Tech and AI: 9. Will AI Take My Job?

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Welcome to Understand Tech and AI, the podcast that takes you back to basics to explain, explore, unpick, and demystify the technology that's becoming part of our everyday lives.

I'm Spencer Kelly from BBC Click and you can find all of these episodes on BBC Sounds.

Throughout history we have toiled.

We've worked, we've built things, plowed things, grown things.

And this is how we've earned a wage to feed and house and clothe ourselves.

And that's been fine.

Thank you very much.

But also throughout throughout history we've learned how to build machines that are faster, cheaper and more efficient than people.

Machines that can do more of the repetitive physical dangerous manual labor that we'd really rather not do anyway.

There have been many ages of automation through the centuries and now we are facing a new one.

The age of artificial intelligence.

And this time, it's not the physical work that's being automated, it's the thinking work.

It's work that requires conversation and discourse with others, work that's traditionally felt pretty human.

It's it's everything.

Is AI coming for your job?

Is there any type of work that's safe from an AI takeover?

Well, while I've still got a job, I'm joined by Dr.

Jonathan Aitken.

You've still got a job as well, yeah?

I do, yes.

Brilliant.

You are an electronic engineer, doctor of applied AI, and you teach robotics at Sheffield University.

Absolutely.

So you are well placed to to talk about the jobs that AI may or may not take.

Give us an overarching view, first of all.

How worried should we be that AI is going to replace a lot of our jobs?

As ever through every industrial revolution that we've seen, we're going to see a change in the nature of jobs.

Whenever I answer this question,

my first thought is always to think back through the trajectory of work and see how it's been affected by each one of these, whether it be mechanization, electrification, computerization.

And right throughout that history we've always seen an increasing number of jobs because wherever we've applied a new technology new jobs have been created.

Yes we have seen a shift in the working patterns we've seen a change but ultimately the number of people in employment has kept growing right throughout that time.

Is that because we're creating jobs that we didn't know we needed because of the new technology or are we just more affluent so new industries open up because we don't all have to go down the mines you know seven days a week i think it's a little bit of both i think absolutely we're going to see as new technology evolves we see new opportunities and we'll see things change so if we look to kind of the previous industrial revolutions we'll see more supervisory roles appear where people begin to look after the hardware and actually when you introduce the hardware you still need somebody to service the hardware, you still need somebody to maintain it, you still need somebody to work on it.

So ultimately, we see the nature of some of those jobs start to change.

They can either become more managerial or they can become more practical, depending on what routes people would want to take.

As you say, automation is a fact of life.

And throughout history, we've built machines that replaced manual labor.

I've heard it said quite a lot now that this time it feels different because we're not replacing physical labor and we're all going into kind of thinky jobs, intellectual jobs.

What we're seeing is AI being able to do at least some part of those thinky intellectual jobs.

So it begs the question, where do we go if it's taking that bit away?

I think it's always an interesting question because ultimately, how does the relationship with the AI work as part of the job?

Where do the bounds sit?

Now, we're sitting at a point in history where we're not quite sure because lots of people will make predictions for what we're going to see in five years, in 10 years, in 15 years, but we don't know how the technology is going to develop.

We don't know how we're going to develop with the technology as well.

Ultimately, we can think about actually is AI more of an assistant to us because it's become one of those tools and it will become one of those tools which is very good at giving us select information and being able to filter down information.

So in the past when someone would say I'll just go Google it.

Actually, this is going to be an easy way to be able to filter that information to allow us to be more efficient as part of our jobs.

Rather than spending 20 minutes looking through search answers and clicking on a few and kind of going off into the ether and potentially can be distracted and various other elements, we can actually now get one single answer delivered to us in a very, very efficient manner, which hopefully solves our conundrum.

Okay, Jonathan, let's take a short break because it turns out that intelligent machines have been coming for our jobs and for us for longer than many of us have realised.

Our tech historian James Sumner picks up the story.

If you've ever called someone who hates new technology a Luddite, you'll probably have annoyed any historians within earshot.

The original Luddites, textile workers in the 1810s, had no objection to technology in itself.

Their problem was with being thrown out of work, which could mean starvation.

Smashing the automatic looms and other machines that were replacing their labor was the closest thing they had to a bargaining tool.

The word robot first appeared in 1921 in the play RUR, R, where it described a kind of emotionless artificial humanoid mass-produced in a factory and set to work on menial jobs.

Even before the robots finally rise up and destroy their creators, their existence is shown to be destroying human society, as most workers lose their jobs and the world economy plunges into chaos.

Since the Industrial Revolution, These fears had focused very much on manual jobs, but in the 1950s...

Engineers have always made machines that move.

Now they are beginning to make machines that appear to think.

With excitable media reports of electronic brains, secretaries, administrators, and even doctors and lawyers were suddenly in the firing line for potential replacement.

Of course, not everyone agreed that machines destroyed livelihoods.

The work, after all, would still be done and the benefits would go to someone.

What if we simply agreed to share them?

And computerization created some jobs itself, often more interesting than the ones that had been lost.

Leon Bagritt, head of the British computer firm Elliott Automation, was particularly active in promoting this vision.

Instead of reshaping the availability of work around changes in the technology, true automation would fit the technology around humans' ability and desire to work, as he explained in 1964.

The opponents of automation are basically people who are pessimists.

Somehow, they don't believe that human beings can be trusted with riches and leisure.

Tell them that here's a way in which we can all be better off, and they warn us solemnly with a wagging finger to beware of affluence.

That was Dr.

James Sumner with the first predictions of the rise of the robots.

Now, Jonathan, what sorts of jobs do you think might be at risk?

And can you think of any jobs that are safe?

I think I'll start with the jobs that are definitely safe.

A lot of the practical physical jobs, a lot of the kind of manual work that we do, they're going to be safe for a very long period of time.

So if they haven't been replaced by machines so far, like making cars, if they haven't already fallen to the robots, you're saying they are now safe?

The world is a complex place.

Humans are very good at dealing with problems.

We're very good at dealing with issues that occur.

We're very good at being dexterous.

We're very good at being craftsman and actually dealing with very nuanced tasks.

A robot is still very good at dealing with the one task that you put in front of it.

But as soon as you ask it to walk over wobbly ground and pick up something that's not quite in the right place and do something new with it, a robot just goes to pieces basically.

Absolutely.

When you work in an uncertain world, a robot can be more of a hindrance than it can be a help.

Now, I've spoken previously about my hatred of the photos of the Terminator or the strange white humanoid robot that's attached to most news stories about AI.

Robots are dumb mechanical machines that do one thing and AI is something that learns and can adapt.

But the two can be combined, can't they?

Should we be thinking about robots that do walk around our world or wheel themselves around our world and learn and adapt and get better at most things that we could do?

I think there's always two different questions with AI and it's almost the general AI versus a specific use case AI where we're looking at AI which is adapted to within a particular task so yeah we used to get the AI playing games like Go and chess and everything else when we talk about the robots kind of wandering around the world we're now talking much more into the the sense of general AI into the sense of AI that we're letting loose in the world and that has an enormous amount of difficulties not just because it has some kind of physical form the robot which is going to struggle on various different types of terrain depending on how well it's been built and how much money people have paid for it.

But it also has the difficulty of the complexity of the world, sensing the world and understanding how the world fits together because inherently the world is a noisy, difficult to understand place with lots of minute changes which can actually have very big impacts as part of it.

And AI is not well suited to that because the amount of training, the amount of learning that the system needs to do in order to be able to pick up those nuances is significant okay what sort of jobs might be at risk then i think the types of jobs we've got to think about or the types i wouldn't say at risk i think it's

i think again it's about thinking about how the nature of the job is going to change and a lot of those could be things around decision making i know we've seen ai applied particularly in health services and health sectors looking at automated analysis of things like images and trying to pull out elements and try and pull out pieces Try and spot tumors, for example, in X-rays.

But as people, we always want a human sitting there on the side of it, checking over it and actually making sure that we're happy with that decision.

A question I'd often ask people around this is to say, well, let's say we're designing and building a new aircraft.

I'll have an AI algorithm do all the programming for it and create all the software for it, build it all, program it all, encode it, stick it on the computers, stick it in the aircraft, and then we'll fly it.

Will you get on board that aircraft?

No, you can go first.

Exactly.

But that's the key point because we are still people.

So whilst we think about how AI is going to have an impact, and it will have an impact, we as people still want people involved.

Here's another issue.

When you employ humans, you pay them a wage, and those humans pay part of that wage as income tax.

When you replace those with machines, you don't pay those machines a wage, those machines do not pay income tax, and the coffers of the country get depleted.

What is is the solution to that?

Who pays for the roads in the hospitals if you've got no human workers earning wages?

I think this becomes one of those things where we may need to discuss issues like a basic universal income,

depending on how far we go with these processes.

Because, again, there is always a choice for this.

There is always an option whether how much we implement some of these elements.

And I think you're absolutely right asking the question: Is that there also needs to be a plan there that says if we do this, and actually, if we do it in a very aggressive manner where actually we do begin to remove big chunks of the workforce actually how is that element of the workforce going to live and how actually is the economy going to change as well as part of that?

One solution I've heard is a robot tax where if you have a robot doing a job then you pay something equivalent to income tax.

The company that makes it contributes to the country in the same way that a human earning a wage might.

I think it's an excellent idea and I definitely think it's something that we can consider.

I think not at the moment, particularly because we're still in very early days for a lot of the industry and actually we still don't know exactly where it will go, particularly as some parts of the processes.

But it's the kind of thing that we may need to think about actually if we do see significant changes.

Jonathan, thanks so much for your time.

Thanks for helping us understand what work might look like in the future.

Thank you very much.

It's been a pleasure.

Now, as well as worrying about our jobs, there is one other big question that comes up whenever AI is mentioned.

Thanks to all of the sci-fi films ever, we are very worried about what happens if AI becomes too powerful.

Will we be able to control it, or could it stop us from switching it off?

That is what we'll be talking about in the final part of this series.

Do join us.

Your survival may depend on it.

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hurt.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.