We've got a machine can learn the knack

Ewan MacColl at the “Ballads and Blues Club” at the Princess Louise, London, 1957-58

For 5 years now I have been opening my AI Demystified course at Oxford University with the story of Lee Sedol; his defeat by AlphaGo and his subsequent retirement in the face of “an entity that cannot be defeated".  When recounting the story I always feel a profound sense of poignancy – a person at the height of their powers and the top of their game replaced by a machine.

I have always pointed out that, of course, the technology is startling and wonderous. But the human cost is also potentially great and rather sad in my view.

I feel that same sadness now when I see the careers of talented creatives being usurped and erased. It must be not only heartbreaking but infuriating.

And soon enough, I imagine, nobody will have a use for a tired old university teacher like me standing in front of a class trying to translate, engage, communicate, entertain, educate, tell-stories, warn, guide, surprise, energize and provoke. Why would you when you could have a bot that knows everything, talks your language, understands your ideal pace of learning, has modelled what you already know and where you need to go, understands your individual learning style and can monitor your heart-rate and blink-rate to measure your arousal level and decide when to pep up the pace. 600 years ago when I did my PhD it was actually focussed on self-adaptive teaching machines and student performance modelling. It is, of course, all laughingly quaint now .. but I do know of what I speak.

Such a bot will,  of course, charge a fraction of my daily rate. No doubt she or he will also wear a bow-tie on demand. Maybe this simulacrum will be sufficiently different to avoid complaints of Intellectual Property infringement but sufficiently similar so that it makes no difference anyway.

Maybe I should present my new colleague:

Professor Wob Bollins, Professor of Knowing Stuff at the University of Uxford

How depressing. It’s giving me a pain in all the diodes down my right-hand side.

The great Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger included their song “My old man” on their 1980 album “Kilroy was here”. That song, rendered in MacColl’s sonorous and heart-wrenching voice includes the lines:

They gave him his card, said, things are slack

We've got a machine can learn the knack

Of doing your job, so don't come back

I would strongly recommend listening to this and also “The Radio Ballads” by MacColl. They are a treasure trove of protest songs. In some curious way they seem to resonate deeply with our current times.

Now, on the up-side, my economist colleagues tell me that everything is just going to be fine. This because, in previous industrial revolutions more and better jobs have always been created. I do so hope antelope they are correct.

They are not, of course. It’s going to be awful.

Even if there is a sunny upland of rewarding, engaging, well-paid jobs in the distant horizon, then that will be little comfort in the face of massive employment disruption between now and then.

And if you think (as some of my colleagues do) that ‘Universal basic income’ is the obvious solution – that society pays people for their leisure, creative and socially worthwhile activities and to sit at home doom-scrolling social-media and video games then I would hate to disabuse you. But maybe somebody needs to explain to me exactly how this ‘wealth re-distribution’ thing works in practical terms. I mean, with a few notable exceptions I don’t see so many elite billionaires re-distributing their wealth for the common good.

I wished that, in conclusion, I had some palatable easy solution for the situation we find ourselves in. I do not I am afraid. My best advice would be, as previously, to ensure that you are on top of the tsunami not crushed underneath it. That means first learning about this technology in abstract .. but then doing something about it in a positive manner. Find a project! Do some development! Work in a team with other people to build your life-boat. The Sent-ai-ance model is a route for doing this for organisations. But exactly the same idea applies to individuals: get the training; build a team; do some projects; get some coaching.

I know it’s not a universal solution. It’s not going to help most the creatives who have spent years developing amazing skills on top of extraordinary talents. It’s probably not going to help me and my job – which is sad, because I so love teaching and educating. But really it is the best I can think of at the moment.

Maybe the best advice comes from the master Ewan McColl:

And my advice to you, my son

Is to fight back while you can

Watch out for the man with the silicon chip

Hold on to your job with a good firm grip

'Cause if you don't you'll have had your chips

The same as my old man