No panic. AI will not steal our work overnight

SUSANA FINQUELIEVICH

Khanty Mansysk

Conferencia; International conference ?Tangible and Intangible Impact of Information and Communication in the Digital Age?; 2019

IFAP / UNESCO

What are / will be our interactions with emerging technologies, or technologies of the industry 4.0, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics? What will the world of work be like in the future? Do these changes affect all professions and trades alike? How will they impact in peripheral (from the economic point of view and technology insertion), such as Latin America, what action will the Governments, enterprises and workers themselves need to implement, in order to cope with the inevitable changes?Warning: whatever answers we can venture, we need to be prudent about prospective studies at a 20-year horizon. The replacement of a number of humans at jobs by AI and robots is possible if progress follows a linear line. Personally, I do not believe in that linear advance will be obvious: this is just one of the possible future scenarios. Even if it occurs, AI / robots will increase the organic composition of Capital, therefore increasing productivity, but they will not eliminate human work, since it is the source of Capital gain. Also, Capitalism needs consumption as well as production. Thus, consumers /workers will be needed for the system to function. The relationship between peripheral countries and cutting-edge technologies regarding the appropriation of capital income due to AI /robots, must also be taken with a pinch of salt. In the fast-changing geopolitical world we live in, different scenarios could be found in 20-30 years. Countries that nowadays are considered peripheral, or just providers of primary products, could rise their technology production and use, using it to improve their production and exports, and therefore, increment their productivity, and enhance their economies. Present significant economies can be overpowered by other countries. This paper is developing just one linear scenario. Everything (or almost everything) we tag as Industrial Revolutions is mainly the transfer of war technologies to civil use. Most nations are constantly preparing for war (either using conventional or cybernetic means): hence technological progress. Where will this progress lead us? We can just guess, based on present (and incomplete) information . Technologies: from physical strength to machine learning Why are emerging technologies of the so-called 4.0 Industry society different from the previous technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries that defined significant industrial and informational revolutions? In the recent past technologies contributed physical strength. They replaced human and animal muscles: if you had to upload heavy goods to ship, you resorted to a crane. In the case of line production, mechanical and routine work were automatized. Even in the early stages of the Informational Era, computers and networks obeyed human-designed programs. Humans kept control. We could give orders to cranes and excavators, engineering automatic manufacturing of canned tomatoes, interact with automated systems, or design computer programs. Machines executed human instructions, without going beyond them.According to Manyika (2017) the main difference is that in the Industry 4.0 we build machines that not only add brute force or facilitate the automatic works that execute completely different tasks. Equipped with techniques such as algorithms, machine vision, machine learning, language processing, algorithms track down patterns, making discoveries by themselves. These techniques help in tasks of classification and recognition, process data blocks and interpret meanings based on them. When these techniques are combined with sensor systems, image recognition, navigation, algorithms, we obtain autonomous automobiles, or autonomous systems, which combine a set of capacities whose results have an impact on the physical world or face-to-face. Evidently, at present the degree of autonomy is relative. Self - driven vehicles can perform in closed testing environments, but they would´t work satisfactorily in Moscow urban highways´traffic not in Buenos Aires traffic-loaded peripheric highways. For Manyika, the attained advances are reduced to three fundamental elements: progress in the algorithms, increase of computers´power, including computer clusters in the cloud, and remarkable increase of data access. The combination of these factors has determined the swift advance of recent years.