I’m alright Jack

Is artificial intelligence and robotics a prudent endeavour by man? Sure they will offer huge benefits to everyday lives; IBM’s Watson is already diagnosing ailments and offering courses of treatment. At this point there is no going back, the race is on to perfect the technologies and inevitably, with our smartest minds on the case, it will be cracked faster than we can imagine.

With this prospect, jobs will be lost and this is an outcome widely shared with expert opinion but hey you probably won’t be affected, or maybe you will. It really doesn’t matter what your profession is, you will ultimately be affected and I will explain why. AI/Robotics is going to become relevant in almost all aspects of society. If you’re a truck driver you don’t need to look far to see the prospect of self-driving vehicles doing the job. Uber, Tesla and Mercedes are a few examples of multinationals that are actively pursuing such tech and when (not if) they succeed, it will be a matter of time before the 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the USA alone are unemployed.

Machine learning software such as Lex Machina is already in use within the law profession and is actively reading litigation from previous cases so it can determine where best to file a lawsuit, giving the case the best possible chance of success. Reading previous litigation and mapping out previous court proceedings to favour you is nothing new however a machine doing the heavy lifting is. What could have taken a large team of lawyers months to determine will take one to set the parameters and a click of a mouse to find the answer. The same is true for reading patents and determining if an infringement has occurred. Even closing arguments could be written in such a way that it is tailored so a jury could be swayed, a possibility would be to automatically check the juries social media accounts to gauge the tone to be taken.

Now you will inevitably say to yourself I ain’t a truck driver or a lawyer, this has nothing to do with me. If you look at the spread of where we are currently you will see it doesn’t take a huge leap to understand how AI and robotics will affect most jobs. Self-flying planes are here pilots are pretty much a fail safe and keep the paperwork in order, automated drone deliveries are currently being tested, and Rolls Royce wants to have autonomous ships within five years, removing the ship’s crew.

Some jobs clearly can’t be replaced easily or in an economically viable way, a carpenter being one example. Creating a machine that will have the ability to build furniture to fitting door frames on site would be hugely complex and ultimately cost prohibitive. What wouldn’t be so difficult is creating a machine to purely manufacture the furniture in a common factory environment and herein lies the rub, where do those unemployed furniture carpenters go? Inevitably they will migrate to site based work such as fitting door frames and kitchens etc, jobs that are dynamic and difficult to make provision for robotic machinery. This surely creates an influx of labour in the job market driving wages lower while unemployment rises among carpenters. The same is true in general, the example truck drivers and lawyers who lost their jobs will retrain and potentially enter your profession diluting the job pool and potentially lowering the wages for everyone.

The industrial revolution is widely held up as reference to how the job market will progress and new jobs will be created to fill the ones lost, the argument being it created more jobs than were lost. Countries that industrialised first were countries that by and large were far ahead economically from the rest of the world. Great Britain was the first power to experience the industrial revolution and that kicked of around 1760 and being fully industrialized by the 1840’s. Belgium was the second nation to implement such standards, although their efforts were initiated in the 1820’s some 60 years after Great Britain. The logic that the lost jobs will be quickly filled by emerging professions in the same way work was created during the industrial revolution is hard to prove. When Great Britain experienced the industrial revolution it did so alone, its wares were marketable to a world yet to catch up and thus the country was booming. The industrial powerhouses in northern England and Scotland were thriving because worldwide competition lagged behind and the factories exploited this by building and selling copious amounts of goods to them and they needed the manpower to achieve this.

In the midst of the latest technological revolution where AI and Robotics are becoming increasingly common, their impact will be felt globally and not confined to one state. Globalism will see the free movement of this new technology where their implementation will be far more uniformly distributed throughout the world and will see no real gains for one particular country in terms of economical or employment status.

The nature of intelligence is the ability to improve oneself through knowledge and problem solving and when we have true AI we will have an infinitely self-improving machine that will leave human intelligence obsolete. Artificial Intelligence may well be the greatest achievement of mankind but in it’s quest we should be prepared its consequences.