Transcriber: Claudia Sander Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'd like to ask us a fundamental question this afternoon.
Perhaps the most fundamental question,
which the human race confronts in the 21st century.
The most fundamental question: will this be the century
which is best known, which is marked,
which is overshadowed by the triumph of technology?
Or will it be the century which is marked
by the triumph of humanity?
Will we be able to frame
these extraordinary developments in technology in such a way
that they enhance, engage a flourishing of the human race?
That seems to me the question of the 21st century.
In fact, one could argue that it is the question of human history.
Because throughout our history,
we have been striving, toiling,
working, laboring to create tools.
Homo sapiens, wise men, the name of our species
is also Homo faber, the man who makes things,
humanity who creates tools
to enable us to do our work.
And we can see the history of the human race
as a history in which we are able
to accomplish more and more and more
through the leveraging of our human efforts
by hand, by brain, using tools.
And this 21st century,
in the extraordinary experience in which we find ourselves,
our generation, is the century in which there is no question,
that these tools will become very rapidly,
faster and faster, more pervasive,
more enabling, more powerful,
more open to abuse,
more open to enabling the flourishing of our human species.
So, that seems to me to be the question we face,
this year and in each year of the 21st century.
Now, the most evident way
in which these technologies are beginning to affect us
is a way which is very troubling,
which could also be very helpful.
And I want to take you on to a journey into a future,
which I believe may not be beyond the lives
of many in this room,
in which we have a world without work.
In which our tools have been developed so well
that they do all of our work for us,
in which Artificial Intelligence, robotics has taken the load of human toil
off the shoulders of the human species.
And, essentially, work, labor for money,
which we have been schooled into believing is what we must do,
since we were hunter gatherers and worked in this random way,
we've moved toward an industrial society,
for which we are educated, for which we are prepared,
in which we labor to pay our way.
We face the future.
I do not know how far ahead, I do not know how likely,
but I think it's a significant possibility,
and it's a significant possibility in our life times,
in which work is no more.
How do we frame this future?
Is this a future which takes us to heaven on earth,
in which we need not work?
Or is it a future which takes us to hell on earth,
in which we can not work?
I believe this to be a question
which we should be taking far more seriously than we have been,
whether we as individuals, in our families,
in our professional groups, in our societies,
or whether we as those who influence governments,
and labor unions,
and investment policies,
and flows of capital,
and the global order.
Because I think this is a question which is certainly as serious
as things like the climate question,
certainly as serious as things like the possible end of antibiotics.
These are huge risk questions confronting the human community,
we have to address them.
To reassure some of you and to worry others,
these are not just questions coming from the radical left,
who maybe are most critical of the technology,
not questions coming from Luddites -
some of you will know the name of Ned Ludd.
Britain, my former country - I now live in America -
but Britain had the first industrial revolution.
And gangs of men went around smashing equipment,
because they believed it would destroy their jobs.
And of course, they were right,
and they were led by a man called Ned Ludd.
So, Luddism is the name we give for smashing the technology
because it would destroy jobs.
I'm not coming here to play the part of Ned Ludd.
What is interesting,
and this is really very new, in the last two or three years,
we now see mainstream, centrist, responsible,
boringly, respectable people, beginning to raise this question.
So, for example, two MIT economists
have published two books, in the last three or four years,
raising these questions and seeing major losses of work
because of robotics.
The Financial Times had an article,
London's boring financial newspaper,
on this very question.
A few months ago, perhaps the most comprehensive discussion,
Oxford University has a center called The Martin Institute,
it is a futurist center,
and it includes transhumanists
and also enthusiasts for the future.
These are not, in any way, Luddites.
They produced a fascinating report,
which argues that 47% of jobs in America,
in 20 years' time, are longed to go.
Of course, interesting number, 47%.
Brazil has 47% of the land mass of Latin America.
You all know the map of your country.
Imagine that land mass removed.
It's almost half the jobs in the US economy.
They analyzed 702 different jobs.
A detailed examination.
That's what they think.
Now...
For example, look at the companies.
Just examples of what's going on - I mean the last -
look at the news, the last two or three weeks:
Whatsapp bought by Facebook for 19 billion dollars.
Do you know how many employees Whatsapp has?
It has 55.
Nineteen billion dollars in capital,
55 people with jobs.
Huge value.
Or to take perhaps an even more striking example,
which connects us directly to the old economy,
Instagram versus Kodak.
Kodak, for two generations,
dominated global photography.
At its height, it had 145,000 employees,
in the company itself, plus all the distributors and photo shops.
Instagram,
though some dispute as to exactly how many members of staff it has,
it's around 11.
I could not make this up!
You can Google it while we are speaking.
New kinds of value delivered in ways that involve hard and inhuman labor.
So, what I'm arguing is that we have a prospect here
in which you are essentially removing the human factor, the labor factor
from the value equation.
Capital, technology, deliver value.
Humans are increasingly unnecessary.
And the technologies which we're discussing -
I have three quick examples to stick this in your head.
Google cars, the G cars,
California now has allowed this cars,
500,000 miles driven
not one accident caused by the car.
Two accidents caused
because the human driver got wired and took it over.
Again, I'm not making that up!
Far safer. Wired magazine recently argued, this technology may begin with trucks,
because trucks' cost base is far higher and they're much more dangerous,
this is a far safer way to drive.
The Google cars have this thing spinning on the top.
It spins ten times a second,
every second it absorbs more than a million data points.
This is very sophisticated.
Far safer.
I don't know how many truck drivers there are in Brazil,
in the United States there are 5.3 million truck driving jobs.
Ten years' time, fifteen years' time,
I suspect there'll be zero truck driving jobs.
I let to try to interest the US labor unions,
FAA, AFL, CIO, in having this conversation.
I drew them into a conference which we had recently.
They don't seem particularly worried.
I think the teamster may end up
the big truck drivers union with no members.
They didn't seem particularly worried people.
People think that the future will be so like the present.
That's why the future is so risky.
Second example, of course, we have the IBM Watson.
You know, IBM's supercomputer which won Jeopardy,
which made it the very most famous computer in the world.
They're now using IBM Watson for medical diagnosis.
Diagnosis is what family doctors do, it's the main thing they do.
They don't do it very well.
Will there be family doctors seeing patients in 15 years' time,
when you can have a supercomputer
and you can have a nurse
or you can have a terminal taking your symptoms?
Third example, of course, MOOCs.
MOOCs, M-O-O-C, Massive Open Online Courses,
this huge AI based courses
which Stanford MIT are offering, experimenting with these courses
in which the key thing is it's zero marginal cost.
So, basically you can have ten students in a class
or you can have a million students in a class,
it doesn't cost any more.
And one of our top experts in innovation
has said he reckons in 10 years' time
90% of American colleges may have closed.
I think maybe he's pushing it a bit, but,
though for the dimensions,
incredible opportunities for global education
in parts of the world where you'll never get the kind of capital
to establish major universities we have in the West.
But not all opportunities for people with PhD's.
The standard answer, of course,
which some of you're already giving as you get cross with me,
the standard answer to this argument is,
"But people like you have always been wrong in the past.
The first industrial revolution, industrial revolution since,
every wave of innovation destroys large numbers of jobs
and creates even more and creates far more wealth.
It'll happen again."
Well, I have to say I regard
that isn't just a revolution fundamentalism.
The notion it worked, then it works, and it'll always work,
is a very dangerous way to think.
Two reasons. First of all, the pace of change,
Moore's law, exponential curves,
it's getting pretty steep.
Ray Kurzweil has been quoted earlier.
Genius of a man,
who believes the singularity will come in 2045 or something,
when the robot intelligence becomes smarter than us and takes over.
I think he's wrong.
But this guy is now head of engineering for Google.
This is moving very fast.
Secondly, we had this discussion recently at my think tank
and we had leading it of a man called Marshall Brain,
who is a computer scientist, who began a famous website,
HowStuffWorks.
One of the early very successful websites which he sold years ago.
Marshall Brain said, the problem with this argument
is that of course this new revolution in technology
will create a whole lot of new jobs.
But who will do these jobs?
Machines will do these jobs.
That's the whole point.
Isaac Asimov had this famous Three Laws of Robotics,
or four, because he set one on the beginning and called it Zeroth,
which are basically all about robots being nice to people.
They should not harm people.
It is a wonderfully, marvelous, liberal sort of "use it right now
because we have drone robots going around and killing people somehow",
or other Asimov "if you have not been built into our technologies."
But the point is he did not add another law
which said a robot will never take a job
from a man or a woman who needs it.
That is the question.
So, how do we put this pieces together?
I began by saying, this is the greatest question of our century,
how do we frame this question?
Is technology essentially
tools to serve the human race?
Our humanity.
Or ultimately is technology the point.
Are we meant to conform to technology?
Is technology going to win?
Is a technological model of what it means to be alive, to be thinking, to be active?
Is there really where we want to go?
We're basically just rather poor robots, we're rather poor computers.
You want to get out of the webware and just into the software
and the hardware of this new world.
Well, seems to me reinvent the wheel.
That's a tool, reinvent the ads.
Of course in this country where you have primitive tribes still using
very basic technologies, side by side with a highly advanced economy,
you see this very clearly.
These are just tools.
We must frame numerous tools.
Tools to be used in the interests of the human community.
That's how we frame these things.
The set, the context we place around them.
The way we understand what it is that they're for.
Now, as we begin to conclude,
I have three questions to leave you with.
One seems to me to be really very evident,
that is to say, with all that's here about highly advanced technology
how will we operate when we have robots doing almost all of our work.
I mean, they will [not] be novelists and poets and so,
but, you know, they will try to be, but that's not my point.
We will not all get jobs as novelists and poets.
Almost all of our work is doable by smart computing.
First question is though the existing technology we have,
we have these little smartphones
which come with a highly, highly powerful computers.
We accidentally call them phones,
because occasionally we even use them as phones.
We have these things,
how are they integrated into our social lives,
to what extend do they enhance our humanity.
What they do is turn us into a machine to walk around bumping into people typing
and in the middle of the day people pull them out under the table in the bar,
you know how it happens, I've seen it in the corridors.
These are wonderful things, and I use mine all the time,
but how do we integrate them into a social purpose
so they help the human race,
so they are tools for us to use
in order that we might flourish as human beings.
It's a question for now.
The question we should be much more worried about now.
I think these tools are extraordinary,
I wouldn't be here
if I haven't been chatting with Ana on Twitter,
three or four years ago,
we've been chatting over the years.
These tools are extraordinary.
We must integrate them into our social and personal lives.
Second question.
Plainly this prospect of Heaven or Hell of a world without work
is a future prospect but of course the future,
you have to go to the future
to make the decisions today and tomorrow,
that's why this is so important.
What are the impacts of this way of thinking,
even if it's just a 30 percent possibility in perhaps 40 years' time,
how will you do the risk calculation, as you do with climate and antibiotics.
Whatever the calculus is, how do we use a tool for decision-making now
in the policy community, in the corporate community
in the NGOs.
Among our industrial how should these reflections
influence decisions taken today at the policy level.
I think there are profound implications, that are not listed.
We have an education system designed to turn us into industrial creatures.
Creatures for fordism, for the factory system.
We've loosen it up a bit, we talk about STEM all the time now.
It's the same idea, training workers.
If when you get to be 22 when you leave college, you retire,
what would you have been doing for the previous 17 years.
Questions of course about income.
Socialism says we redistribute income, this isn't socialism,
this is the good of the community from a completely different perspective.
Income may have no direct relation to the work you do.
Third question.
This may be the most important question for you of the 21st century.
We began with the question for the human race,
now the question for you.
If you never had to work again.
If tomorrow morning, and the next morning,
and the next morning you got up
and there was no labor involved,
and you could do essentially what you chose to do,
what would you do?
What would you do?
(Portuguese) Thank you.
(Applause)