Why automation anxiety is one of the key problems of our era, why work is over, and why we are living through the twilight of the Industrial Ages.
“ROBOTS TO STEAL 15M OF YOUR JOBS” screams the Daily Mail’s front page.
“Robots will take over most jobs within 30 years,” says the Daily Telegraph.
The Mail and the Telegraph aren’t the only ones worrying about technology’s advance and our demise. The source for the Mail’s headline was the governor of the Bank of England. The Telegraph’s was a respected American university professor.
The robot armageddon is spawning many more scary headlines:
“Robot Invasion: Self-driving vehicles to destroy 4 million jobs”
“Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck”
“93% of Investors Say AI WIll Destroy Jobs”
“White House: Robots will kill jobs and make inequality worse.”
Meanwhile, the BBC takes a practical approach, asking “Will a robot take your job?” Type your title into a field on the BBC’s website, and they’ll tell you if your job is safe. How reassuring.
No wonder The Economist has observed that the “pace of technological change [is] making heads spin.”
Look Who’s Spooked
As you can see, it isn’t just getting Daily Mail writers and their readers into a lather. It’s also worrying the sort of people you’d expect to stay calm. It’s even spooked the sort of visionary people you’d hope would lead us confidently into the future.
Like futurists Gerd Leonhard and Martin Ford, whose latest books are Technology vs Humanity: The Coming Clash between Man and Machine, and Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. Or a Silicon Valley commentator like Andrew Keen, who voiced his concerns in The Internet Is Not The Answer.
Or Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of PayPal who wants to put people on Mars. Alongside Cambridge University’s Stephen Hawking, Musk is so worried about AI’s impact he’s set up an organisation to make sure it doesn’t destroy us as well as our jobs.
“Artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” says Hawking.
This dystopian machine-first future isn’t only in books, newspapers, and the anxious minds of futurists, academics, and entrepreneurs. It’s in movies set a few recognisable decades from now: AI, Her, Minority Report, even Wall-E. It’s on TV — in Humans and Black Mirror. In short, it’s everywhere.
Automation Anxiety
If “status anxiety” reflected a new truth a decade ago, and “stuffocation” caught the mood in 2015 — then “automation anxiety” will define how people feel for the next decade.
Perhaps the oddest thing about automation anxiety is this: given the ubiquitous negative hype about the impact of technology, this technophobic response actually feels rational.
Lazy humans, in the automated world of Wall-E.
Especially when you can see the world of Wall-E — where fat, lazy humans are served by machines — becoming true all around you. It’s right here, in the obesity epidemic, in the rise of food delivery services, in robo-vacuum cleaners, and in the new clothes-folding Laundroid bot. Maybe we will end up like that, you wonder.
Black Mirror, season 3, episode 1, has a biting view of where social media scores could lead us.
Especially when you worry what social media and VR and all the time we spend on our phones will mean in the long term. And then Black Mirror shows you that we’ll all end up strung out, psychologically and physically. Maybe I’m halfway there already, you think as you check your email or Twitter or Facebook feed for the umpteenth time that day.
Especially when you hear that consultancy McKinsey says 60% of jobs may be automated and you look around at some of the things you do. Will robots be better, faster, cheaper than me? you wonder. Will I lose my job to a robot?
But we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Society has faced technological upheaval many times in the past. And each time our ancestors have put one foot on the step of progress, they’ve worried in ways that sound daft after.
The most famous people with automation anxiety were the machine-bashing Luddites in the 1810s. What, they wanted to know, would all those weavers do?
Next, there were the people who fretted about trains. When the Stockton-Darlington Railway opened in 1825, some thought the human body wasn’t made to go that fast — 30 miles per hour that is — and if you did, your body might melt.
There were people who got all bothered about bicycles too. Really. In the 1880s, when modern bicycles were invented, many thought that, what with their giving young women an easy way to get about on their own, they could emancipate women and upend society.
Oops, and so they did.
And as they did, they helped change society in ways that were hugely positive and entirely unexpected.
So I think we need to deal with this knee-jerk reaction to technology. We need to have a grown-up conversation about what robots, drones, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) will mean for the lives we lead. People have to see that even technology clouds have their silver lining.
So we need to talk about automation. And we need to talk about automation anxiety.
Why I’m writing this post on Technopia
I think we need to reboot our narrow, limited, negative attitude to automation. We need to reframe the current conversation about automation anxiety. We need to renew our excitement for a human society built on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robots.
I hope this post will add to the conversation, that it’ll inspire you, and that it’ll provoke people into seriously considering what the “Technopia” of not-so-far away tomorrow will be like.
I want them to do this by asking the key questions that underpin automation anxiety.
When technology surpasses us — getting things done quicker, better, cheaper — will it become our master? Instead of the robots working for us, will we work for them?
When technology takes over so many of our tasks, will that leave us as idle, pointless, fat blobs?
When technology overtakes humans, will we be left on the scrapheap of history, the unwitting victims of digital Darwinism? Is the automation we’ve set in motion about to make humans go the way of the dinosaurs, radiograms, and landline phones?
After technology has destroyed some jobs, will it decide to destroy us too?
In short, will technology be bad for us? Will it lead to some sort of dystopia where humans become slaves, passive wastes-of-space, irrelevant, or extinct?
Or, is the future far less bleak, far more positive? Will there be upsides as well as downsides? And not just the benefits that come from the next generation’s latest feature set, but real, meaningful positives for society? And if so, what are those benefits? If machines do more, will we change what we do? What will a Technopia be like for you, me, our families and friends, and everyone else on Earth?
(By the way, it’s deliberate that Technopia suggests both utopia and dystopia. From a certain, strict philological point of view, the word should be “techno-topia”, from the ancient Greek words for tool and place, technon and topos. But it’s perfectly acceptable to simplify the portmanteau and elide the “no-to” into “no”. Hence, “technopia”.)
Just as a peasant or weaver or even leading thinker in 1750 would have found it hard to imagine life with cars, planes, TVs, and Spotify — so it’s hard for most people to imagine what life will be like after automation. Doesn’t mean we can’t try though. And the best way to do this is in the hands of a futurist with a track record in forecasting the future.
Hello, I’m James Wallman, a futurist since 2004. Come with me on a short journey to find out if technology will save us, or enslave us.
The End of Work?
Let’s begin with the area that’s worrying most people right now. Work. Technology will revolutionise the world of work. On the one hand, robots are now gunning for ever more blue collar jobs. And their software cousins are doing the same for white collar workers. (Perhaps that’s why the press seems so much more bothered nowadays. Bots now write articles.)
Millions of us will be put out of work, as cheaper, more efficient, more accurate workers who don’t take tea breaks or go home at the weekends will take our jobs. This is deeply worrying.
On the other hand, automation will set us free from difficult, boring, rote jobs. It’ll enable us to move higher up the value chain, and to step away from the value chain.
One way to solve this massive wave of technological unemployment in the next decades will be the introduction of universal basic income. Currently being trialled in the Netherlands, Finland, and other places, this will free us from having to do dull work to pay for essentials. Instead, we’ll be free to pursue things we really want to do.
How does less work sound to you?
It doesn’t sound that good to everyone. Listen to this from the man who inspired the Telegraph’s headline about robots taking jobs, Moshe Vardi. But before you do, put your coffee cup down.
“If machines do all the work, we will be free to pursue leisure activities,” says Vardi. “I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing. That seems to me a dystopia. I believe that work is essential to human wellbeing.”
Sorry, but what did he just say?
Work may seem essential to a university professor with a interesting, safe, job-for-life like Vardi. But not everyone is quite so inspired by the things they have to do to pay the rent. Actually, anything between 25% and 60% of people are miserable at work and hate their jobs.
And if Vardi thinks work is so essential, does he wish that technologies that destroyed jobs in the past could be uninvented? Does he regret the washing machine, that it’d be better if we spent hours washing clothes every day? And what about that most dystopian of inventions: running water and the taps in our homes. Think of the precious work that’s stolen from everyday people. Pity those who no longer get the chance to walk for hours each day to get water.
But there is something in Vardi’s comment. Given the choice to choose what we do, some people will choose leisure and contribute little. But research so far suggests more will spend their time doing things that are meaningful to them: like make their neighbourhood or the world a better place, care for their children or parents, or create art or businesses. There is every possibility that basic income will unleash an era of unprecedented creativity.
“Maybe 90 percent of people will go smoke pot and play video games,” says Sam Altman, the president of Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, which is now funding research on universal basic incomes. “But if 10 percent of the people go create new products and services and new wealth, that’s still a huge net win.”
However things turn out, the transition is unlikely to be easy. Given the evidence of previous revolutions, the next few decades could be a rocky ride. But the end-point could be a far more interesting world — of fewer boring jobs, and more time for creative, passion-led pursuits instead.
Will Amazon’s Alexa End Domestic Abuse?
Besides work, automation will revolutionise many other aspects of our lives: how we shop, how we get about, how we conduct our relationships. It could even end domestic abuse.
What makes me say that?
To begin with, think about how GPS has made life easier. It’s stopped us getting lost, for starters. Technology naysayers bemoan the loss of serendipity and spontaneity. But getting lost is annoying. And my GPS has taken me places and opened up routes I would never have travelled without it.
And how many arguments has GPS has prevented? Many millions, I bet. At least a few hundred in my household anyway. GPS means no more rows about map reading, and there’s no one to blame for taking you down a dead end.
If that’s what GPS can do out of home, just think what Amazon’s Alexa could do in the home. Alexa, in case you haven’t met her yet, lives in a natty little speaker/listener called Echo that Amazon sells. Alexa prefers to live, so the manual says, somewhere central in your home, so she can hear you clearly. Then, when called upon, she plays the music you tell her to, answers general knowledge questions and queries about that day’s weather, and organises your shopping. She’s like HAL in Space Odyssey 2001, only mainly for shopping with Amazon, and slightly less powerful and megalomaniacal. For now.
Soon, Alexa will build a profile about your shopping desires, and suggest things for you, like order the turkey for Christmas or make suggestions for your partner’s birthday based on their Facebook profile. She’ll soon be like those amazing personal assistants who do things for you before you even know they needed doing.
(This is called “cognitive commerce”, and its part of the cognitive computing revolution that companies like IBM are ushering in with their Watson artificial intelligence computer system.)
She could even end the “You said that”, “No, I didn’t”, “Yes, you did” type of arguments. With Alexa, you’ll be able to end that dull domestic spiral with a simple query: “Alexa, can you check and see if James said he’d be OK with looking after the kids while I go out tonight?”
So far, so good, but think about it for half a second longer and you don’t need to have studied George Orwell’s 1984 to recognise the dystopia that we’re all inviting into our own homes. This device could listen to everything we do there.
Would you really want that? What will that mean for privacy? What happens if that information gets into the wrong hands? By inviting Alexa into our homes, and her cousins from the other tech companies, are we unwittingly creating our own technological prisons where the walls really do have ears?
And yet. Alexa may well not lead to quite such a nasty, jackbooted outcome. As I said, she could end domestic abuse.
Here’s how. A court in the US recently asked for Amazon to use Alexa data to help with a murder investigation. They said no, that they didn’t have it, and and that the device only listens when explicitly asked to. But that isn’t strictly true. (See Wired article A Murder Case Tests Alexa’s Devotion To Your Privacy.) Already Alexas have ordered dolls houses after hearing something a TV presenter said on TV.
Amazon’s Alexa has ordered dolls houses.
More importantly, the implications of a home listening device are actually very exciting, because we all behave a little better when we’re on show.
Think how Uber drivers are so much nicer than cab drivers of the past, because they get feedback through the rating system. Also consider how you act more politely when you take an Uber, because you’re conscious of your rating too. Then think of millions of women who face domestic abuse around the world — like the one in four British women who are abused at some point in their lives. Shining a little Alexa-style microphone into our homes could dramatically reduce domestic violence.
(Perhaps, as a way around the current concerns about privacy issues, people could have secret “safe” words or phrases that automatically switch the machine on so that it listens.)
The End of Accidents?
Concept for a driverless car interior.
We may see similar reductions in injuries, and improvement in life, as another key area of our lives is automated: cars. Of course, there are people who can’t imagine not driving. They talk about the psychological benefits of driving. Like the sense of camaraderie that comes from letting someone go first at a crossing. And the feeling of power when you press your pedal to the metal and the car surges forward.
But human drivers are prone to errors. Humans answer the phone, think about other things, and generally make mistakes. Machines don’t. (Well, actually they can think about other things, but they are far less likely to make mistakes.) Driverless cars are already safer than humans. In December 2016, a Tesla’s sensors even picked up a crash happening two cars in front, applied the emergency brakes, and avoided injury. If we could reduce the 1,730 children, women and men killed on Britain’s roads each year, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
And this is only the most obvious improvement that automated cars will provide. Imagine not having the onerous, wasteful expense of keeping your own vehicle at all. (Cars are only used 5% of the time.) And having all the benefits of your own private driver instead. Any time you want a car, you’ll effectively whistle — in a digital way, much the same way people call Ubers now.
Instead of private cars that people own, there will be what Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and now advisor to the US government on the future of transport, calls FAVES: Fleets of Autonomous Vehicles that are Electric and Shared. Among other further benefits, there will be far less need for parking spaces and car parks, freeing up our cities’ roads and spaces.
Besides, cars won’t disappear entirely. They will become like horses. They will be playthings for the weekend rather than a principal everyday mode of transport. Just as you can’t drive a horse-drawn cart down the motorway, so there will be roads where it’s illegal to drive your own car. I think you won’t be able to drive in central London by 2030. (Note: I made this prediction in 2008 to Britain’s Sky News.)
The Technosexual Revolution
Much of what I forecast in a 2009 GQ article on the technosexual revolution is coming true. Consider how robotic sex machines — that is, vibrators — have made the journey from unmentionable to everyday in a few decades, and you can see the technosexual revolution has already begun.
In the future, powered by natural language processing (NLP), AI and ML, robotic sex machines will be more human and lifelike. Like the chatbot in Her, they will listen to our worries, soothe our minds, and seduce us. One of you had a hard day and doesn’t have the patience to listen? Or just a plain old headache? One of you has a fantasy — Scarlett Johansson or Daniel Craig or something weirder perhaps — the other isn’t so keen on? Again, like the robo-gigolo played by Jude Law in AI, perfectly possible.
Gigolo Jane and Gigolo Joe in Spielberg’s AI
Will these new technologies be so good and addictive, we won’t want to come back to the reality of our non-celebrity, imperfect partners? Will it be dangerous for relationships, and mean we just don’t need other humans anymore? But isn’t that what they once said about vibrators?
This technosexual revolution will open the door to a world of AR and VR porn which is already taking off, as some of its further out practitioners pioneer the idea of love and sex with machines. It’s fascinating (to me at least) how the rise of machine-driven love today fits into the long term trend of sex shifting from a taboo subject to something worthy of celebration and exploration. (For more on this, read Gay Talese’s nonfiction masterpiece, Thy Neighbour’s Wife.)
Big Idea Alert! The Twilight of The Industrial Ages
As well as hoping to re-frame the debate about our tech-enabled future, there is a bigger idea here.
This rollercoaster ride we’re about to live through — where work, homes, sex, shopping, cities, relationships, travel, and other key aspects of our lives radically change — is the adrenalin kick that reflects a more fundamental, historic change.
You can see the signs of it in the Finnish, Kenyan, and Dutch people living life on a basic income; in the French woman who wants to marry the robot she 3D printedl; in the Brit who put a chip in his body to telepathically communicate with his wife; in the Chinese team behind Xiaoice, the chatbot who’s a trusty friend to 40 million Chinese every day.
Ready? Here’s the big idea.
I believe that we are about to live through one of the most pivotal times in human history.
This is as transformative as when humans domesticated animals.
Painting of herdsmen and cattle, Tassili-n-Ajjer, Algeria. Photo: Jean-Dominique Lajoux
Think what the move from human to animal power meant for farming. It’s as meaningful and revolutionary as the shift, millennia later, from animal to machine power. And think of the incredible changes that has unleashed.
I believe that in the future, humans will look back on the period 1750–2150 as an aberration in human existence. This epoch will become known as the Industrial Ages, when people worked harder than they’d ever worked before or since.
Before 1750, before factories and the imposition of clock time, life was messy and hard and rural. Then, the first, second and third industrial revolutions changed life on earth — for the better and the worse.
Through the steam engine, the train, and machines that could weave clothes hundreds of times faster than any human could, the first industrial revolution (1750–1870) gave the first hints of what technology could do, including both good and dark sides. Picture the dark Satanic mills of Turner’s paintings, and what life was like in the factories. Life expectancy fell, too.
Through the telephone, the lightbulb, and the internal combustion engine, the second industrial revolution (1870–1914) made communications much faster, the world much smaller, and it made it much easier to read in the evening.
The third revolution, the digital revolution, has given us the internet, the iPhone, and the sharing economy.
Thanks to these incredible advances, life on earth has changed radically.
Life expectancy has doubled. (Actually it’s more than doubled, in all regions in the world: from 26 and 34 years in Africa and Europe in 1770, to 60 and 81 today.)
Poverty has halved. (Actually, it’s far better than that. Around 84% of people lived in “extreme poverty” in 1720. Now, it’s only 9%. And the World Bank believes that we may end extreme poverty by 2030.)
Distance is dead. (Or, at least, moribund. But who’s complaining that it now takes 22 hours to get to Sydney, compared with the 40 days it used to take? And don’t forget the free teleconference services of Skype and Google Hangout.)
There are countless more examples of the everyday magic we take for granted. We have indoor toilets, hot water on tap, and children that stay alive past five — even in the 1930s, one in ten British children died before their fifth birthday. We have wifi, Boeing Dreamliners, power showers, flat-bed seats, flat screen TVs, and virtual reality. We worry not just about staying alive, but whether we are happy.
Before these three industrial revolutions, our ancestors subsisted in dirty, muddy farmyards, eking out their few short years cheek-by-jowl with their animals. Now, we live long, clean, connected lives.
The changes haven’t been perfect. There are downsides to today. We have also given up the close family bonds we had before. We are no longer citizens. We are consumers. We have riches, but we also have inequality, stress, depression, loneliness, obesity, climate change, populism, and Donald Trump.
So, yes, we still have problems. But they’re first world, 21st century problems. Give me struggling to get a good wifi connection, moaning about Donald Trump, and worrying about how happy I am versus getting smallpox any day.
On balance, then, the changes have been positive. Perhaps even climate change is a small price to pay compared with the longer, cleaner, better lives we lead.
More importantly, those industrial revolutions have been essential for the fourth industrial revolution that’s happening now, the automation revolution. It won’t be perfect. It’ll bring bad as well as good, and getting there may be tough. There’ll be problems we can’t yet fully picture, as well as good things that are hard to imagine.
But however the fourth industrial revolution turns out precisely, and whatever the journey to get there, one thing’s for sure. It’s happening, and at a precipitous pace. It’s happening so fast it’s making heads spin, and frightening even the smartest of people.
And that’s why we need to consider what this new Technopia means now. Because change is scary, especially change happening this fast. But given what’s happened in the past, it’s clear to me that these worries are just the birthing pangs to something better.
I think future humans will be thankful to us, their hard-working industrial ancestors, for creating this new tech-enabled utopia.
Above all the other improvements — longer lives, healthier bodies, better relationships, more honesty, better sex, more happiness, and more pleasant homes and cities and journeys — they’ll look back with surprise at the sort of work millions have to put with today.
To them, from the enlightened point of view in their Technopia, the phrase “jobs for life” will sound as outdated as “six-year-old chimney sweep” does today.
They’ll giggle at the idea that we worried that automation would “destroy” the jobs their ancestors thought so precious.
After all that change, we’ll have an answer to the question: will technology be bad or good? Because technology won’t simply surpass us and enslave us. Instead, it’ll overtake us, and set us free.
We stand at a gateway to great change. This is an opportunity that we not only can, but also really should, roll up our sleeves and commit to. When our work is done, we’ll have created a tech-driven utopia, a Technopia, for all those who come after us.
About the author
James Wallman is a futurist, author, entrepreneur. Forecast the future since 2004. Clients inc Absolut, Disney, Google, Zurich Insurance. Runs a strategy business called The Future Is Here. Runs a tech startup based at Google’s TechHub in Shoreditch. Gives keynote talks via speakers agency The Leigh Bureau. Wrote Stuffocation (Penguin, 2015).
About Stuffocation
Best seller. Peaked at #4 on Amazon.co.uk, at #11 on Sunday Times.
Self-published late 2013. Penguin bought rights early 2014.
Also published in: USA (Spiegel + Grau), Thailand, Czech Republic, Poland, Taiwan, South Korea.
Coverage: MSNBC, BBC ONE, BBC TWO, Channel 4, ABC, Globo (Brazil), New York Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, TIME, Wired, Fast Company etc.
Talks: Authors@Google, 10 Downing Street, TEDxLSE, Collision Conference (Las Vegas) PINC (Netherlands), School of Life (Antwerp) etc.