automation will not deprive us of all work, and the relationship between people in the future will come to the fore - Professor Toby Walsh

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Professor Toby Walsh, an AI specialist from the Australian University of New Wales, talked about how a high-tech future will bring us back to the human head. Most of all, we will begin to value the relationship between people, and social and emotional development will come to the forefront, along with handicraft and creative skills.

"Hal Verian, chief economist at Google, has a simple way of predicting the future. In his opinion, in the future we are waiting for what the rich people already have. Millionaires have personal drivers - in the future we will be driven by unmanned vehicles. The rich have private bankers - in the future, everyone will have robot bankers, "Walsh begins his column.
In addition, people with seven-digit numbers on the account can afford not to work. So maybe soon everyone will do cars for us, and we will be able to spend our time on what we really want, and not on trying to make money on food and housing?

Economist Andy Heldane of the Bank of England in 2015 predicted that 15 million jobs in the UK will be under the threat of automation. And such gloomy forecasts are made today by all: politicians, bankers and industrialists. According to Jim Jong Kim of the World Bank, automation will affect 69% of jobs in India, 77% in China and 85% in Ethiopia. The results of the study, conducted in Oxford in 2013, suggest that 47% of US jobs will be given to robots.

"It sounds that work in the usual way we can soon disappear," - says Walsh.
However, such predictions and even Oxford studies are now being increasingly criticized. From a technical point of view, many figures are simply wrong. For example, the Oxford report says that in the next two decades, the profession of a bicycle repairman will be automated by 94%. But, proceeding from the existing development of technologies, in fact the probability of this is zero.

"The truth is that no one knows how many jobs will disappear," Walsh writes.
Moreover: automation of 47% of jobs is not equivalent to 47% of unemployment. First, in order to avoid mass unemployment, people can simply shorten the working week. So, before the industrial revolution, many worked for 60 hours a week, after - about 40. The same can happen after the technological AI revolution, on the threshold of which we are just standing.

In addition, innovative technologies not only destroy old jobs, but create new ones. This has happened more than once in the past and we have no reason to believe that this will not happen in the future. Of course, there is no basic law of the economy, which would read: "The number of disappeared jobs is directly proportional to the number of new jobs." But this does not mean that robotization will entail massive unemployment.

However, this is not all. The industrial revolution at one time saved us from many kinds of heavy physical labor, and now people are busy solving cognitive tasks. But what will remain for us, the expert thinks, when the machines master serious thought processes? Someone believes that the profession related to the repair of robots will be in demand. At the same time, this argument can be refuted by a simple example: thousands of welders from car factories lost their jobs, and only a couple of engineers responsible for the technical condition of the robots took their places.

"Well, then people in the future will have to solve tasks that are incapable of performing machines," you can answer. But what if one day their intellect becomes higher than ours? And there will not be a job they can not do better than us? In this case, it turns out, we will have no work at all?

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"No, the work will still remain - and the work that we ourselves prefer to do instead of robots will remain," Walsh writes.
The AI ​​revolution will make humanity rethink what makes us human. Theoretically, robots can become terrific artists and musicians. They will paint pictures better than Picasso, and they will write music better than Bach. However, there are areas where we will always want to see people. For example, we will always prefer works of art created by man. We will want to listen to an actor's monologue about love, because he himself experienced this feeling.

Thus, the expert concludes, the value of modern workers will be the ability to convey their human experience, feelings and emotions. And this applies not only to people of art, but also artisans - we will increasingly appreciate the things and products made by human hands. Echoes of this can already be observed in the culture of hipsters.

"Mass production products made by robots will be cheap. But handmade work will become rare and very expensive, "Walsh says.
Ultimately, most of all, we will begin to appreciate the relationship between people, cherish them. Therefore, our social and emotional development will come to the forefront; developed social and emotional intellects will become no less in demand than traditional handicraft and creative skills.
In short, a high-tech future will bring us back to what can be christened "the human element".

"Technology will make us more human, no matter how paradoxical it may sound," concludes Walsh.

Sources: hightech.fm, The Guardian

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