(Toby Walsh) I wanna talk about artificial intelligence: it's --
I'm a professor of artificial intelligence
and its a great time, 2015, to be working in AI.
We're making real palpable progress
and there's loads of money being thrown at us.
Google just spent five hundred million dollars --
pounds buying an AI startup called Deep Mind a couple of weeks ago,
today they announced that they were going to spend a billion dollars
setting up an AI lab in Silicon Valley.
IBM is betting about a third of the company
on their cognitive AI computing effort.
So it's really interesting time to be working in AI.
But the first thing I wanted to help inform you about
is what is the state of art, what progress have we made in AI
because Hollywood paints all these pictures,
these mostly dystopian pictures of AI.
Whenever the next science fiction movie comes out, I put my head in my hands
and think Oh my God, what do people think that we're doing?
So, I wanted to start by just giving you a feel for what actually is really capable.
So a couple of years ago, IBM Watson won the game show Jeopardy 1,
the million dollar prize in the game show, Jeopardy P, the reigning human champions.
Now, you might think, well that's just a party trick, isn't it?
It's a -- pour enough of Wikipedia and the internet into a computer,
and it can answer general knowledge questions.
Well, you guys are being a bit unfair to IBM Watson,
there are the cryptic questions they are answering.
But just to give you a real feel for what is technically possible today,
something that was announced just two days ago:
some colleagues of mine at NII in Japan passed the University Entrance Exam
with an AI program.
Now, I thought long and hard about putting up a page of maths.
I thought, well, I'm going to get --
half of the audience is going to leave immediately
if I put up a page of math
But I wanted you to see, just to feel
the depth of questions that they were answering.
So this is from the maths paper, you know, a non trivial, sort of,
if you come from the UK, A-level-like math question
that they were able to answer
Here is a physics question about Newtonian dynamics
that they were able to answer.
Now they got 511 points, out of a maximum of 950.
That's more than the average score of Japanese students
sitting the entrance exam.
They would have got into most Japanese universities with a score of 511.
That's what's possible today.
Their ambition in 10 years' time is to get into Tokyo, University of Tokyo,
which is one of the best universities in the world.
So, this is why I put up a picture of Terminator,
because whenever I talk to the media about what we do in AI,
they put up a picture of Terminator, right?
So I don't want you to worry about Terminator,
Terminator is at least 50 to 100 years away.
and there are lots of reasons why we don't have to worry about it,
about Terminator.
I'm not going to go and spend too much time
on why you don't have to worry about Terminator.
But there is actually things that you should worry about,
much nearer than Terminator.
Many people have said, Stephen Hawkins has said
that, you know, AI is going to spell the end of the human race.
Elon Musk chimed in afterwards, said "It's our biggest existential threat."
Bill Gates followed on by saying, "Elon Musk was right."
Lots of people have said that's a -- AI is a real existential threat to us.
I don't want you to worry about the existential threat that AI
or Terminator is going to bring.
There's actually a very common confusion,
which is that it's not the AI that's going to be the existential threat,
it's autonomy, it's autonomous systems.
What's in the (check) --
it isn't it going to wake up any time in the morning and say:
"You know what? I'm tired of playing Jeopardy,
"I want to play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!
"Or wait a second, I'm tired of playing game shows,
I want to take over the universe."
It's just not in its code, there is no way,
it's not given any freedom to think about anything other
than maximizing its Jeopardy score.
And it has no desires, no other desires than,
other to improve its maximum scores.
So I don't want you to worry about Terminator,
but I do want you to worry about jobs.
Because lots of people, lots of very serious people,
have been saying hat AI is going to end jobs,
and that is a very great consequence for anyone working in education,
because, certainly, the jobs that are going to exist in the future
are going to be different than the jobs that exist today.
Now, who has an odd birthday?
Well, I haven't told you what an odd birthday is yet,
so someone has an odd birthday, like me.
OK. Who was born on an odd-number day of the month?
I was born on the 11th of April, right?
Come on, it's half the room, I know it's half the room.
(Laughter)
OK.Well, you want to have an odd birthday, by the way,
because that means, in 20 years' time, you will be a person with a job.
As opposed to the even people, who won't have jobs.
That's certainty -- if you believe lots of serious people,
you might have missed this news on Friday the 13th,
I thought this was a rather depressing news story
....... (check) comparison otherwise ...... (check)
but the chief economist, Bank of England,
went on the record saying 50% of jobs were under threat in the UK.
And he's not the first serious person who should know what he's talking about
who said similar things.
There was a very influential Merrill Lynch report that came out a month or to ago
saying very similar things about the impact of AI,
robotics, automation on jobs.
And some of this goes back to, I think, one of the first reports
that really hit the press, that really got people's attention,
was a report that came out of the Oxford Martin School.
They predicted that 47% of jobs in the United States
were under threat of automation in the next 20 years.
We followed that up with a very similar study and analysis
for jobs in Australia, where I work.
And because it's a slightly different profile of workers,
of the work force in Australia, we came up with a number of around 40%.
These are non trivial numbers, right? 40-50%.
No, just an aside: 47%, I don't know why they didn't say 47.2%, right?
You can't believe a number that's far too precise
when you're predicting the future, but nevertheless,
the fact that it's of this sort of scale,
you've got to take away: it wasn't 4%, it was roughly about half the jobs.
Now, let's put some context to this.
I mean, is this really a credible claim?
The Number One job in the United States today: truck driver.
Now you might have noticed,
the autonomous cars are coming to us very soon.
We're going to be having -- tried the first trial of autonomous cars
on the roads, public roads of Australia, three weeks ago.
The Google Car has driven over a million kilometers
-- or the Google cars, rather, have driven over a million kilometers,
autonomously, on the roads of California.
In 20 years' time, we are going to have autonomous cars.
We're also going to have autonomous trucks.
So if you are in the Number One profession in the United States,
you have to worry that your job is not going to be automated away.
The Number Two job in the United States is salesperson.
Again, since we use the internet,
we've actually mostly automated that process ourselves,
but it's clear that a lot of those jobs are going to be disappearing.
So I think these claims have a lot of credibility.
There's actually a nice dinner party game that my colleagues in AI play
at the end of our conferences, where we sit around
and the game is, you have to name a job
and then, someone has to put up some credible evidence
that we're actually well on the way to actually automating that.
And this game is almost impossible to win.
If I had more time, I'd play the game with you.
The only -- about the only winning answer is politician.
(Laughter)
They will certainly regulate that they'll be the last to be automated.
But that's about the only winning answer we have.
So -- and it's not just technology that is the cause of this.
There's many other, really, sort of rather unhelpful trends.
If you were trying to set up the world's economy,
you would not put these things all down on the table at the same time:
the global, ongoing global financial crisis,
which seems like it will never disappear, I think;
the fact that we're all living longer: this is great, great news for us
but bad news for employment;
the impact of globalization, the fact that we can outsource our work
to cheaper economies.
All of these things are compounding the impact
that technology is having on the nature of work.
And this transformation is going to be different than the last one,
the Industrial revolution.
There's no hard and fast rule of economics that says:
"As many jobs need to be created by a new technology as destroyed."
Every time we have a new technology, of course, new jobs are created.
There's lots of, there's thousands, hundreds of thousands of new jobs
enabled by technology today.
But there's no reason that they have to balance exactly those that are destroyed.
In the last -- in the last revolution, that did happen to be the case.
A third of the population was working out in the fields, in agriculture.
Now, worldwide, it's 3 or 4% of the world's population
working in agriculture.
Those people are working in factories and offices now.
We employ far more people than we did at the turn of the 19th century.
But this one looks different, this information revolution looks different.
It looks like it has the potential to take away more jobs, perhaps,
than it does.
And one of the other things is that we used to think
it was the blue-collar jobs.
And that's true: if you go to a car factory today, sure enough,
there are robots that are doing the painting,
there are robots that are doing the welding.
But nowadays, it's white-collar jobs:
it's journalists, it's lawyers, it's accountants,
these jobs that are under threat.
These graphs here show the percentage change in employment
and the change in employment rates.
And it's the middle, the middle class, white-collar professions
that we thought that you would go to university to make yourself safe,
but it seems to be the ones that are most under threat.
If you are a ....... (check) it's probably --
you're too cheap to be replaced by something automated.
But if you're a more expensive person, and this means (check)
that the rich are getting richer and inequalities that we are seeing in society
that are distressing our societies to day,
seem to be magnified by these technological changes.
And there is so many frightening graphs,
if you're going to read Thomas Picketty (check), I encourage you.
Go and look at one of his books and you can see here
that we're seeing a constant improvement in productivity.
Technology is buying us those improvements in productivity,
is increasing our wealth, but there's a leveling off of employment.
And so, the challenge, then, is how
-- it's a question for society, not for a technologist like myself --
how do we all benefit from this rising tide,
not so that it is the rich get richer and the rest of us get further behind.
So, many parts of many jobs looks likely (check) to be automated.
One confusion is this: people say these jobs are going to disappear.
Actually, it seems to be more likely that many parts of your job will be automated.
But that still means that there is perhaps less employment around.
So how can you make yourself more future-proof?
Well, I have two pieces of advice as a technologist,
in terms of what's going to be technically possible in AI.
Either you've got to embrace the future, so become like me,
become someone who's working on trying to invent that future.
And if you're not technically minded, that's fine:
I've got the other part of the equation, the other answer to your question
which is completely at the other end of the spectrum, which is:
focus on those things that find as AI, (check) the hardest things,
making a future that's more creative,
making a future that can understand your emotional state,
focusing on emotional terms and not intellectual intelligence. 12:23