Monash University public lecture - artificial intelligence and the future of work.

A.K.A the day I disagreed with a Lord.

This week I attended a lecture presented by Lord Meghnad Desai.

Lord Desai was fascinating to hear and has an incredible CV: Chairman of the Meghnad Desai Academy, renowned academic, Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, a member of the EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee, a life peer of the British House of Lords, and Chairman of the Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust.

Which is why I hesitate to challenge him.

Will machines fully replace humans?

One of his positions seemed to be that artificial intelligence (AI) will never replace humans fully in the workplace because it'll never have our capacity for creative thinking. Routine predictable manual labour, sure. But it'll never be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances to which it wasn’t programmed to adapt. In the end, it'll always be limited to the intelligence of the one who programmed it.

So as long as there’s always unforeseen circumstances (or "uncertainty", to use the economics terminology), there’ll be jobs.

One example Lord Desai gave is in health care. In the next 20 years, it is estimated that 40% of the workforce will be in health care - increasingly in mental health, which is harder to deal with than physical health and can only be done by humans. People will always demand one-on-one attention for medicine (education too). Machines simply can’t do it.

Now for my boldness ... I disagree.

Isn’t it just a matter of programming the machine to self-program (i.e. learn)? To figure out unanticipated problems for itself based on its programmed knowledge - just like humans?

The human brain is essentially a computer literally limited to the genes (programming) of our parents. But we still have the ability to adapt to circumstances that our parents never faced. Why can’t machines, that are limited to the programming we give them, adapt to circumstances we never faced?

The mind wanders.

If machines do replace us, what's left for humans?

But Lord Desai did offer an olive branch to the alternative view, and a ray of hope. For those worried about what will happen to the human condition in a future without work - when many people define their lives and their very humanity by their work - Lord Desai offered a very simple idea:

"No economic activity can be sustained alone by supply. You need demand."

Even in an idealised world where AI has eliminated all human effort, that is not the end of life. The only limitation is the amount of tax that can be extracted and reallocated to people to generate the demand necessary to meet this newly automated supply.

Filling our spare time with sufficient leisure will be the least of our problems.

Here were some other great quotes/thoughts from Lord Desai during the evening:

• Economics’ greatest strength is solving problems that don’t exist.
• This is an economics lecture, let’s not worry about reality.
• He even told a joke: A man robs bank, drives away, and as he’s crossing a bridge, he’s stopped by the police. He confesses to robbing the bank only to be told by the police that he was only pulled over because he was the millionth person to cross the bridge and had won a prize.
  Now he’s in jail. He decides to never let such a thing happen to him again. So he builds a probability machine that predicts perfectly accurately what will happen in the next 5 minutes. It works. But it tells him he will die in the next 5 minutes. So he destroys the machine and commits suicide.
  Moral: even when we can predict the future, we can’t always control it.