OEB 2015 - Tomorrow's New World: Extending the Reach of Learning - Toby Walsh

Toby Walsh - Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales - Australia

How can we ensure that education is ready to prepare learners for the future? And how can we create new learning environments which enhance the benefit of education? Learn about the latest theories, new digital solutions, policies, strategies, research and insights, as our expert speakers shared their enthusiasm for tomorrow’s new world of learning.

More info: http://bit.ly/1NgVtia

(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 politicians.

(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 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;

it says, as many jobs need to be created
by 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 reason that they have to
balance exactly those that are destroyed.

In the last -- in the last revolution,
that happened 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

that 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. 10:40