 How will it be in the future when we actually live with robots? So we're currently on the brink of the fourth industrial revolution, when the boundaries between men and machine or humans and machines are set to blend. AI and robots have crept into everyday life and it's really hard to deny their utility or not to be in simple awe of the capabilities. Robots can fly, computers are beating world champions and chess and go and machine learning knows that you're pregnant before you do. Just recently an artificial neural network had been trained to write texts so convincing that the researchers decided not to release their findings to the public for the fears that these dangers would bring to a world that's already struggling with fake news. Automation is changing our lives as we look into a future with ever-smarted digital assistants and self-driving cars. But we live in times of a hype and it's changing our lenses. Just last week a study was published that found that 40 percent, two out of five of the self-proclaimed AI startups in Europe don't even use AI at all. Go figure. And there's no question that the way we interact with machines will change and will have significant impacts on our lives. But the changes we're going to see, I believe, are going to be a lot more nuanced than we've had in previous three industrial revolutions. And I believe that we as society can stand to benefit from these changes. But wait, before I go on, allow me to lay some groundwork. For most, whenever someone says artificial intelligence outside of academia, they are probably referring to machine learning. And machine learning is a study of science wherein algorithms take in huge quantities of data in an effort to make generalizations over these data. Most often this is done by so-called artificial neural networks which are loosely modeled on the human neural networks we have in our brains and that they propagate signals between neurons across synapses with varying strengths. So here's an artificial neural network and this network will have seen countless images of animals and in the presence of training data will have learned to flicker on that second output neuron every single time the image it sees resembles that of a dog. And even though what you see here suggests that this network has learned to pick out the edges and features and grew a concept of what a dog is, that's nonsense. All it has done is built a statistical model of the input according to how the implementer has designed it. It has absolutely no idea what a dog's wagging tail looks like or seen a dog, heard a dog bark and in an image of animals it will not be able to pick out a dog. Whenever it encounters a new set of pixels it quite stupidly employs basic arithmetic to compute the similarity between what it sees now and what it has seen. And yet machine learning is all the hype. It powers our search engines, those creepy advertisements, the product recommendations and the personal assistance that we talk to. And there is a very simple explanation for this hype because the algorithms actually haven't improved very much over the past three decades but what we have today is faster computers and the cloud and so deep learning which is the ability to handle vast amounts of data is a possibility. And this is producing for the first time in history tangible results and that is what's grabbing the attention of the media and the people. These results are so far beyond human comprehension and they happen at such astonishing speeds that we think we must be witnessing intelligence but we're not. All we're witnessing is highly domain-specific behavior as impressive as it may be. There is no creativity, there's no intrinsic motivation, there's no survival mechanism, no loyalty, no empathy. There's no ability to handle exceptions because artificial neural networks are operating on finite models and they are unable to think outside the box so to speak. The technology is still based only on ones and zeros and it doesn't matter how many of those you string together in the most powerful computers. The number of combinations of all these ones and zeros is always going to be finite and that is where your intelligence is limited, the artificial intelligence. And it's worth pointing out that we as human beings are also limited by the capabilities of our bodies but we've spent the last four billion years getting out of the primordial soup into the most advanced species of this planet. We learned by using our bodies. The morphology of our bodies shapes the way we think. Our arms don't bend outwards, they come inwards and our fingertips and our lips have the highest sensory density which may explain why babies put everything in their mouth. Our knees, they don't bend backwards, forward, they do bend backwards. So the way we've been walking and scouting out earth is chiefly influenced by the way our bodies have evolved. We weren't designed by a team of programmers and trained for a specific task. So what does that mean for the future of work? Will they take our jobs away? Well one aspect that's generally disregarded in this discourse is that a job is not usually just one task and when you automate that one task, the whole job goes away. Humans are really good at a variety of tasks and automation can empower us to be more effective with our time. We're excellent at connecting threats and solving problems previously unencounters. We're creative, we're ingenious. If you get your culture right, your employees are your best asset. They protect and enhance your business. Rather than the robots replacing us, I consider it far more likely that the robots are going to grow up beside us and are going to assist us in all the tasks that we are not good at such as repetitiveness and vast amounts of data. In the diagnosis of diseases, molecular research for medicine or software design, hey, let AI create a consensus algorithm for blockchain. Let's enlist the machines to help rather than fear them. In an ideal world, this shift will mean that there will be less labor work to be done by humans. The machines will take the highly repetitive and data intensive tasks of our shoulders and this will free up our time for tasks that we as humans are better at because we are humans and being human is something that we enjoy. I mean, we care, we empathize, we congregate, hello, new frontiers. We develop our communities to be more inclusive so that we can be and more of us can be human with each other. One of the trends in the modern workplace is well-being and companies do not invest in the well-being of their employees for fear that they're going to be replaced by machines. Rather, the opposite is taking place. They're investing in their employees so they can be human and do more of what we humans are really good at. Tasks that require emotional intelligence and things will change. No question about that, but we as a society can stand to benefit from this. Traditionally, work has been separated to mean both or conflated to mean both, doing something with your time and earning a living wage. Advances in technology are going to enable us to split those two parts and, hey, here be rainbows. But a large number of companies do not treat their employees like humans. They enslave them. They make them dependent. They rob them of their perspectives. These companies are already treating their employees like robots. And even though this industrial revolution will create a whole new family of jobs, these people are not going to be the ones that can take them because they don't have the time or the power or the courage to prepare themselves for this revolution. And the irony, furthermore, is that low wage jobs are going to be the last to go because it'll be cheaper for a long time to employ people below their standard than to invest in the advancements of robots and AI. Corporations and policymakers hold the baton. And we must not let the future be decided by white men and suits. We must assume responsibility. We have to keep fighting for minimum wage and equal pay. We have to support wage slaves to be able to free themselves from being treated like robots. Let's put our ethics to work. In our jobs and with our consumer dollars, let's enable each other to be more human because humans are awesome. We are awesome. Tena kouto, tena kouto, tena tato. Ki ora.