[Music]
take a close look at this see anything
interesting this is a picture of
complete darkness trust me no matter how
hard you look you won't see a thing
for some this represents the conditions
of a nightmare or a horror film so if I
told you this was a picture of a
modern-day workplace would you find that
disturbing this is a real live
electronics Factory in Chengdu China
this is not after-hours this is in the
middle of the day at the height of
productivity and there's total darkness
at this factory workers work 24 hours a
day
they don't take lunch or bathroom breaks
they're happy to work without lighting
and not get paid and no one complains
why is that
well these workers they're not human
this is what it looks like without the
need for basic amenities no lights no
air-conditioning no running water
not even toilets the things we as modern
humans take for granted this is a dark
or lights out factory in a dark factory
machines automate the end-to-end
production line from processing the raw
materials to storing the end product and
it's sometimes weeks before a human
enters the factory floor to inspect or
maintain the equipment in 1955 this
notion was just a futuristic fable by
2049 most of Chinese manufacturing will
look like this I want to show you
another image
well sure to the human eye it looks the
same this time it's a different kind of
factory this one is in oshino Japan at
this factory dark factory robots build
other dark factory robots they can build
up to 50 per day and go unsupervised for
up to 30 days at a time in the dark
since 2003 and they've built over
400,000 to date that's right in some
kind of self-replicating human-free
level of Inception machine intelligence
is building other intelligent machines
capable of operating without the need
with human supervision robots like these
are increasingly replacing us humans in
factories and other blue-collar jobs and
why simple they're just more efficient
ok so you might say sure automating a
production line to grind drill polish
and assemble well that makes sense but I
have a white-collar job I'm safe right
well sorry to break it to you earlier
this year we were approached by a
top-tier law firm and they said hey
could you build us a junior lawyer using
machine intelligence when a law firm
hires a junior they barrage them with
years of casework and a decision tree
they shadow the more senior lawyers they
try to learn as much as possible take as
much of the workload and then become
billable in as little time as possible
and then they leave all of the time and
equity invested gone and the process
starts again so when they ask me to
improve this process I said sure how
hard could it be a machine intelligence
Junior has its advantages you can train
artificial intelligence in much the same
way as you would a human but in much
less time hey I can learn from its
mistakes handle the unexpected with much
greater context based on its previous
learnings it doesn't have a family
doesn't take a paycheck doesn't need
friends won't take a sick day and most
importantly when it leaves you to go
work elsewhere one machine intelligence
Junior can replay
an army of human genius and within
months might even make senior partner
the junior we're in the process of
building we'll be able to digest decades
of case notes and output are ready to go
contract in seconds that means every few
seconds around the clock this jr. will
be making money for the firm and we
expected to be fully operational in six
months it's a reality which is as
exciting as it is terrifying welcome to
my world
my team are on the front line of this
shift optimizing jobs through
data-driven experiments we take human
behavior turn it into data and teach it
to machines sounds like a tall order but
with the right people in the room not
really once programmed AI isn't just
cheap it's pretty much free you can
train AI by ingesting information and
making sense of the structure or lack of
structure and it's fast an AI recently
deployed by JP Morgan can do 360
thousand hours of human labor in just
seconds because humans are patent
creatures and because our jobs have some
kind of structure to them machines
should be able to learn how to do them
and that's why we're about to see an
implosion of what I like to call organic
labor or labor performed by a human you
can imagine your job as a salad with
each ingredient something you need to do
each day what we'll start to see is our
tasks the ingredients in our jobs
starting to be eaten away slowly we
might lose our daily spreadsheet and
then I'll need to generate reporting
without reports we won't need to attend
meetings will be way more productive
there'll be less of us required to
achieve the same outcome slowly but
surely would be less responsible for
more tasks until the majority have been
swallowed by the machines so it got me
thinking which jobs are at the highest
risk of automation we gathered over
11,000 of the world's most widely held
jobs and created the short term
automation susceptibility index what we
found is that no matter whether it was
blue white or any other color regardless
of skill or intelligence level our jobs
tasks can be deconstructed
into three things structure variance and
predictability we found that up to 80%
of low-skilled jobs are already so
automated they'll be forgotten as human
options over the next few years these
are jobs that make you say what people
still do that jobs like cement mixer
candy machine operator a video store
attendant the next most susceptible are
jobs like water meter inspector stop
taker and order filler up to sixty
percent of these low variability jobs
will succumb to automation over the next
decade up to 25 percent of low structure
high variability jobs will shrink Jeter
having bits and pieces of their
day-to-day being automated these are
primarily senior blue-collar positions
or standard white-collar jobs such as
pharmacists accountants and health
inspectors yet only 3% of highly
specialized jobs will follow the same
fate we're talking neuroscientists
chemical engineers acrobats actors and
animal scientists machines will have a
hard time with these jobs as they
require a certain intellectual context
multidisciplinary skills and often
fundamentally human attributes such as
interpersonal communication and random
physical manipulation but you'll notice
I said machines will have a hard time
with these jobs but nothing really is
impossible it comes down to a
fundamental question
where would we rather pay to watch this
guy perform a comedy routine or Seinfeld
let's take an overwhelmingly human job
for example sales we recently completed
a proof of concept for a fortune 500
company which proved sales could be
driven by machine intelligence we took a
bunch of open source information and key
revenue driving criteria and the AI was
literally able to tell us how to sell to
new leads in a world where salespeople
spend up to 70% of their time on
research and administration even a small
improvement means real money through the
door in this reality the salesperson
becomes a delivery vehicle for an AI
crafted sales message in a very human
way so what does this leave us our
financial freedom our sense of self and
our sense of purpose is becoming
increasingly threatened as the job
of today become more automated and cxeh
as a result this is the price we pay to
make things like legal advice accounting
and counseling cheaper and more
accessible to the masses but what we
must remember is that while we can take
the human out of the job we can never
replace the job of being human at the
end of the day we are social creatures
and we crave human interaction maybe
that means it will cost more to interact
with a human instead of a machine in the
near future but as I see at tomorrow's
world we'll be faster and smarter a
world optimized to leverage the best
version of ourselves this is exciting
right
machines will liberate human purpose so
how can we prepare take a look at your
job prospects and the job prospects of
your children and ask yourself could a
machine do this prepare your family to
be ok with change as uncomfortable as it
may be will likely be switching careers
far more frequently in the near future
love it or hate it
let's take feelings out of this machines
can't be stopped but they will light up
our world in more ways than we could
ever imagine this is the future of work
let's embrace pushing limits not buttons
buttons are so 2017
thank you
[Applause]