Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: employment

The workplace is going to look drastically different ten years from now. The coming of the Second Machine Age is quickly bringing massive changes along with it. Manual jobs, such as lorry driving or house building are being replaced by robotic automation, and accountants, lawyers, doctors and financial advisers are being supplemented and replaced by high level artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

So what do we need to learn today about the jobs of tomorrow? Two things are clear. The robots and computers of the future will be based on a degree of complexity that will be impossible to teach to the general population in a few short years of compulsory education. And some of the most important skills people will need to work with robots will not be the things they learn in computing class.

There is little doubt that the workforce of tomorrow will need a different set of skills in order to know how to navigate a new world of work. Current approaches for preparing young people for the digital economy are based on teaching programming and computational thinking. However, it looks like human workers will not be replaced by automation, but rather workers will work alongside robots. If this is the case, it will be essential that human/robot teams draw on each other’s strengths.

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Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s prediction for the future of the workforce includes more robots and less human workers.

“We’re about to go into a period with artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, those things where we literally are going to see a change in the nature of employment,” Cuban said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

In that same interview, he criticized President Trump’s leadership skills before calling Trump “technologically illiterate.”

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Massive and complete automation could enable industrializtion of the moon and space. By using some larger human colonies along with the robots then it would be more robust and less dependent on perfect automation.

Advances in robotics and additive manufacturing have become game-changing for the prospects of space industry. It has become feasible to bootstrap a self-sustaining, self-expanding industry at reasonably low cost. Simple modeling was developed to identify the main parameters of successful bootstrapping. This indicates that bootstrapping can be achieved with as little as 12 metric tons (MT) landed on the Moon during a period of about 20 years. The equipment will be teleoperated and then transitioned to full autonomy so the industry can spread to the asteroid belt and beyond. The strategy begins with a sub-replicating system and evolves it toward full self-sustainability (full closure) via an in situ technology spiral. The industry grows exponentially due to the free real estate, energy, and material resources of space. The mass of industrial assets at the end of bootstrapping will be 156 MT with 60 humanoid robots, or as high as 40,000MT with as many as 100,000 humanoid robots if faster manufacturing is supported by launching a total of 41 MT to the Moon. Within another few decades with no further investment, it can have millions of times the industrial capacity of the United States.

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Robots will not replace every worker and their use in the workplace will lead to more jobs for people who are creative, according to a company that aims to predict the future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will operate alongside humans to “take away the grind” from work, enabling people to be more imaginative and productive, experts from The Future Laboratory told a Microsoft Surface event.

“Robots will actually create jobs because humans have unique thinking,” Steve Tooze, Special Projects Editor at The Future Laboratory, said. “They will take away the grind that we don’t want to do. This will free us up to the imaginative stuff, the creative stuff.”

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Forty per cent of Australia’s jobs will disappear in 10 years but the head of CSIRO’s data research unit has delivered an action plan for how they can be replaced.

“The fourth industrial revolution is under way and the winners will be so far ahead of the losers, Australia has no choice but to pivot to the new industries that will emerge,” Data61 chief executive Adrian Turner told The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Wednesday.

Australia was already feeling the consequences of an economy whose greatest disruptors, such as Uber and Amazon, were mostly coming from elsewhere, Mr Turner said. He noted that GDP growth rates were below historic averages, government debt to GDP ratios were rising, wage growth was slowing and productivity plateauing.

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If you think that the march of automation isn’t going to affect jobs in the medical profession, then, uh, you better sit down. A Belgian company called BeWell is showing off WellPoint, a self-service kiosk that’s designed for patients entering hospitals or clinics. The WellPoint is a touchscreen-enabled booth that operates as a first port of call for visitors, quickly checking your basic vitals before you see a medical professional.

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In an era of maturing artificial intelligence technology, what does the future of the corporation look like? Will the rise of robots help us do our jobs better, or harm them? This dynamic has become a mainstay of the dialogue around AI, with voices from technology visionaries such as Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking weighing in.

But at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday, leaders at two of the world’s most powerful tech giants pushed back on those concerns. AI is intended to help—not hinder—the human workforce, they said.

“AI is actually not new for us,” said Vanitha Narayanan, chairman of IBM India, whose Watson supercomputer has risen to global acclaim. But “technology always comes way ahead of policy.”

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While there are different flavors of the UBI, the basic concept is that everyone just gets money for existing—this, in theory, would help keep the economy running smoothly even as people are working less.

“Sounds like a communist scheme” jokes Pethokoukis. But he explains how this is actually a very old idea that has its roots on the political right as a way to simplify the welfare state. It’s an idea that’s really taken off among the libertarian-leaning luminaries of the tech world in recent years.

“Silicon Valley has sort of latched on to this idea. They have the most aggressive timetable as far as when we will actually see all these jobs hemorrhage,” explains Pethokoukis.

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These dystopias may sound like science fiction, but they’re perfectly plausible given our current trajectory. The technology around robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve – but without substantive political change, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic for most people. That’s why the recent rumblings about a robot tax are worth taking seriously. They offer an opportunity to develop the political response to mass automation now, before it’s too late.

When I asked the prominent leftwing thinker Matt Bruenig for his thoughts, he explained that whatever we do, we shouldn’t try to discourage automation. “The problem with robots is not the manufacturing and application of them – that’s actually good for productivity,” he told me. “The problem is that they are owned by the wealthy, which means that the income that flows to the robots go out to a small slice of wealthy people.”

Job-killing robots are good, in other words, so long as the prosperity they produce is widely distributed. An Oxfam report released earlier this year revealed that the eight richest men in the world own as much wealth as half the human race. Imagine what those numbers will look like if automation accelerates. At some point, a handful of billionaires could control close to one hundred percent of society’s wealth. Then, perhaps, the idea that wealth should be owned by the many, rather than monopolized by the few, won’t seem so radical, and we can undertake a bit of sorely needed redistribution – before robot capitalism kills us all.

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By David Ewalt

REUTERS TOP 25

N” Silicon Valley’s hoodie-wearing tech entrepreneurs are the poster kids of innovation. But the innovators who are really changing the world are more likely to wear labcoats and hold government-related jobs in Grenoble, Munich or Tokyo. That’s the conclusion of Reuters’ Top 25 Global Innovators – Government, a list that identifies and ranks the publicly funded institutions doing the most to advance science and technology.

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