, since women have long been accustomed to working flexibly and juggling the conflicting demands of domestic and workplace responsibilities, the agile mindset that is required to succeed in the new era is likely to come as less of a shock.
‘The trick to futureproofing yourself is continuous learning, adopting new skills and staying very nimble,’ says Pip Jamieson, founder of the Dots, a LinkedIn for creative sorts. ‘You need to think in terms of your core, transferable skills. And embrace your creativity. You can’t automate that.’ On the day we meet, Jamieson is wearing a jumpsuit bought from a one-woman business selling via the craft website Etsy. ‘It came with a little hand-written note, and I love that I know my money is going straight to her. The more tech takes over our lives, the more we crave human experiences.’
This observation is borne out by the experience of the fine jeweller Jessica McCormack, who has seen demand for her bespoke pieces outstripping supply to such a degree that she has had to double the number of craftspeople working in her Mayfair atelier. ‘In an era where machines are doing it all, luxury is about something handmade and personal,’ she says.
This is not to say that there will be no job losses to tech; but the BBC’s risk predictor seems unduly pessimistic. A recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation has concluded that far fewer roles will be replaced by AI than the Oxford report originally suggested – 12 per cent rather than 35 per cent. ‘After all,’ says Fry, with unarguable and comforting logic, ‘if no one has a job, then nobody has any money to buy the services of robots.’
‘Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine’ by Hannah Fry (£18.99, Penguin) is out now.
‘Technology advances, but there are things that we fundamentally crave as humans, and they come
to the fore’