 My clicker is not working. Noted. All right. Hi This this is fine Cheers People love to imagine the future. What will it look like? Will we have cars that run on electricity or even drive themselves or? Huge warehouses staffed only by robots May be wristwatches that you can use for communication or entertainment or A global job market enabled by instant worldwide video communication We may not yet have jetpacks robot butlers or flying cars But in many ways we are already living in the techno futuristic utopia envisioned by futurists in the 50s We ask tiny machines living in our kitchen what the weather is like We have supercomputers in our pockets that allow us immediate access to any information We have fridges that order more milk when we run out And you can go to YouTube right now and see prototypes of new airships and flying cars And in case you're worried they look hilarious Isn't the future glorious It's all so exciting that we don't tend to think that much about what could go wrong Are we building Skynet is how plotting against us? Are the robots coming to steal our jobs? The answer to that last question is yeah, probably an Oxford University report of 2017 estimates that by 2055 half of all current jobs will be automated Now it's worth noting that we're really really bad predicting the future futurists in 58 predicted that we would have a chess playing computer by 1968 And that actually took us 40 years and This oft quoted Study about half of all jobs being automated actually has a 20 year margin of error Which means it could be really really soon or it could be ages But either way, this is a problem that we need to start thinking about now The thing is we've always been terrified that automation is going to come and take our jobs The term technological unemployment to refer to the loss of jobs by technological change was coined in 1930s by the Economist John Maynard Keynes But it's a problem that's as old as the wheel Public works and handout programs of ancient China Egypt Greece and Rome were all responses to fears of technological unemployment Aristotle said that if machines can become sufficiently advanced we would have no need for human labor and This fear has often resulted in outright bans on technological innovation Queen Elizabeth and James the first both refused to issue a patent for a time-saving knitting machine For fear that this technology might cause unemployment amongst textile workers Speaking of textile workers, who here has heard the term Luddite? Okay, so a Luddite is somebody who opposes technological change or isn't comfortable with it If you know somebody who thinks iPhones or newfangled devices and refuses to touch one that is a Luddite The term is actually derived from a secret organization of English textile workers in the 19th century They were afraid of these new machines that would put them out of work And in response they went around smashing textile machines as a form of protest This was such a problem at the time that there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites in Britain Than there were fighting Napoleon in the Iberian War Eventually Parliament made machine-breaking a capital crime and one of the most prominent defenders of the Luddites was actually Lord Byron Whose daughter Ada Lovelace would go on to become the world's first computer programmer By combining the technology of Babbage's analytical engine With a system to give programs and date the machine that was actually based on the punch card system of the Jackard loom So innovations in the textile industry in spite of it being so against Innovations actually had a direct correlation to the invention of what would eventually become the modern computer When Gutenberg and verse invent introduced the printing press in 1452 so the first one It provoked complaints about German interlopers driving honest Italian scribes out of work and there were protests in Paris But it also revolutionized the publishing industry across Europe It led to an explosion in literacy and a flourishing of the arts which ultimately led to a number of new jobs Over the years we've largely replaced a whole lot of jobs switchboard operators travel agents stockbrokers Check out clerks grocery clerks Pilots are still employed But most of their work tends to be done by autopilot algorithms and their job has become more supervisory Bank tellers have often been replaced by automated machines The average bank now only employs 13 people instead of 20 But with the advent of these machines the banks pass those cost savings along and actually opened more banks And now there are more bank tellers employed We think of computers as plastic boxes and machines But the original computers were actually humans and mostly women a Computer just meant somebody who computes mathematical tables for scientific actuarial military work and this work was considered quite grueling and Performs by humans until the advent of electrical computers In spite of all these changes our economy has improved consistently over the years We see that this has happened over and over again, and we've been fine We've been better. We work less and we enjoy a higher quality of life So what makes it different this time the first reason is scale The number of jobs that we expect to be automated in the future is Staggeringly high. There's that 50% number again, and it's not isolated to one specific industry It runs across the gamut It's often not the tasks that you do expect as well And this is known as more of axe paradox The things that are easy for a toddler to do like climbing stairs or reading emotions are actually really difficult for computers to do But the stuff that we find difficult to do like logic is incredibly easy for a computer to do There's a website. It is will robots take my job calm Where you can find out how at-risk you are As a general rule right now the more procedural and systematic your job the more you should start looking for something else So if you're into data entry telemarketing or tax preparation learn a new skill If however, you are a social worker and occupational therapist or surgeon. It's cool. You don't need to worry Surveys generally find that people are concerned about technological Unemployments, but they don't think it will affect them and we've often assumed that certain jobs are safe I'm a designer. I do creative work. There's no way a machine could do that That was true for a while when AI's were largely algorithmic and needed to follow rules But advances in machine learning which combines pattern recognition with massive amounts of data Mean that computers can now do a lot of tasks. We thought they'd never be able to do They can beat humans at chess at go and at jeopardy They can write books this one nearly won a Japanese literary award, but its characterization station was a little meh They've composed music convincingly enough to pass the Turing test and trick humans a Computer even wrote a stage musical that was produced on London's West End And it was called Android Lloyd Webber So it's clear that we aren't safe just because our jobs are creative The other reason that it's different this time is speed It's all happening incredibly quickly Technological progress is more or less exponential Who's heard of Moore's law? Okay. Well, this is Moore's law, but you all already know that Basically, it was a rule set up in 1965 By the founder of Intel George or Gordon more somebody more Basically saying that computing power would double every two years He predicted that that law would hold true for around 10 years But it's been consistent for the last 50 One small note. These look like linear graphs, but they're actually logarithmic Which means that this rather than being a straight line is actually an exponential curve Which is boring graph stuff that basically just means there's a potential here for uncontrollable growth and That what has come before it isn't a reliable indicator of what will come next or the speed at which it will happen the flip side of this is for the increase in Computing power we also see a corresponding decrease in the cost of products as More work is done by machines the cost of those goods decreases and we can afford more So these lower prices theoretically mean that companies can hire more humans for other human work Just like banks hired more humans in more bank buildings And we also have new innovations that are enabled by new technologies and those lead to more jobs Ultimately there's always going to be more work Imagine if somebody gave you a robot tomorrow that could do all of the boring parts of your job Would you still have things to do? Maybe you could focus on the things that humans are better at like caring or innovation or playing Angry Birds The trouble is that our economy isn't currently well structured for human beings Corporations are incentivized to maximize shareholder returns not necessarily to make a profit Which means that wealth is accumulated for a small number of people and it isn't evenly distributed Millennials are the first generation we expect to be worse off than their parents and the gap between the rich and the poor is ever widening Now this gap actually tends to be a lot smaller in the Nordic countries Who coincidentally also worry less about automation and tend to be happier across the board But that gap is actually increasing faster in Finland Sweden and Germany than it is in the US So this gap is a global problem What can we do to ensure that these changes to our economy? Don't disenfranchise swaths of the population and contribute further to global inequality how about or Maybe We often talk about market forces as though they are inescapable like tides or gravity But we invented them So we can change the rules We need to push politicians for policy change so we can work within these new systems This could take a number of different forms we could just work less in 1870 we used to work an average of 62 hours a week and that fell consistently for a while But it's been stagnating and even increasing since the last financial crash A recent study in the UK actually found that switching to a four-day work week didn't impact productivity in any way But it definitely impacted people's happiness an idea that's currently taking hold in the United States is that of a job guarantee Which is basically a federal program to provide a guaranteed job With decent wages and benefits to anyone who happens to need one And this has caused a lot of excitement Ivanka Trump decided to weigh in on it saying that I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people would want It's pretty rich coming somebody from somebody who already has a guaranteed minimum for life But generally speaking people want to work. We want to feel as though we have a purpose But work and jobs aren't necessarily the same thing There's a lot of valuable work that we can do without needing to have it be attached to a company caring education innovation Universal basic income or UBI is a way that we could allow for work. That's unconnected to a job The idea being that all residents of a country receive a set income regardless of means and It's not new. It was first described in 1516 in Thomas Moore's utopia But people are still really uncomfortable with this idea like it'll make us lazy in 2016 77% of Swiss voters rejected the idea of UBI in a referendum Finland actually just released preliminary results From their two-year UBI study in which they paid a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people 560 euros a month With no strings attached the findings at the present are that it increased people's well-being but didn't lead to an increase in employment levels and they've since Introduced some more restrictive Rules in terms of how welfare is distributed There's a really interesting study in Kenya right now. It's the largest UBI experiment to date The expected number of recipients exceeds 26,000 people and it's going to take 12 years Again, they just give them free money in a lump sum or spread out over that time period with no strings attached This can reduce the administrative costs of managing a welfare state Because you don't need to track your citizens or have them prove that they're looking for work You don't need to know who's working or who's not and everyone just gets enough money to live on It means that you can quit a job You weren't happy and to look for another or to start a business or to go back to school and learn new things Or to take care of others It's a way of giving power back to individuals and removing some from corporations I'm not an economist, but I have high hopes this could help us build a more equitable world But on an individual level, what can we do? Ultimately, we can't fight technological progress. It's going to happen regardless of whether we like it or not So our best bet is to plan for the worst case scenario and assume the most radical predictions turn out to be true There are two keys to surviving the robot revolution as an individual One is embracing the new technology Recognize that even if it seems scary, it's going to happen and start thinking that this technology is for you It's not here to replace you. It's here to make you better. You can use it to augment your own abilities and skills and Then teaching yourself to work with it rather than get then against it Some of this is policy employers should be providing ongoing training for employees and we need to encourage people To adopt lifelong learning and constantly upgrade their skills as the economy changes But we have one advantage right now in that there's a lot of information on the internet So this is what I wanted to do. I didn't want to be a Luddite I wanted to see how these tools could benefit me and I spent a year trying to make this happen Mostly for selfish reasons Before I joined automatic I freelanced for eight years doing client work and I got bored of it I wanted to do larger scale work. I wanted to work on products and I joined automatic to do that and somehow found myself working on client work again So I wanted to really like make sure it's stuck this time But I'd also been talking to a lot of small businesses and I realized that most small businesses can't afford good visual design They don't have access to that and I as a human. I'm not scalable So I started to think of it like this. I can use computers to streamline my process and Generate mock-ups that might take me hours in a matter of seconds In doing this I become a creative director. I basically give myself a promotion This is augmentation. It doesn't replace me, but it allows me to focus on other things To act as a conductor instead of a violinist So I could work faster or I could charge less and do more and work with more people I Could focus on polish once the basics were nailed and I had a better baseline to work from Or I could just do more innovative work or get something done on my endless to-do list Somewhere along the line this sort of became my white whale And it's the thing that I'm always talking about or thinking about and the spoiler alert here and Maybe the disappointing thing as has been pointed out. Where's your robot? I don't have a robot. I have not yet built I know right? It disappoints me too, and I was trying to get it done in the last five minutes, but I'm not quite there yet I'm not a developer or a data scientist or a stutter Titish I Can't even pronounce it. So like it's not happening And machine learning is hard and it's statistics and it's kind of weird and I've had some struggles Figuring it out a friend of mine who does statistics recommend me a book that she swore was gonna be super helpful She said it's written like a cartoon Sarah It's so easy you're going to love it and I was so excited and I ordered it and it's 800 pages And it's currently a doorstop and I have never read any of those pages. It's terrifying But I realized Maybe I don't need to figure this out in five minutes or one year What if I could figure it out in ten years? I can do ten years. I have time So that's what I'm doing now and I'm breaking down the problem into little pieces and taking them one by one Starting small sharing what I learn as I go along Because I think that open sourcing this kind of work and Sharing even in our failures Means that we can share this technology with everyone rather than having it centralized in one place Giving people access to the new means of production in our updated economy So that the benefits of that technology will be better distributed So I started by looking at the parts of my job that could be automated We think of design as this sort of emotional hand-wavy process, especially the visual parts It's driven by instinct or by what feels right and That's what it looks like on the surface, but it's actually more about pattern recognition and Machines can do that now if I could learn to teach one to do it So I itemize my process into logical steps What would I do when I sat down with a client to design them a website and Then I tried to teach a machine to do some of those things So the first step is to collect lots of content I knew from my research with small business owners that writing content for their sites was a real blocker It was very intimidating for them But a lot of them also have content elsewhere on the internet on Facebook on Instagram on Twitter And we could leverage that content So our first step was to build out this API and a flow that gathered all that information and pieced it into a logical hole Now we built this out Algorithmically and I thought this was going to be like the two second step at the beginning and then we could get to the Interesting stuff. It turns out this bit was actually really complex to get right It took a lot of time and a lot of testing a lot iterating to be able to piece together all those pieces of content in a way that made a logical site But once we got it sorted out it was actually pretty magical It allowed you to build a website in a matter of seconds from anywhere I used to walk around town on my phone building websites for people as I was walking the businesses that were around me and it actually worked pretty well We pulled content. We pulled photos. We pulled their logo We built a color scheme based on the logo and we pieced all those parts together to create the con site content in the final step We set logical defaults. So if we couldn't find any photos for a business, we'd pull photos based on keywords from pexels This had some weird side effects I once built a site for a Scottish tourism agency And it ended up with a photo of a white sand beach and a palm tree I live in Scotland. I don't know what part of Scotland that is but it's not the part I live in So it's really important here to make these smart guesses and defaults But allow for people to correct them in case our system didn't get it right After that content, I'd have clients fill out a brief asking a bunch of questions What's the purpose of your site? Who's your target market? Give me some adjectives to describe your organization. Tell me designs that you like What sort of mood or feel do you want to the site? And that part can be automated too. So I designed a flow to collect this information It was based on the questions that I asked clients and it used sliders to gauge the mood which would then determine the field As well as a free-form adjective input for more granular and specific results Now this is where the machine learning bit would come into play Because I know from context and experience that if somebody describes their business as simple and bold They probably want a sans-serve typeface really clear saturated colors But if somebody describes their business as organic and natural, they're probably going to want a more subdued color palette Maybe some papyrus. I don't put papyrus in but a computer might We can use machine learning to train a computer to know this as well So everybody can have papyrus if they really want it The next step is presenting these options The human way of doing this is spending a bunch of time thinking and drawing up things and Hours or days or weeks of work and I would present a few designs as style tiles and the client would choose one Usually would choose parts of different ones and then we'd go back and forth until we landed on something They'd like and that whole process would take at least weeks But if we could automate this part, then it becomes immediate more or less We can present two to begin with and then if the client doesn't like them We can immediately generate more with no extra effort time or cost And we can record their preferences and feedback as data Which we feed back into the model to make it smarter and more accurate and the next time the model makes a guess It's a little closer and then after hundreds or probably thousands of iterations and guesses It's able to make smart design decisions that reflect the client's needs and tastes Finally once we have all those visual choices The last step is to take all that content along with the style choices and use it to build a site This part we actually did do We used the business's logo to generate a color scheme It doesn't work very well here when the logo is black, but it works better on other things and We generate the color schemes algorithmically following the same sort of patterns and rules that I would use We applied into the site with CSS variables and we build out the site Now we actually built this before we had access to Gutenberg And it meant that a we had to build a whole editing interface like a front-end editing interface on our own And we found in testing that users were really confused when they went from the easy interface To the one that wordpress.com was using at the time So we never ended up launching this And now that we could use Gutenberg that story would actually be different There are actually a lot of parallels between Gutenberg and Offimation People are sometimes worried that they'll put them out of a job because it makes it easier to do some tasks We would have previously needed humans for But if we look at the problem in the same way We have better tools that provide us with a better baseline on which to work on This is an opportunity to innovate and already we're seeing an ecosystem That's flowering with lots of innovation and new ideas coming out Just like with automation we need to embrace this new technology and learn to work with it rather than against it Ultimately automation is coming in some form or another at some point and We can't stop it no matter how much me we might want to So instead of fighting it. Let's work with it Let's ensure that the robots work for us the people Remember Thank you Thank you, Sarah I'm kind of blown away now. I don't even know where to start. You were so disappointed. I didn't have a robot Kind of understood the robot is kind of living inside your head still and some of it's living inside a computer and so on So maybe in 10 years the robot will leave my head. Yeah But we do have time for audio questions, so please raise your hand if you have questions for Sarah Otherwise we have to make up that's true Yeah, yeah, that's like a walking metal box and I think it would have been a lot cute or had I been able to bring one So I'm gonna try that for next time Maybe in London Who knows I can do that You have time Star preparations Any other questions I will also be around and I'm happy to talk about robots. I love talking about robots So I will need I will have to create a question for you. So I just out of my machine head You sold the application was it some kind of application you build with automatic people or was it just something before and Have you kind of considered now that you're gonna do the same with the Gutenberg? The last one was the most important question Are you trying to do the same with the Gutenberg now kind of automate the process that I'm gonna build your Company website in two minutes when you can answer these questions and afterwards you have what you showed So the original thing that we built that I showed the screenshots of was That was your robot coming in Was sort of an experimental Thing of exploring how can we make a website more quickly because we knew that that process is very slow and arduous for people And it involves a lot of switching between screens and WordPress Now the Gutenberg is available and we knew the Gutenberg was coming But we couldn't use it while we were doing it which made doing it very difficult because there was this big paradigm shift coming That would make it a bit easier One of the things I'd like to do is try to take parts of what we built there because I'm not working on that right now Take parts of what we built right there and Sort of repurpose them and Incorporate parts of Gutenberg into it. So the building the site part is really quick and it's seamless Because I I tested what we built with a lot of people and what happened was we went through this whole flow We showed them a website and we let them edit parts of the website So they could change the title that we pulled up or the images or whatever and they they were good right up until that process and once they got to the end there was a button that said launch your site or something and then it launched their site and it made Them a wordpress.com site that converted it and Then they ended up in an editing screen in wordpress.com or the customizer or something and people just got so Confused and they kept saying things to me like can we go back to the easier one? And I was like I would love to take you back to the easier one. Um, so Rebuilding that part of it now that we can access Gutenberg and use those components and move things around more easily Would be a key part of making that whole thing actually happen Does that answer some of the questions? Yeah, at least the last one I I kind of see that kind of in my head already that you Want a new website and you don't have a big budget Ten thousand dollars or something and you still don't have the capability actually You know to do actual website. You don't even know how the blocks works But you kind of start with that a kind of idea and you can kind of Just fill in the blanks first and it actually creates you at least the homepage I don't know if it creates for all the blog post in the same time with the CO and stuff like that it will you mentioned the book for example does it Could it kind of write your blog post? Also, that is definitely on my giant long wish list one of the things that I Realized from talking to a lot of people and I focused a lot of my my the sort of research user research that I did on small business owners who tend to be most time strapped and Least sort of tech technically capable they would love to hire somebody to do it But they can't afford it and they try to do it themselves and it's a painful process And part of that is just fear of you get this blank page What on earth do you do with it? and so we were trying to sort of Find ways that we could make that easier for people because if you give them something to start from and then they can Just edit it that's a lot less intimidating then here's a white screen that you have to fill with stuff And you're not quite sure what? So in progress Well, we're stunning Hello, you mentioned that The the system is based around that you Finding content from Twitter or Facebook and so on and so on and so on But what happens if you're a brand new Company that doesn't have any web presence whatsoever, but and your budget is ten quid And you'd still like to have some sort of web presence. How would this tool then help you? So that's Definitely the non ideal situation that we weren't designing for and from Sort of the data that I looked at it seemed like that was actually 50% of businesses who had no presence whatsoever It was about half half half had lots and half had nothing So we try really hard to find them and if we couldn't find anything we'd sort of fall back to a more wizardy process I just wanted an excuse to draw pictures of robots But it would ask okay, so what's your business name? What's it about and you sort of fill in the blanks and then it would pull from that and then you'd get to okay Well, we've made you a site based on the answers you gave us So it's still a bit more wizardy than just well, here's a website do what you can with it But it's definitely easier when you have that content one of the things we looked into doing and never got around to was Sort of like a mad libs approach to content as well About me actually does this really well It asks you for a couple of things you're interested in and then it makes like a paragraph of text That's your bio that includes the stuff that you're interested in It's a really easy way of making content While asking for really a really small number of inputs So that was sort of what we're driving toward there Great. Unfortunately, we don't have time for other questions anymore. We have a 20 minutes break now so we'll continue in 20 minutes in here and in the Track one. I'll see you later and pick up laws for sorrow