IEEE Spectrum: Will Robots take People's Jobs ?

[Andre Kesteloot]

  The Job Market of 2045


    What will we do when machines do all the work?

BY Steven Cherry // Tue, January 22, 2013

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*Steven Cherry:* Hi, this is Steven Cherry for /IEEE Spectrum'/s 
"Techwise Conversations."

Automation has displaced a lot of workers in the last 50 years, and it's 
set to displace a lot more of them---taxicab and truck drivers, once 
vehicles drive themselves; much of what remains of manufacturing and 
assembly work and maybe even a lot of construction labor; fewer lawyers 
and doctors, once Watson-like software is perfected 
<http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ibms-watson-goes-to-med-school>; 
teaching, except for the few people making the videos that everyone else 
learns from. Will we even need waitresses, or just people to bring out 
the food that we've ordered ourselves, once iPads replace menus?

The endgame here is the so-called singularity---the point at which 
technological development, spurred by Moore's Law and another generation 
or two of software and robotics development, is so sophisticated that 
humans have become irrelevant.

An article in /The Atlantic Monthly/ 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-consequences-of-machine-intelligence/264066/>, 
back in October, by Rice University professor Moshe Vardi, tackled the 
question of whether that future is inevitable, and if so, what will it 
be like. He wrote: "[Artificial intelligence's] inexorable progress over 
the past 50 years suggests that Herbert Simon was right when he wrote in 
1956, 'Machines will be capable...of doing any work a man can do.'"

Vardi continued, "I do not expect this to happen in the very near 
future, but I do believe that by 2045, machines will be able to do if 
not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the 
work that humans can do."

Moshe Vardi <http://www.cs.rice.edu/%7Evardi/> is the Karen Ostrum 
George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at 
Rice University and directs the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information 
Technology there. He's an ACM Fellow, a AAAS Fellow, and most 
importantly, an IEEE Fellow, and he's my guest today by phone.

Moshe, welcome to the podcast.

*Moshe Vardi:* Thank you. It's a pleasure to be talking to you.

*Steven Cherry:* You cite a book that came out last year, /Race Against 
the Machine/ <http://raceagainstthemachine.com/>, by Erik Brynjolfsson 
and Andrew McAfee. I interviewed McAfee last year on this show 
<http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/the-future-of-work>, 
and the examples I gave in my intro came mainly from that conversation. 
What do /you/ think are some of the most vulnerable professions between 
now and 2045?

*Moshe Vardi:* Well, I think it's interesting that you mentioned in your 
introduction waiting on tables, because just yesterday I saw an article 
with some videos from restaurants, where robots are now delivering the 
food. So this is already happening.

But I think what we are going to see happening are certain 
more-routinized jobs. Manufacturing is coming back to the United States, 
but without employees, practically, so the plants that we will see in 
the United States will mostly be automated plants. Even Foxconn, who is 
an employer probably of a million manufacturing workers in China, is 
investing heavily in robotics. So I think manufacturing will become 
automated to a larger and larger degree, not only in the developed 
world, but also in the developing world. And the price and the cost of 
these robots is going to go down.

Driving is a huge source of jobs. Just think of how many people drive, 
you know, transportation, goods, much of it we're going to see automated 
in the next two decades. I believe that it's going to be quaint in 
another generation, [to] talk about driving your own car. It's just 
going to be quaint.

And, I mean, more and more, you know, you go to supermarkets, and more 
and more there's automated checkouts. And then even loading the shelf 
will be automated. Warehouses, you know, maintaining warehouses will be 
automated. So as both AI and computing power and robotics all continue 
to progress, we will see bigger and bigger swaths of jobs just being 
taken over by robots.

*Steven Cherry:* Yeah, I would imagine that the driving thing is even 
going to affect farming. Between GPS and self-driving vehicles, there 
won't be much need for people there.

*Moshe Vardi:* Yes, so even farming now is really not a major employer 
anymore. I think it's just 1 percent of the economy. Used to be, I think 
if you go back 100 years, it used to be 85 percent of the economy. But 
whatever little, the fewer jobs that are left in farming, again, we will 
see them being gradually eaten away by automated machinery, with GPS, 
with self-driving machinery. Yes, much of it again will be automated.

*Steven Cherry:* Yeah, I was thinking more the third world in terms of 
the impact there. You mentioned in your /Atlantic/ article an article 
that /Wired/ published in 2000, by Bill Joy, in which he calls robotics, 
genetic engineering, and nanotech "our most powerful 21st-century 
technology." It's interesting that Bill Joy of all people doesn't 
mention Watson-like software, or software at all.

*Moshe Vardi:* Yeah, it is interesting. And, you know, I actually 
remember when the article came out. Bill Joy is the ultimate techie, so 
for him to express that thought was almost heretic. You know, I think 
the article at the time was widely cited, but I don't think it was 
widely influential. I think most people kind of read it, in my opinion, 
and shrugged. I don't see that there was much of a follow-up on it, of 
people really questioning it.

But I think what happened in the last decade, especially in the area of 
robotics and software automation, is such huge progress has been made, 
and people start weathering the big recession, which made people very 
sensitive to the issue of jobs. And economists started paying attention 
to the fact that really, we're now seeing a trend of about 30 years that 
includes the compression of income, for middle- and low-income workers, 
growing inequality in the economy, a greater and greater portion of the 
economy going to capital vs. labor. So this has become over the last 
year a very, very hot topic among economists to understand what's 
happening to the job market. And so suddenly this issue that I think 10 
years ago everybody was shrugging Bill Joy's article off, suddenly it's 
become something that's on everybody's mind.

*Steven Cherry:* So what professions will still be around in 2045, and 
in particular, what are the remaining sweet spots for our listeners, the 
sort of people who today are engineers and scientists?

*Moshe Vardi:* You know, it's really hard to say, because there are 
things that computers do that we really never imagined them doing. You 
know, we can think of the things that really require soft skills. Okay, 
the more it requires human contact and soft skills, the more I think 
this is going to be the piece that we're very far from having.

You know, we're very far from having robots as salespeople that make 
cold calls to convince people to buy something. We are very far from 
this, okay, because these jobs really require human-to-human contact. 
And you can go on now, in my daily life, I look at jobs and I say, okay, 
in this job how routinized is this job? What level of proprietary skills 
and motor skills does it require? And you see as you look at jobs, you 
say, well, yeah, I think in 10 years this can be automated. I mean, just 
think of the people who work at the, as you go about your life, you 
know, well, tollbooth collectors, automated. You know, checkout clerks 
in shops, automated. One job after another will fall down.

*Steven Cherry:* In a short talk you gave in England, you asked recently 
what does humanity look like in a world where machines can do things 
better than we can? So what does humanity look like in a world where 
machines can do things better than we can?

*Moshe Vardi:* So I think, you know, we almost have to go to science 
fiction to try to figure it out. And there's another prospect also, and 
in fact the counterpoint to my worry is Rodney Brooks's worry that we 
won't have enough robots, because we're going to have a gray population, 
and we'll have many more older people than younger people, and we'll 
need all these robots to take care of the younger people.

And I have to say, I look at this, and to me this whole vision of a 
graying society where people don't even feel that they necessarily have 
to have children because they will be taken care of in old age by 
robots, it's not a great prospect for humanity. So, and this is 
something that we need to, you know, these can't be issues that people 
in our discipline, in computer science and engineering, we don't usually 
worry about these issues. We say, oh, these are matters for 
sociologists, okay?

But we seem to be blindly developing the technology without worrying 
about the consequences. The same way that there's a lot of discussion, 
not much action but a lot of discussion, about global warming, even 
though when we're talking about when things are going to become really 
deep, they're going to be very adverse, it's going to be, like, 2100, 
which is almost 90 years away. I think the impact of AI and robotics on 
jobs is not going to wait 100 years. It's going to happen in the next 30 
years.

*Steven Cherry:* My producer, probably not contemptuously, wrote me a 
note last week that said, "I don't think all of them will pursue a 
lifelong interest in Kierkegaard." I'm not sure what she has against 
Kierkegaard, but anyway, in that talk in England you concluded, "We are 
facing the prospect of being completely outcompeted by our own 
creations." Now, I think Kierkegaard would have had a lot to say about 
that, but 60 years ago this future didn't seem inevitable. Is it 
inevitable? Is there any way of getting off the robotics and artificial 
intelligence freight train before we reach singularity station?

Moshe Vardi: So in this society, we have not done, I think...we have not 
been able to, I would say, generally, to regulate technology. I mean, 
the technology seems to, I mean, we adopt technology, we discover the 
consequences later, and at that point it's very often too late to get 
off the technology.

I mean, if we look at automobiles. You know, automobiles brought us an 
immense amount of convenience and flexibility. And now we are thinking 
that these automobiles are, what they have done to us, what they are 
doing to climate, what they are doing to air, what they have done to our 
cities, can we get off automobiles?

It's just particularly impossible to do it now. But generally we run 
away with technology. I mean, the only community that I can think of 
that have a very conservative attitude about technology are the Amish, 
who consider the consequences felt before they are willing to adopt it. 
But, you know, most of the rest of us think of them as quaint, and 
that's not the prevailing attitude in society. We run away with 
technology and deal with the consequences later.

*Steven Cherry:* I'm glad you framed the issue that way, because in 
conclusion I kind of want to ask you about your own take on this. I 
don't know how old your children are, if you have children, but if you 
had the choice, would you prefer your child to be born in 1984, 2004, or 
2024, and I picked those years because I want to know, basically, if you 
would prefer your child to turn 21 in 2005, 2025, or 2045.

*Moshe Vardi:* So I have a child who's in his mid-30s, and I had some 
time ago a talk asking, basically, are we, humanity, happier today than 
we were, let's say, 100 years ago, 200 years ago? It was by Stephen Jay 
Gould. And he said that he had a hard time convincing himself that we 
are really happier, that we are really better off because of technology. 
Except for one aspect: He said he cannot imagine we are not better off, 
and this is child mortality.

So he said you went back 100 years ago, and you expected several of your 
children to die before reaching adulthood. And today when a child dies, 
it's an unexpected tragedy. And he said he could not imagine that this 
was not hard even 100 years ago, even if this was the norm. So I'm very 
happy that I have only one child, and I'm very happy that the child 
mortality is not a serious, prevailing risk these days. At least the 
world now is familiar to me. And I think it's under control. The world 
in 50 years is, either will be a utopia or a dystopia.

*Steven Cherry:* And which will it be?

*Moshe Vardi:* Ah, that we don't know. This is the big mystery of life. 
We don't know how the world is going to unfold. And we have to contend 
with both possibilities. I think what we could do today is start having 
conversations about the future.

So we are, for example, with climate change, there is a vigorous 
conversation going on, okay? I mean, there are people who accept it, 
there are people who deny it. We are discussing countermeasures, we are 
discussing consequences. We haven't done much action, but at least it's 
a topic for discussion.

I think the issue of machine intelligence and jobs deserves some serious 
discussion. I don't know that we will reach a definite conclusion, and 
it's not clear how easy it will be to agree on desired actions, but I 
think the topic is important enough that it deserves discussion. And 
right now I would say it's mostly being discussed by economists, by 
labor economists. It has to also be discussed by the people that produce 
the technology, because one of the questions we could ask is, you know, 
there is a concept that, for example, that people have started talking 
about, which is that we are using, we are creating technology that has 
no friction, okay? Creating many things that are just too easy to do.

I saw an article just last week, I think about electronic dating. All 
these dating websites, and it says, "It's too easy, not enough 
friction." And so it's just too easy to find people; it's too easy to 
dump people. It's not like real dating, and so maybe we need to start 
thinking, as we're producing technology, about using human technology, 
and to think about the consequence of technology, and maybe who has a 
role in producing technologies that will mitigate its impact. Right now 
we're not doing it. We're producing technology, damn the impact.

*Steven Cherry: *Very good. In the words of another great 20th-century 
existentialist, Yogi Berra---I guess this is this show's favorite quote; 
I think we've used it three times now---"Prediction is hard, especially 
about the future."

*Moshe Vardi:* And when you come to a fork in the road, take it.

*Steven Cherry:* Exactly. Well, thanks for taking a shot at prediction, 
and thanks for joining us today.

*Moshe Vardi:* It's my pleasure.

*Steven Cherry:* Very good. We've been speaking with Rice University 
[computational] engineering professor and IEEE Fellow Moshe Vardi about 
the future of work and leisure, and war and peace, in the year 2045.

For /IEEE Spectrum'/s "Techwise Conversations," I'm Steven Cherry.

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