Kevin Surace: Robotics, AI, the end of human work, and a coming Renaissance

So I love this session because it's truly about the Renaissance. And in fact, my talk today is about the next human Renaissance. And the nice thing about talking about that is we get to go back in history and think about the first Renaissance, which was truly an awakening where Art like this came, came out where it never did before. And in fact, people painted essentially themselves doing the things they wanted to do in the Renaissance, which was truly an awakening of the human spirit and the human mind. But other than that period of time, most of our life is spent working. And we've been working for tens of thousands of years doing different jobs. And we do those different jobs so much that they've become Us. In fact, when someone asks you, hey, Mary, what do you do? She says, well, I do this. So much so that even Jesus' father is known as Joseph the carpenter. We become known by the things we're doing, even though this is a job and we're really only doing it to pay the bills for the most part. That's why we were forced to do this kind of work. So somehow we become known by it, but what happens when it goes away? It's gone. What happens if humans are obsoleted in the next 50 years for the kinds of jobs that we've always done? Where all this new technology that's coming along changes what we would do every day. So first of all, what would we do? Do we sit home and watch TV all day? I hope not. And number 2, how do we define ourselves? Because we've been used to defining ourselves since the beginning of time as what we do. And that's a big change. Now, I first started thinking about this way back in '97. I ran a program, a big project for General Magic, about a $100 million program to replace the secretary and create something called the virtual assistant. And here's a little bit of a video from that time. Must be the chief. I told Serengeti, my virtual assistant, to put his call through.

Good morning, Jack. I've got the chief on the phone, and he says it's urgent. Should I put him through, or do you want me to take a message? Put him through.

Chief, I'm in the middle of a massage.

You have 3 new voicemails, 1 email, and 2 faxes. Shall I read them now?

Yes, please.

The first message is from your mother, received today at—

Yes, read me my email messages.

You have email from Frank Huffner, instructor, International Spy School.

The idea was truly to replace what we knew as the assistant at that time, and some of that technology has come along, but regardless of what came along and didn't come along, The big learning we took from that is that people began to treat that machine like Mary, which was what we called her. We called her Mary. And so people called her Mary. They talked to Mary. They said all kinds of obscene things to Mary. That's what they did. And this was a very, very interesting experiment. And it took a lot of horsepower at that time. That's me standing in the operations center at that time. There were dozens and dozens of rows and thousands of computers to make that service work. way back in '97. Well, we're going to go back further to the first time we really started to replace humans in jobs, to 1961. This is the first industrial robot that was installed at GM at the time called the Unimation. It did very, very little. It could weld some joints. And it was about $1 million in today's dollars. But everything in the last few years, mostly driven by cell phones, smartphones, has been driving down so fast down this cost curve that it's changing the way we think About robotics. The sensor prices for gyroscopes and MEMS are just completely driving downward towards zero. That's a gyroscope from 1945 and a gyroscope in 2014. It's just a little thing for a dollar. And not only that, the transit price, the cost of driving data, of getting data to us continues to drive downward. It continues to move downward. To the point of zero. That is, getting data and moving data is basically free. And the cost of computing has continued to drive towards zero, from $1 trillion to a trillionth of a penny for 1 million instructions per second. Now, all of that adds up to the fact that on our desktop today, we can have a computer that is somewhere between the intelligence of a monkey and a human, on our desktop for $200 or $300. And that's not all. We've made great strides in showing that the biggest computers in the world can actually be way smarter than humans. It was back in 1997 that the first computer beat the grand chess champion of the world. And it was only 3 years ago that Watson won against the grand champions of Jeopardy! And this was truly a turning point. Because of the natural language understanding that had to be embedded in that computer system. That's what was hard. And we finally broke that code in 2011. That's already 3 years ago. So the tipping point isn't near, but it's actually here. In the past, when we looked to outsource labor and to drive down the cost of goods, we would go further and further away from the United States, and eventually we went to China, and all of our goods are made in China, many of our goods are made in China today. However, just in the last two or three years, the tipping point has occurred in China, where now robotics and automation are cheaper than the average Chinese factory worker wage. Now that's a real issue. That's a real issue because there's no further to go. So what happens is the four hundred thousand people working on your iPhones today might be. $40,000 just a few years from now. And in fact, why even make it over there? You can make it here, because if it's all robotics, the cost is the same. And that's a huge tipping point. We have never seen that point before. By the way, we saw the million-dollar robot. Here's the $25,000 robot. It does much more than the million-dollar robot did, and with a simple software upgrade, doubled its capacity in one year. Can you double your capacity with a software upgrade in a year?

No.

I can't. This is faster than any human can do the job, and it pays for itself in 1 year, and after that, it's free for the next 20. 1 human can run dozens of these things. His name is Baxter, by the way. So now we're reaching a tipping point where the technology as a whole— computers, sensors, robotics, and communication— are faster, smarter, more reliable than humans already today. They'll work all the time, far less expensively, and they're factual. They don't lie, and they don't guess. We could break down the end of human work into 3 categories: now, soon, and 50 years from now. Now, soon, and 50 years from now. And I'm going to pose the fact, in my mind, that in fact all of the jobs go away within the next 50 years. And this is happening already. Over the last 20 years, we've seen routine occupations head downhill as a percentage of our workforce. So more of our workforce is working in more complex opportunities that are using our minds more. Here's an example of restaurant tablets. Many of you have already probably run into this at your favorite restaurant, and what happens is this reduces labor by 40%. You can place your order and you can pay for your order right there, and you don't have to talk to anyone, and it works. It's amazing. Not only that, The customers are happier and the order accuracy is 100%. Now here's the towel butler that's now at Aloft Hotels. Very, very interesting because this will deliver warm towels to your room at your beck and call. Can you imagine what happens when you mix the towel butler with what's going on in restaurants and now it's the food butler? And now the cost of labor goes to 0% because you don't need a waiter or a waitress. Quite likely, the patrons are even happier. Someone's got to cook, or do they? This is the automatic hamburger machine. It makes burgers for 90% lower cost than the way we make them today, and faster. This is the home kitchen robot. It cooks in the kitchen for you and delivers meals to you. However, it's very expensive, it's only in a lab, but this is what's coming. Over the next 10 to 20 years, we will have a robot in our kitchen. It'll be a few thousand dollars. It'll make your meals for you, and it'll also clean while it's not busy making meals. It'll also order the food that morning for delivery fresh, and when you come home at 6, your meal will be there.

Yay! Yay!

And by the way, there won't be a UPS driver or some other driver driving your vehicle to drive your package there because they're going to be delivered With drones, which eliminates 80 to 90% of package delivery in this country and cuts the labor cost by over 90%. And that's not the only drones. Here's a company that's working on robo-ships, because they figured out that a ship without a captain that might be drinking or might be asleep at the wheel is much safer than one with one. We have GPS, we have technology, we can get the ship from point A to point B. It's not that hard, folks. So now we're going up the chain and further up the chain, and we say, can doctors be replaced by computers? Well, computers have up-to-the-minute millions of peer-reviewed papers, CDC info, data from other computer-based docs, data from social media, data from blood, everything else at its disposal, hundreds of millions or billions of papers. and data, and your doctor can store maybe a few hundred pages in his or her head. So yes, I hope that this happens, because that's the person I want to go to. And let me take it a step further. Human genome sequencing has also fallen from thousands of dollars to— it's going to be a dollar, okay, in the next few years. And at those rates, we will know more about ourselves and our being and how we were born and how we came to be than we've ever known. And a doctor wouldn't know what, most of the time, to do with all that data. So we're going to actually create more data about our bodies that need to go to computers and need to go to systems that can analyze it and help us determine how we can live a better life and how we can cure our sickness. But of course, there's surgeons, and there'll always be surgeons. Well, wait. OK, hang on. Maybe not. This is the da Vinci surgical robot. You may have seen that. This is actually run by doctors today. Doctors put their hands in some gloves, and manipulate the robot, and then that's what makes the robot operate on your body. I'm sorry, why do I want doctors' hands operating this very delicate instrument? Why wouldn't I want a computer system that can be programmed with all the knowledge of humanity, that can make split-second decisions, literally nanosecond decisions, on hundreds, thousands, or millions of outcomes, and take The right one. And by the way, there are some 400,000 people that die every year in this country because of medical mistakes. That's 10 times the number that die in automobile accidents. We can eliminate that. But let's go further. We've all seen the self-driving car. You've seen this on TV. You might have seen one drive by. They're really amazing. But the impact to society is much greater than you think. Because technically we just need 92% fewer vehicles. Because your vehicle is parked 92% of the time. And if you can drive the cost of getting from point A to point B down below you owning a vehicle, there's no reason to own a vehicle. One will show up autonomously. There'll be no one there. There'll be no one driving it. There'll be no wheel in the car. You get in and it takes you to point B. And this is what happens to New York City taxi fares per mile once you automate. They go from $3 a mile to about $0.40 a mile. And that reduces traffic accidents everywhere in the world by 95%. And it's so safe that I predict that human driving will be outlawed. Because who would want a human behind the wheel? In fact, there shouldn't be a wheel. Think about it. Now, here's an interesting thing. Humanoid robotics companies, the biggest, best, most advanced in the world, almost a dozen have been bought by Google in the last 2 years. What do they know that you don't know? Or rather, what do they know that you didn't know until now? So the question in the future isn't about the perfect job, good salary and benefits and job security and close to home and everything else. That's actually the wrong question we're going to give our kids. Go to school, learn so that you get the perfect job. There won't be a perfect job. It's the wrong question. And I think Bucky Fuller said it best, we should do away with the absolute specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. We keep inventing jobs because of the false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery. You ever feel that way? And the true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them that they had to earn a living.

Thank you.

So that brings us really sort of full circle and suggests to, I think, all of us that in fact jobs aren't good, they were a necessary evil, and in fact they were a form of human bondage. We were enslaved and have been enslaved and continue to be enslaved by the fact we have to get up, we have to go to work, we have to produce something, and then we have to come home. And we're only producing something so that we can put food on our table. Get that. But if that goes away, what if this is the most incredible human opportunity that we've ever seen? That we finally get to ponder, why are we here? I don't mean why are you here listening to me? I mean why are we here? Because we weren't here to make widgets, to go to some whatever job it is. We're much more capable than that. And that brings us to my final point, which is this is an opportunity that we have, that we've been granted, if we choose to take it, for the next Renaissance. Just as in the first Renaissance, it was an amazing awakening of the human spirit, where people looked to the heavens and pondered what it meant. People looked to the heavens and pondered what it would be and how one would travel to the stars and beyond. People opened up their hearts, they opened up their minds, they created art, dance, music, and theater. This is our possibly one chance that we will be free to do exactly the same thing. I, for one, can't wait, and I hope to see you all there. Thank you so much. Thank you.