[Applause]
in just three months we’ll have another
batch of graduates leave this University
and go out into the working world and as
they look back in the first five years
of their career in the half decade ahead
and as all of us look back and the
evolution of our careers in the coming
years I think we’ll have a lot to say
about how technology and artificial
intelligence affected our work maybe
we’ll say that it helped to augment our
skills we got the more done with the
same amount of input maybe we’ll be able
to say that AI help to automate some of
the more boring or monotonous aspects of
our work and we got to focus on more
creative tasks in my line of work I have
people ask will AI take our jobs and so
it’s an interesting question what are
the jobs that are safe in the next
decade and which are the ones that are
maybe ripe for automation my business
tech emergence focuses on the impact of
artificial intelligence and different
business sectors so this is what we
study lucky enough to talk to AI leaders
at Silicon Valley giant companies like
the headquarters of Facebook and Airbnb
and a lot of these companies you folks
might know but also to speak with the
researchers in this domain the people
working on the hard science of
artificial intelligence and our last
poll asking about AI risk to these
researchers in this case a little bit
over 30 PhDs in the AI domain we asked
them in the next 20 years what are the
greatest risks to society that AI might
posit and the biggest cluster was around
automation the economy sort of job
market concerns roughly speaking not
quite as bad as it could be as you can
see you know got about four folks in the
killer robot category so personally I’d
much rather not have a job than you know
be killed by a robot so automation and
the job market was sort of the biggest
cluster of the folks who did respond who
felt confident enough to positive guests
mostly professors MIT University
Montreal etc that was the category where
they put a lot of the risk and so my
work was in 12 minutes to sort of
distill hundreds of surveys like this
and hundreds and hundreds more
interviews into some core concepts
around what demonstrates
job security and what what leaves
something ripe for automation and I’ve
tried to boil it down into three
concepts and so we’ll dive into the
first one the first one I think about as
context so I’ll frame this into some
examples so there’s limited context
roles and there’s broad or varied
context roles you might think about in
the domain of welding for example if you
weld on an automation line in some sense
you get a certain kind of input you do a
certain kind of work and you send it off
in the other end you have again a
certain number of things that come to
you a certain number of things that you
do and a thing that you produce this is
the kind of work that machines tend to
be rather good at even before artificial
intelligence this is the low-hanging
fruit for automation that’s not really
gonna change that’s certainly going to
uptick in the years ahead but people
think that often it’s blue-collar work
that’s the most automatable definitely
not the case there’s plenty of extremely
varied context quote/unquote blue-collar
work one example might be in plumbing
for example so my best friend growing up
in this small town is actually a plumber
he receives Josh I had coffee with him
this morning and that’s a role that
doesn’t have a certain number of inputs
a certain kind of work certain kind of
outputs when you show up at a house you
don’t know what to do you ask when was
this boiler installed
what are your pipes made out of and has
this issue happened in the summer is
this only after the cold spike only
after those kind of questions can you
start to figure out what to even
diagnose before you know what to do lots
of context there lots of physical
dexterity tough work for machines when
we finally do have machines that can
roll up to your house knock on your door
ask you how the day is doing and go in
your basement and fix your pipes we’ll
have much bigger concerns than job
security we’ll have a species dominance
issues going on at that point which
which I think I think we have a couple
years before we really have to grapple
with thank goodness so moving on we’ll
get into the white collar space actually
a lot of where I am in the Bay Area a
lot of the work being done on AI and
industries being done in the white
collar automation world and so a lot of
people think that inherently jobs that
are better paid that work with data for
some reason are safer not necessarily
the case so if you’re an auditor for
example you look at financial reports
you sort of look for certain kinds of
discrepancies and
and then you pass it along and the
auditing workflow in some way shape or
form even at a high pay grade and not in
any way demeaning that kind of labor to
some degree there are machines that will
figure out how to read those in numbers
and find those discrepancies and there’s
a lot of work actually in the
bookkeeping accounting auditing space in
terms of current automation efforts a
lot of work that just involves handling
and processing data even high-paid stuff
7080 K salaries there’s companies going
after that um but there’s varied context
work in the white-collar world it’s much
harder to automate so if you work in the
same finance department you look at the
same finance reports but you also make
decisions for purchasing so for example
you don’t just look at you know where
are we spending our money and what does
that mean and look for those
discrepancies but you think about what
does that mean for how many materials we
need to purchase what does it mean for
what suppliers we should work with and
how can those purchasing decisions and
those varied suppliers and products
affect our the goals for profit margins
for this quarter for example that’s a
lot of moving parts that’s negotiating
this is this is safely in the purview of
humans much much broader context that
we’re working in even if they get paid
about the same I will say to end on the
context point it’s probably the most
salient single point that I got from all
of my interviews that if it’s possible
for you to be in a nook where you get a
certain kind of inflow you’d do a
certain kind of work and you have a
certain kind of output and have the
changes in the industry and the changes
in the nature of your customer passed
you by without you knowing because
you’re facedown it’s very very easy to
be left behind in the job field this is
a extremely salient point and there’s a
comfort to that because the world is
complex negotiations complex other
humans are complex and there’s a there’s
a comfort but there’s also a real
helplessness with having someone else in
the organization handle the complexities
of the market and you just have a job
but the the big takeaway for me and
really listening to maybe 60 of these
interviews was that if you want to see
your interests represented in your
industry your own interests your own
career represented your industry you
have to have your hands around the ugly
messy real context of what’s changing if
you want to stay relevant but luckily
there are some things outside of just
context that are pretty safely in the
human world working with people is a big
part of this but it’s not all working
with people there are some people work
that
kind of low-hanging fruit for automation
if you work in a call center if you’re a
checkout clerk there’s companies gunning
for you right now in a real real big way
in the next half a decade not exactly
safe places to be but in terms of human
work I break it down into two categories
here coordination is a big one if you
manage other people manage a sales team
for example you’ve got to work with
other people you’ve got a martial
company resources martial technologies
to reach company goals this is a
challenging complex task and it’s more
than machines can really manage in many
regards similarly speaking connection
might not involve management in the same
way but if you’re a schoolteacher if you
are a high-level b2b sales person if you
are a nurse and connecting with other
people i – i handshake etc is a critical
part of your role and you’re good at
that that’s tough for machines to take
away again when you’re kindergartener
you know goes to school to bring an
apple to the indistinguishably
human-like robot teacher who shows
affection to it and Vicey Versey we have
much bigger issues than job security
Steve’s Gees dominant stuff coming up so
um these are these are big and important
points that I think should come to the
fore when it comes to working with
people these are kind of the major
categories that come up time and time
again and the way I think about it is
that when my grandmother was working
over the course of her whole career at
some point there was a critical moment
where she had to learn how to use a
typewriter and fortunately she had the
brain pirate do that and she did that
and that was that was a juncture of kind
of getting to the next level in her own
career in many of our spaces you have to
learn a new technology tool every three
months or so the rolling process of
creative destruction is moving faster
and faster and staying ahead of that is
a big reason why keeping a grasp on
context is critical but the evolution of
technology in our era will be more than
just upgrades in our tools of what we
use for work it’ll involve different
ways to relate and indeed live as human
beings so as artificial intelligence
progresses we will have programs that
preempt our needs and take actions on
our behalf
virtual reality combined with AI will be
a place where we’ll be able to go
instead of having all these kinds of
monitors we’ll have everything we need
displayed in front of us entertainment
and work in interfaces that we can’t
even currently imagine right now and
brain machine interface in the next 20
or 30 years
I think it’s going to become a much
bigger deal already today for more than
a decade folks with severe depression
can get electrodes drilled through their
skull and into their pleasure centers in
order to keep stave off thoughts of
suicide and an alleviate really extreme
depression and folks born without the
ability to hear can have brain stem
implants to grant them a sense that they
were never born with to see videos of
this it’s pretty beautiful stuff but in
the decades ahead as we evolve more in
altering our emotion altering our senses
these will be bigger questions than what
are we doing with these tools but more
of what are we turning ourselves into
when VR becomes a more important place
than the real world when artificial
intelligence manages businesses or
states and when we can alter happiness
and intelligence itself will we do that
I think for better for worse we probably
will and we should probably grapple with
it and these are as we’re frantically
kind of moving around an increasingly
virtual world I think there will be an
increasing shift towards control in the
physical world particularly in what’s
most important and increasingly more
important in the physical world which is
the computing that houses the virtual
experiences the computing that houses
the intelligence of our increasingly
super intelligent machines a decade two
decades out the machines that house the
experiences piped in and out of brains
20 years from now in brain machine
interface that’s so the notion of
playing God when this becomes more than
kind of a play on words I think there’s
there’s organizations and nations that
are going to be very very interested in
taking that seriously and more or less
as we sort of move forward into the
future I think that’s going to be a
concern that maybe we’re not quite
prepared with but fortunately these
these aren’t things that most of us are
gonna have to grapple with on a day to
day basis you know for us if in the
future the entertainments good and we
got a job that’s kind of what matters
you know job security if we’re getting
our paycheck we don’t really have to
grapple with the ultimate complexities
of sort of the future of the human
condition
but you’d think if we have the will to
do whatever it takes to make sure we
keep a job for ourselves maybe we could
direct a bit of that effort towards
directing the great creative destructive
waive that well not just overhaul
careers will over call what overhaul
what it is to be human and maybe the
nuke that we hide in and could be left
behind in is our job security look and
maybe there’s a context in ugly complex
context of the human condition that we
should wrap our hands around if we want
to ensure our interests are represented
in the future of our species that’s all
I got
[Applause]
in just three months we’ll have another
batch of graduates leave this University
and go out into the working world and as
they look back in the first five years
of their career in the half decade ahead
and as all of us look back and the
evolution of our careers in the coming
years I think we’ll have a lot to say
about how technology and artificial
intelligence affected our work maybe
we’ll say that it helped to augment our
skills we got the more done with the
same amount of input maybe we’ll be able
to say that AI help to automate some of
the more boring or monotonous aspects of
our work and we got to focus on more
creative tasks in my line of work I have
people ask will AI take our jobs and so
it’s an interesting question what are
the jobs that are safe in the next
decade and which are the ones that are
maybe ripe for automation my business
tech emergence focuses on the impact of
artificial intelligence and different
business sectors so this is what we
study lucky enough to talk to AI leaders
at Silicon Valley giant companies like
the headquarters of Facebook and Airbnb
and a lot of these companies you folks
might know but also to speak with the
researchers in this domain the people
working on the hard science of
artificial intelligence and our last
poll asking about AI risk to these
researchers in this case a little bit
over 30 PhDs in the AI domain we asked
them in the next 20 years what are the
greatest risks to society that AI might
posit and the biggest cluster was around
automation the economy sort of job
market concerns roughly speaking not
quite as bad as it could be as you can
see you know got about four folks in the
killer robot category so personally I’d
much rather not have a job than you know
be killed by a robot so automation and
the job market was sort of the biggest
cluster of the folks who did respond who
felt confident enough to positive guests
mostly professors MIT University
Montreal etc that was the category where
they put a lot of the risk and so my
work was in 12 minutes to sort of
distill hundreds of surveys like this
and hundreds and hundreds more
interviews into some core concepts
around what demonstrates
job security and what what leaves
something ripe for automation and I’ve
tried to boil it down into three
concepts and so we’ll dive into the
first one the first one I think about as
context so I’ll frame this into some
examples so there’s limited context
roles and there’s broad or varied
context roles you might think about in
the domain of welding for example if you
weld on an automation line in some sense
you get a certain kind of input you do a
certain kind of work and you send it off
in the other end you have again a
certain number of things that come to
you a certain number of things that you
do and a thing that you produce this is
the kind of work that machines tend to
be rather good at even before artificial
intelligence this is the low-hanging
fruit for automation that’s not really
gonna change that’s certainly going to
uptick in the years ahead but people
think that often it’s blue-collar work
that’s the most automatable definitely
not the case there’s plenty of extremely
varied context quote/unquote blue-collar
work one example might be in plumbing
for example so my best friend growing up
in this small town is actually a plumber
he receives Josh I had coffee with him
this morning and that’s a role that
doesn’t have a certain number of inputs
a certain kind of work certain kind of
outputs when you show up at a house you
don’t know what to do you ask when was
this boiler installed
what are your pipes made out of and has
this issue happened in the summer is
this only after the cold spike only
after those kind of questions can you
start to figure out what to even
diagnose before you know what to do lots
of context there lots of physical
dexterity tough work for machines when
we finally do have machines that can
roll up to your house knock on your door
ask you how the day is doing and go in
your basement and fix your pipes we’ll
have much bigger concerns than job
security we’ll have a species dominance
issues going on at that point which
which I think I think we have a couple
years before we really have to grapple
with thank goodness so moving on we’ll
get into the white collar space actually
a lot of where I am in the Bay Area a
lot of the work being done on AI and
industries being done in the white
collar automation world and so a lot of
people think that inherently jobs that
are better paid that work with data for
some reason are safer not necessarily
the case so if you’re an auditor for
example you look at financial reports
you sort of look for certain kinds of
discrepancies and
and then you pass it along and the
auditing workflow in some way shape or
form even at a high pay grade and not in
any way demeaning that kind of labor to
some degree there are machines that will
figure out how to read those in numbers
and find those discrepancies and there’s
a lot of work actually in the
bookkeeping accounting auditing space in
terms of current automation efforts a
lot of work that just involves handling
and processing data even high-paid stuff
7080 K salaries there’s companies going
after that um but there’s varied context
work in the white-collar world it’s much
harder to automate so if you work in the
same finance department you look at the
same finance reports but you also make
decisions for purchasing so for example
you don’t just look at you know where
are we spending our money and what does
that mean and look for those
discrepancies but you think about what
does that mean for how many materials we
need to purchase what does it mean for
what suppliers we should work with and
how can those purchasing decisions and
those varied suppliers and products
affect our the goals for profit margins
for this quarter for example that’s a
lot of moving parts that’s negotiating
this is this is safely in the purview of
humans much much broader context that
we’re working in even if they get paid
about the same I will say to end on the
context point it’s probably the most
salient single point that I got from all
of my interviews that if it’s possible
for you to be in a nook where you get a
certain kind of inflow you’d do a
certain kind of work and you have a
certain kind of output and have the
changes in the industry and the changes
in the nature of your customer passed
you by without you knowing because
you’re facedown it’s very very easy to
be left behind in the job field this is
a extremely salient point and there’s a
comfort to that because the world is
complex negotiations complex other
humans are complex and there’s a there’s
a comfort but there’s also a real
helplessness with having someone else in
the organization handle the complexities
of the market and you just have a job
but the the big takeaway for me and
really listening to maybe 60 of these
interviews was that if you want to see
your interests represented in your
industry your own interests your own
career represented your industry you
have to have your hands around the ugly
messy real context of what’s changing if
you want to stay relevant but luckily
there are some things outside of just
context that are pretty safely in the
human world working with people is a big
part of this but it’s not all working
with people there are some people work
that
kind of low-hanging fruit for automation
if you work in a call center if you’re a
checkout clerk there’s companies gunning
for you right now in a real real big way
in the next half a decade not exactly
safe places to be but in terms of human
work I break it down into two categories
here coordination is a big one if you
manage other people manage a sales team
for example you’ve got to work with
other people you’ve got a martial
company resources martial technologies
to reach company goals this is a
challenging complex task and it’s more
than machines can really manage in many
regards similarly speaking connection
might not involve management in the same
way but if you’re a schoolteacher if you
are a high-level b2b sales person if you
are a nurse and connecting with other
people i – i handshake etc is a critical
part of your role and you’re good at
that that’s tough for machines to take
away again when you’re kindergartener
you know goes to school to bring an
apple to the indistinguishably
human-like robot teacher who shows
affection to it and Vicey Versey we have
much bigger issues than job security
Steve’s Gees dominant stuff coming up so
um these are these are big and important
points that I think should come to the
fore when it comes to working with
people these are kind of the major
categories that come up time and time
again and the way I think about it is
that when my grandmother was working
over the course of her whole career at
some point there was a critical moment
where she had to learn how to use a
typewriter and fortunately she had the
brain pirate do that and she did that
and that was that was a juncture of kind
of getting to the next level in her own
career in many of our spaces you have to
learn a new technology tool every three
months or so the rolling process of
creative destruction is moving faster
and faster and staying ahead of that is
a big reason why keeping a grasp on
context is critical but the evolution of
technology in our era will be more than
just upgrades in our tools of what we
use for work it’ll involve different
ways to relate and indeed live as human
beings so as artificial intelligence
progresses we will have programs that
preempt our needs and take actions on
our behalf
virtual reality combined with AI will be
a place where we’ll be able to go
instead of having all these kinds of
monitors we’ll have everything we need
displayed in front of us entertainment
and work in interfaces that we can’t
even currently imagine right now and
brain machine interface in the next 20
or 30 years
I think it’s going to become a much
bigger deal already today for more than
a decade folks with severe depression
can get electrodes drilled through their
skull and into their pleasure centers in
order to keep stave off thoughts of
suicide and an alleviate really extreme
depression and folks born without the
ability to hear can have brain stem
implants to grant them a sense that they
were never born with to see videos of
this it’s pretty beautiful stuff but in
the decades ahead as we evolve more in
altering our emotion altering our senses
these will be bigger questions than what
are we doing with these tools but more
of what are we turning ourselves into
when VR becomes a more important place
than the real world when artificial
intelligence manages businesses or
states and when we can alter happiness
and intelligence itself will we do that
I think for better for worse we probably
will and we should probably grapple with
it and these are as we’re frantically
kind of moving around an increasingly
virtual world I think there will be an
increasing shift towards control in the
physical world particularly in what’s
most important and increasingly more
important in the physical world which is
the computing that houses the virtual
experiences the computing that houses
the intelligence of our increasingly
super intelligent machines a decade two
decades out the machines that house the
experiences piped in and out of brains
20 years from now in brain machine
interface that’s so the notion of
playing God when this becomes more than
kind of a play on words I think there’s
there’s organizations and nations that
are going to be very very interested in
taking that seriously and more or less
as we sort of move forward into the
future I think that’s going to be a
concern that maybe we’re not quite
prepared with but fortunately these
these aren’t things that most of us are
gonna have to grapple with on a day to
day basis you know for us if in the
future the entertainments good and we
got a job that’s kind of what matters
you know job security if we’re getting
our paycheck we don’t really have to
grapple with the ultimate complexities
of sort of the future of the human
condition
but you’d think if we have the will to
do whatever it takes to make sure we
keep a job for ourselves maybe we could
direct a bit of that effort towards
directing the great creative destructive
waive that well not just overhaul
careers will over call what overhaul
what it is to be human and maybe the
nuke that we hide in and could be left
behind in is our job security look and
maybe there’s a context in ugly complex
context of the human condition that we
should wrap our hands around if we want
to ensure our interests are represented
in the future of our species that’s all
I got
[Applause]
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