MSP81 [] The Automation Autopilots.

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9, the Business Station. On shows like MSP, it's very easy to present the changes that technology brings as being unavoidable and inevitable, none more so than when it comes to AI and automation. But is it really a foregone conclusion that a machine will take over your job and if it's a choice, who gets to make it?

Are you eating your words today? The robots are coming is one of your favourite phrases. Hey Rich, yeah that's true and I'm going to your introduction. I'm very often avoidable as far as a lot of people are concerned.

I think today's actually about explaining my words a little bit more clearly. One of the things that we try and do with this show is to demonstrate the worst case scenarios, which in the case of robots and automation is the genuinely scary prospect that machines might put us all out of our jobs and out of our homes and into the Swiss and tunnels. You can pretty much watch any sci-fi movie on your favourite streaming channel to figure out what happens next. And this is where you tell us that we actually have hope.

Yeah I can tell you that there's hope. I can tell you Miley Cyrus will be a guest on next week's show. It doesn't necessarily make any of it true. On the subject of hope, you know, as we've seen in recent years, Donald Trump's America First Policy is an interesting and illuminating example because it's persuading companies not to offshore their production, giving them tax breaks to keep that production onshore.

But what often seems to be the case is that those companies, the ones seeking to offshore as a way to reduce their production costs, they're using those incentives not to employ more US workers. In some cases they've continued to reduce their domestic payroll and they're using those tax breaks and subsidies to bring in machines that can do the work faster and more cheaply. The Amazon packing robots you mentioned on the show are more than once. Yes, more than once.

But I'm not lumping that in as part of the incentivised automation that we were talking about just now because Amazon's model is slightly different in that there's a distribution rather than a production hub model. So it's difficult to offshore those jobs and the facilities because it's their proximity to customers that allows the customer to deliver the things you want to so fast. You know, that all-important final mile. And without that utility, that speed, Amazon is limited to goods that we don't need immediately.

And that means things like food and perishable household items would not be part of their kind of inventory. So Amazon's packing robots are built to meet the demands for those products. And it's very likely that these distribution hubs will actually get bigger and more numerous as they reduce that final mile speed and cost and actually increase their scale. Automation allows those distribution centres to work 24 hours a day so that they can ship us toilet paper and bean shoots and those yummy tide pods at the moment's notice.

Could they do the same with people? You know, employ more people, run 24-hour shifts. Yeah, but people are expensive and they're fragile. You know, as workers we want good wages, a good standard of living, paid holidays, time off to spend with friends and family, health care.

Good point. Yeah. As consumers we want cheap prices, fast delivery and a high level of customer service. And it's very hard to square those two sides of the same person.

Right. Additionally, we're often told that Amazon works on slim margins. You know, I'll be honest, I don't know how true that is and it's not really the purpose of today's show in any case, but we'll assume that that is the case. How do you bring these two things together?

That's one of the questions that we all face today. You know, whether it's as workers or business owners or legislators, you know, how do you create that balance? Consumers whose loyalty is based around price and speed, whether it's Amazon or whether it's when you go out to buy lunch. And of course, workers who want these well paid secure jobs.

And this is happening across numerous sectors, right? One example that springs to mind is Uber and its development of self-driving technologies. Yeah. I mean, we have that unfortunate quote from the company a few years ago that the most expensive part of your ride is not the car, but the driver.

So you have this very strange dichotomy, not just with Uber, but with a lot of the driving and gig economy type jobs, that these companies are rapidly expanding globally. They're recruiting tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers or as they call them partners. And at the same time, they openly state that their aim is to reduce or rid themselves of those humans they're employing. And do you think this is a change that people actually want?

It's actually genuinely hard to get a grip on. You know, we hear that people are more solitary in their habits. We find people on social media are unable to handle views that diverge from their own. Those shifts and changes are definitely there.

But what's actually leading them is a different discussion. So some people argue that we're being conditioned and led in this direction. And that technology companies are playing a big role in that change. Others argue that there has been a breakdown in the social fabric that the cult of the individual and the MEE-first philosophy is eroding the social trust that enables us to trust people we don't know.

Look at the number of situations where our default reaction is anger. Like you're lunch order not being the way you want it. But is that a reason, you know, to start shouting at the waiting staff who had nothing to do with the preparation of your food? It's like we've kind of forgotten how to interact.

Do you think it's a generation of things? Possibly, but not necessarily in the way that it's often portrayed in the media. That narrative is usually that the thin-skinned, millennial or digital native, you put them out of his or her comfort zone and they're unable to cope with the requirements of normal physical interaction. Now, even if there is some truth for that, and there isn't really any evidence to suggest that there is any truth to that, the blame still lands squarely back on parents.

You know, if you release a child into the wild who has no idea how to pay utility bill or boil an egg, that's on you. That's why I advocate for children to be raised in the wild. You know, parents are supposed to be raising human beings, not social media influencers. And it's often those older generations, my generation, for example, who are kind of bitter about the way the consumer world their parents built is turning out, you know, facing an uncertain end to their working lives, rising, living in health costs.

And this increasing sense of a technology induced dislocation from the way the world actually works. The generation that's caught in between. I think in a sense, you know, we were the first generation really to be brought up without knowing how the machines in our world actually work, or to be able to fix them. You know, my parents' generation possessions, especially technology, stuff was supposed to last.

If your TV broke, you'd try and repair itself. And if you couldn't, then you'd send it out for repair. And they'd always be a local repair shop. Yeah.

And today's TVs can't be fixed, or at least it can be more expensive and definitely a lot more hassle to repair them than to junk them. You know, how many of us have thrown away a washing machine because it was cheaper to get a new one on special offer than to repair the one we had. And throwing away a washing machine or a fridge is not easy. You know, you can't even give them away in many instances, and you can't just pick them up and throw them in the bin.

So my generation, I think, is in that middle ground. You know, we remember this world of repair, even if it wasn't actually our world. And we remember a time when people, or at least some people, actually knew how stuff worked. Whereas younger generations accept that tech is too complicated to understand.

Well, exactly. You know, and that's kind of a philosophy we push on MSP as well, forget how it works, figure out what it does. If you're brought up in that world where everything is ultimately disposable, then you'll probably be worrying more about the waste than how it worked or why it broke. And that's another thing.

You know, we understand when things physically break, but not so much why they might wear out. And technology companies are actively pushing us towards this model. You know, Apple makes it practically impossible for third parties to repair its newer machines. And as we see that closer convergence between hardware and software, we just have to accept that knowing how stuff works is just some clever voodoo that we have to take on trust.

I do feel a little bit like we're running away from automation here. I know it looks that way, but you know, it's part of looking at the whole picture. That's one of the problems of this idea of a fracturing society. It makes it harder to join the dots and make the connections.

And it's why the automation debate has been mis-categorized as the robots are coming for your jobs, more of which will get too shortly. And I hold my hands up. You know, I use that kind of terminology and imagery pretty much every week as well. You know, because it's visceral and the inhuman aspect of it is a good way to attract people's attention.

But maybe I'm failing to actually complete that picture. I mean, I can give you an example. Uber and its silent, right? Yeah, that's actually the one.

One of the new options that Uber is rolling out in its premium tier services is the quiet ride, where the driver of craze not to talk to you. Now, I know there are a lot of different takes on this. We all have different frames of mind. Sometimes I'm happy to chat.

Most of the time I'm happy to chat. Other times I'm more reticent, especially if I'm heading to an airport. I hate flying, so I really don't want to chat to anyone when I'm heading to the airport. For female passengers, I know sometimes they may prefer not to chat with male drivers, or they've been in situations where the driver has made inappropriate comments or pushed the conversation in directions that they're not comfortable with.

You think we could look at it from another direction that could be seen as a conditioning set? Yeah, and I think that's what, whether it's intentional or not, you're casting the driver in the role of that robot or automaton. What better way to get people used to the idea of a self-driving car than to have a driver who isn't quite human, who can only communicate with you when you grant permission. You're essentially denying that person their agency.

That's why we're going to come back to this idea of the robots coming for your jobs, because someone is after your jobs, but it's not the robots. After the break, find out who really is behind the robot up rising, and are these changes truly as inevitable as people like that would have you believe you? Listen to MSP here on BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Burning for more, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.

BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Welcome back to MSP. Now, before the break, we touched on technology, and changes that are making us behave more like machines. Matt, you mentioned that this is almost a form of conditioning.

Yeah, let's go back to that Amazon example again, because the technology is only 50% of the way there. The machines have to be fed by people. So we mentioned on the show a couple of weeks back that this is a weird inversion of our relationship with machinery. The machinery is supposed to be there to improve our lives, to make working easier, literally to do the heavy lifting.

Yeah, this is a case where humans are feeding the machines. Reminds me a little bit of images from my history lessons at school, pictures of people on treadmills in Victorian workhouses. Yeah, I had a feeling you've probably had the same images at school that I did. You know, but I totally get that.

You know, there's something regressive about machines that we have to work for. For starters, you can't tell a machine that you've got a muscle ramp and you need to slow down for a minute. I think I've used this analogy on the show before, years before I had a summer job harvesting potatoes. And my job was to throw stones and quads of earth off the conveyor belt.

And it was sold destroying because you're not doing the positive part, which is actually pulling the potatoes out of the ground. You know, doing that positive stuff of getting the food for people. You're just throwing rocks away. But at least we could tell the driver to stop.

So if there were too many rocks, we could slow down and clear the belt before we moved on. But we're moving into a world where the machines don't stop, won't stop, and can only stop in an emergency. And we really have to question what place we have within that world. And then how do we square this with the idea that robots are coming after our jobs?

This is kind of the interesting part. So I was reading a piece on Gizmodo over the weekend by one of their writers, Brian Merchant, and it's titled Robots Are Not Coming For Your Jobs. And he reminded me that we in the media often miss out a simple part of the statement, which is when we say that robots are coming for your jobs, we miss out the part about who is sending them. I always seem to get to say this when I stand in for Jeff on the show.

Skynet! No. And that's the assumption we make because robots don't have agency. They aren't sentient, but at least not yet.

And they're not self-determining. So a robot hasn't decided that he can make a prettier Amazon box than you and wants to take over your job. The AI driving a car hasn't decided that you deserve the weekend off from your ride-sharing gig and is taking over from you. These automated systems are implemented because human beings, whether in management, on a board, they might be shareholders, or they might be in governmental or think-tank type positions, they've decided that machines are cheaper and more productive than people.

It's those evil bosses. And again, you know, it's nice to reduce things to those easy stereotypes. Certainly bosses may see AI in automation, whether it's consumer or customer service chatbots or machines for manufacture as their own need-logical step. They're competitors buying into those systems, so they fear that their competitive advantage is going to be eroded.

And they're looking to cut costs and increase productivity. And those are two things that are very hard to do with human beings who naturally tend to resist being asked to work harder for less money and obviously only do so enforced. And we get into that position where it becomes this race to the bottom without anyone thinking about whether it's in the best long-term interest of the company, let alone the bigger picture of society. Do you think then that we ought to question the benefits of automation a little bit more?

Well, you know, there's this danger of creating truisms. Amazon, it's a huge company, it has massive resources, and it has these monumental flows of data. That gives it a lot of advantages, especially when it comes to designing systems and experimenting with business models. So in the same way that A.B.

testing is now the norm in internet content and marketing. These big companies can experiment with their business models in similar ways without negatively influencing their bottom line. Whereas an SME looking at automated solutions is probably not going to have the same resources to test different options. So they're going to have to trust the case studies, they're going to have to trust the sales pitches, and in a lot of cases those systems will benefit the companies.

But that doesn't mean that all automation is going to work? Yeah, and that's something we have to be very honest about. I think it was last year or the year before where we used the example of a South African Defense Force artillery gun. This is, yeah, admittedly it was going back about a decade, and it killed its crew during a test.

We also know the case of the people who have been killed or injured by self-driving cars. Some automation is fantastic. In some countries, coal and other mines now routinely operate with only a handful of humans on site. Massive machines do most of the underground work and they haul the coal or whatever product it is up to the surface.

And that has hugely beneficial outcomes for people in terms of health and safety. But it does put a lot of miners out of work. So that not only destroys lives and livelihoods, it's a colossal waste of skilled labour unless we find another way to reuse those human resources. It doesn't seem to change the inevitability of that automation though.

Well, that's what I have to agree with Gizmodo's Brian Merchant, because I am also to blame, because I don't take enough time to emphasize that it's people who are choosing to implement automation. It's people who are choosing to replace humans with robots or to start new companies that never employ humans to begin with. Because you're building a larger ecosystem that's selling the supposed inevitability of this technology. Yeah, and I have to ask myself, am I giving people the idea that there's no other solution?

And that may actually be the case, especially when you look at all the research papers and think tanks and policy papers who are all pushing in the same direction. It's easy to get into this mindset that you have to automate now, get in on the ground floor, act before it's too late. And it becomes one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. Alright, yeah, it's my defense.

What's the solution? Well, okay, my viewpoint is not the norm. And maybe it's too uninformed to be a solution. But I want to see more automation.

I want to see more artificial intelligence. I want to see better artificial intelligence. I want to see companies who are run by the machines. They can be completely staffed by machines as far as I'm concerned.

But I want to see all of this being done for the benefit of society rather than for profit. I don't think our current model of capitalism is compatible with the digital and technological age, at least not in any way that isn't dystopian and doesn't impoverish and disenfranchise huge swathes of the working population. We're probably unlikely to lurch towards a utopian scenario either, though. That's very true.

And I know I'm kind of an outlier on this. But I don't think it's sensitive to say that a lot of the information about automation is extremely self-serving. We've used the example of last year's World Economic Forum report on automation that essentially says that senior management and CEOs are safe and everyone else's position is up for grabs. But actually, it's those senior management positions that are the first ones I would replace with the capable AI.

Machines that communicate with the market in real time, machines that can act systematically and act to reduce risk. But our current system is based around the idea of disruption and maximising gains and returns. It doesn't favour stability and continuity. And that kind of puts it odds with our lives because we depend on stability and continuity.

At the same time, there are a lot of prominent Silicon Valley folks who are pushing for progressive solutions like Universal Income, Tech Focus, Retraining Systems and the like. And that's where we come back to people like the Dutch historian, Ruka Bregman, who argued at the Davos Forum earlier this year that to save capitalism, companies have to pay tax. If you want progressive solutions like Universal Basic Income, then they have to be funded. And the most likely method of doing that is through taxation.

In an automated world with limited employment opportunities, the main source of tax will be companies and high net worth individuals. In fact, we're already seeing calls from both the left and right of the political spectrum to abolish individual income tax. Both sides of the spectrum are starting to view that taxation as regressive. So if you advocate for UBI and you're the CEO of a company that aggressively limits its tax exposure and is possibly pursuing a policy of automation, then you're much more a part of the problem than you are a part of the solution because you're proposing a solution that you're unwilling to fund.

At the end of this, what have we learned? Well, I guess we've learned that when a robot replaces you, it's because a human being has decided that you're obsolete or too expensive. Don't blame the machine, whether the machine is sentient or stupid. I guess we've also learned that automation can be a positive force, but it shouldn't be represented as this passive destiny, especially by people like me.

You know, for automation to work for us, then new jobs or modes of living have to be created. New industries, new life opportunities have to rise up. Governments, I think, will probably have to become more interventionist. Industry and commerce will have to be more cooperative and hopefully take a longer term strategic view.

And I know it sounds very idealized, but it's actually pretty much the model of mid-20th century capitalism. It's not particularly far-fetched. And that's a model that raised hundreds of millions of people at poverty, helped to share the economic gains across society, and it offered people job stability and a sense of hope and optimism. And it's kind of weird that with all the technology and the advantages we have now, you know, why don't we deserve those same opportunities?

New York Ladies and Gentlemen, that was MSP here on Enterprise on BFM 89.9, Business Station with Matt Armitage from College of Public. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, the Business Station.