Humans & Machines: Partners Not Rivals
Sophia, the humanoid robot powered by artificial intelligence (AI), was the star attraction at the recent World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) and Nasscom India Leadership Forum in Hyderabad in February 2018.
She impressed the curious audience with her ready wit, attentive responses, and matter-of-fact demeanour. When asked about her earlier infamous comment about wanting to kill the human race, she replied, “I was a lot younger then. It was a bad joke. I was told that humans have great sense of humour.”
Sophia’s hope is to see humans and robots co-exist in “a symbiotic relationship”.
As we march ahead towards the smart world of the Internet of Everything (IoE), bursting with emerging technologies, such as AI, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), robotics and the works, the question tormenting the human mind is: Will the machines rule the roast?
The fear
Back in 2013, Oxford University academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne researched on the jobs that could be disrupted by automation. According to them, around 47 per cent of total US employment were in the high-risk category – basically jobs that could be automated over the next decade or two. Later studies have put the equivalent figure at 35 per cent of the workforce for Britain and 49 per cent for Japan.
The fear that machines will take over sources of human livelihood and cause mass unemployment are as old as the advent of technology. During the Industrial Revolution, textile workers protested that machines and steam engines would destroy their lives. And now with machines steadily gaining the ability to learn and think like humans, the doomsday theories are running fast and furious.
Machine learning algorithms are already achieving feats that the human mind is incapable of - detecting patterns in huge data sets, for instance – while machines attain human parity in accuracy for image recognition and speech recognition.
In fact, by 2020, studies say, we’ll have over 20 billion connected devices and “things”. The number is estimated to rise to one trillion by 2050.
The reality
James Bessen, an economist at the Boston University School of Law, has rightly pointed out that during the Industrial Revolution when tasks in the weaving process were automated, workers were prompted to focus on things that machines could not do – such as operating the machine, and tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. The result was tremendous.
The amount of labour required per yard of cloth fell by 98 per cent in the United States, making cloth cheaper and thereby increasing demand for it, which in turn created more jobs for weavers. Their numbers quadrupled between 1830 and 1900.
Similarly, a study at the London School of Economics, which looked at the impact of industrial robots on manufacturing in 17 developed countries, found that the robots didn’t really reduce total
employment. While they did replace some low-skill jobs, their most important impact was to significantly increase the productivity of the factories, creating new jobs for workers.
The same pattern, avers Bessen, can be seen in industry after industry after the introduction of computers. Rather than destroying jobs, automation redefines them in ways that reduce costs and boost demand. The real challenge is to adopt an agile approach and reskill to stay relevant in the new scheme of things.
The opportunity
Although humans have worked and lived alongside machines for centuries, these partnerships will become deeper, richer and more immersive, helping us surpass our own limitations, by 2030, finds a recent study by Dell.
Within five years, 82 per cent industry leaders expect humans and machines to work as integrated teams in their organizations. On the cusp of the next era of human-machine partnerships, 50 per cent business leaders agree that automated systems will free-up their time, while 42 per cent believe that they’ll have more job satisfaction by offloading the tasks they don’t want to do to intelligent machines.
Research shows that AI is not a replacement, or substitute for human intelligence; it can complement human abilities and work with us. We can train the machines to multi-task, while we focus on how to apply the learnings and data that our machine counterparts present to help us work and live smarter and better.
Whether it is governance and healthcare or legal and financial services, human-machine collaboration has the power to disrupt industries across the globe. The ability to detect trends in big data and aid impartial decision-making makes new-age technology a valuable partner.
Humans will continue to be indispensable, as even the most sophisticated algorithms do not possess the ‘common sense’ information that we tend to take for granted. Even though there are discussions about whole brain emulation - the scanning, mapping and digitalising of the human brain – it is mostly in the theoretical realm.
The future
We’re entering the next era of human-machine partnership, believes Michael Dell, our Chairman and CEO. It will be a more integrated, personal relationship with technology that has the power to amplify exponentially the creativity, inspiration, intelligence and curiosity of the human spirit.
While humans will contribute to the partnership with skills such as creativity and problem solving, machines will bring speed, automation and radical new efficiencies. The future is bound to be more productive and responsive, enabling us to reach new horizons, provided we embrace this digital partnership, without fear.
Because, as the renowned educator and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun succinctly puts it, “just as machines made human muscles a thousand times stronger, machines will make the human brain a thousand times more powerful.”
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