21 Lessons for the 21st Century(10)

The benefits for human society are likely to be immense. AI doctors could provide far better and cheaper healthcare for billions of people, particularly for those who currently receive no healthcare at all. Thanks to learning algorithms and biometric sensors, a poor villager in an underdeveloped country might come to enjoy far better healthcare via her smartphone than the richest person in the world gets today from the most advanced urban hospital.5

Similarly, self-driving vehicles could provide people with much better transport services, and in particular reduce mortality from traffic accidents. Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime and terrorism combined).6 More than 90 per cent of these accidents are caused by very human errors: somebody drinking alcohol and driving, somebody texting a message while driving, somebody falling asleep at the wheel, somebody daydreaming instead of paying attention to the road. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2012 that 31 per cent of fatal crashes in the USA involved alcohol abuse, 30 per cent involved speeding, and 21 per cent involved distracted drivers.7 Self-driving vehicles will never do any of these things. Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 per cent.8 In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of a million people every year.

Hence it would be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs. Redundant drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.





The Mozart in the machine


At least in the short term, AI and robotics are unlikely to completely eliminate entire industries. Jobs that require specialisation in a narrow range of routinised activities will be automated. But it will be much more difficult to replace humans with machines in less routine jobs that demand the simultaneous use of a wide range of skills, and that involve dealing with unforeseen scenarios. Take healthcare, for example. Many doctors focus almost exclusively on processing information: they absorb medical data, analyse it, and produce a diagnosis. Nurses, in contrast, also need good motor and emotional skills in order to give a painful injection, replace a bandage, or restrain a violent patient. Hence we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.9 The human care industry – which takes care of the sick, the young and the elderly – is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time. Indeed, as people live longer and have fewer children, care of the elderly will probably be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the human labour market.

Alongside care, creativity too poses particularly difficult hurdles for automation. We don’t need humans to sell us music any more – we can download it directly from the iTunes store – but the composers, musicians, singers and DJs are still flesh and blood. We rely on their creativity not just to produce completely new music, but also to choose among a mind-boggling range of available possibilities.

Nevertheless, in the long run no job will remain absolutely safe from automation. Even artists should be put on notice. In the modern world art is usually associated with human emotions. We tend to think that artists are channelling internal psychological forces, and that the whole purpose of art is to connect us with our emotions or to inspire in us some new feeling. Consequently, when we come to evaluate art, we tend to judge it by its emotional impact on the audience. Yet if art is defined by human emotions, what might happen once external algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo or Beyoncé?

After all, emotions are not some mystical phenomenon – they are the result of a biochemical process. Hence, in the not too distant future a machine-learning algorithm could analyse the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the emotional impact that a particular song – even a particular musical key – is likely to have on you.10

Of all forms of art, music is probably the most susceptible to Big Data analysis, because both inputs and outputs lend themselves to precise mathematical depiction. The inputs are the mathematical patterns of sound waves, and the outputs are the electrochemical patterns of neural storms. Within a few decades, an algorithm that goes over millions of musical experiences might learn to predict how particular inputs result in particular outputs.11

Suppose you just had a nasty fight with your boyfriend. The algorithm in charge of your sound system will immediately discern your inner emotional turmoil, and based on what it knows about you personally and about human psychology in general, it will play songs tailored to resonate with your gloom and echo your distress. These particular songs might not work well with other people, but are just perfect for your personality type. After helping you get in touch with the depths of your sadness, the algorithm would then play the one song in the world that is likely to cheer you up – perhaps because your subconscious connects it with a happy childhood memory that even you are not aware of. No human DJ could ever hope to match the skills of such an AI.

You might object that the AI would thereby kill serendipity and lock us inside a narrow musical cocoon, woven by our previous likes and dislikes. What about exploring new musical tastes and styles? No problem. You could easily adjust the algorithm to make 5 per cent of its choices completely at random, unexpectedly throwing at you a recording of an Indonesian Gamelan ensemble, a Rossini opera, or the latest K-pop hit. Over time, by monitoring your reactions, the AI could even determine the ideal level of randomness that will optimise exploration while avoiding annoyance, perhaps lowering its serendipity level to 3 per cent or raising it to 8 per cent.