"NEWSREEL:" "The shape of things to come has arrived." "For generations, we've been promised an era when robots could think for themselves and do our jobs." "We have over 20,000 computers in this country alone." "And they're becoming more powerful all the time." "Now, it could be about to happen." "Machines are working faster and smarter than ever before." "I personally think it's going to wind up being an even bigger story than the Industrial Revolution." "My deepest conclusion is, we ain't seen nothing yet." "Once, manufacturing jobs were replaced by machines." "Today, could office jobs be under threat, too?" "It's a lot of the white-collar jobs that I think will either be transformed, or will disappear." "I used to advise the government on policy, including technology." "Now I work with some of Britain's newest digital companies." "I can see how profound this change may be." "Get used to the fact that you'll probably have five, ten jobs in your life." "Get used to the fact they might actually be geographically in different places." "How can we learn to live with the rise of the robots?" "In Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, there's a sign of the big change coming to our workplaces." "It was a fabulous place to work." "I loved it." "We could set our watches by the people that would come into the enquiry centre year after year." "Margaret Davies worked at this former tax enquiry centre." "Now her job has gone, as more people go online to submit their tax returns." "34 people here were made redundant." "A computer cannot do the job of a human being." "It cannot think the way a human being can think." "We could pick up a mistake in somebody's tax return and put it right, have a chat to them, explain what the problem was." "A machine will never take the place of a human being." "South Wales has had its share of job losses in the past." "Thousands lost their jobs after the pit closures." "And the recent recession hit hard." "A lot of the people here are zero-hours contracts, they're on National Minimum Wage." "Businesses open, they last a year, they close down." "We've gone from heavy industry to light industry to also, the administrative industries are also closing." "HMRC said public demand for the centre dwindled to the point where it could no longer justify keeping it open." "It said it still provides individual support for more vulnerable customers." "Advances in robots, machines and technology mean that more of our work will be automated." "That'll bring big benefits." "But some of the jobs we currently do will disappear." "This journey shows how the slow creep of technology into our lives has been getting faster." "These trains have been driving themselves for almost 30 years." "In the last 15 years, we've been able to check ourselves in at the airport." "And the latest advance" " I don't need to call a person for a taxi" "My smartphone knows exactly where I am and I can use it to order and pay for a cab." " Hi, Dawn." " SATNAV: 'How are you?" "'" " I'm very well, thank you." "This progress can make our lives easier." "But at one time, these tasks would all have been done by people." "But this is nothing compared with the way technology's about to change our lives." "I'm on my way to meet two top academics whose work predicts these changes." "You start to get this rhythm that once a century, there's a huge surge in technological progress." "We saw it two centuries ago with the Industrial Revolution." "'Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee 'are academics at one of the world's top universities, 'the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.'" "What's remarkable is the advances over the past year or two." "'They say artificial intelligence, 'the ability of machines to think and behave like the human brain, 'is about to advance faster than anyone thought possible.'" "A lot of the insiders we talk to, people who have been doing artificial intelligence or computer science for their whole careers, tell us over and over again, "What's happened in the past" ""five or ten years has really caught us off guard." ""We were not prepared for this kind of progress."" "We're on the cusp of machines being able to do mental tasks the way that machines have begun doing physical tasks about 200 years ago." "And it's going to have profound effects on the economy." "NEWSREEL:" "Although not quite human, he's certainly the nearest approach yet created by man." "Machines still can't move as well as humans." "But are they starting to think like us?" "Machines have always been destroying jobs and they've always been creating jobs." "The question is, what the balance of those are going to be." "What's happening right now is what we're seeing is a lot of middle-class, middle-skilled jobs are being automated." "Things that clerks or accountants or book-keepers or secretaries are doing." "New research for Panorama suggests that over the last 15 years, at least 800,000 jobs have been lost to automation in the UK." "Some have come from manufacturing." "But jobs involving routine tasks in offices are becoming more at risk." "Roughly one third of today's jobs in the United Kingdom are potentially at risk from automation in the next 10-20 years." "And that's about ten million jobs." "Since 2000, over half of secretarial jobs have gone in the UK." "More than half of travel agents, more than half of counter clerks, more than half of librarians." "Jobs involving high levels of skill, creativity or personal care are generally safe." "But telesales agents, typists and bank clerks have the highest probability of being replaced next." "Your research suggests that people who are on lower-paid jobs are the ones who are most at risk." "That's what we found with the work we've done with Oxford University." "Jobs that pay £30,000 or less at the moment are five times more likely to be replaced by technology than jobs that pay £100,000 or more." "I think the second machine age will be a radical shift in the middle tiers of jobs that are available." "It's a lot of the white-collar jobs that I think will either be transformed, or will disappear." "And that's where the significant change is going to be." "But it's not just routine jobs that might change." "The biggest advance has been in machines that can cope with the unexpected." "That's what's leading to self-drive cars." "Google already has a fleet in California." "The only crashes, they say, have been when humans got it wrong." "The UK government is investing over £100 million into self-driving vehicles." "MUSIC:" "Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd" "We'll see this one being tested on the streets of Milton Keynes next year." "We're in a self-drive car right now, but if you don't mind me pointing out, there is a driver here - you." " Yes." " What's going on with that?" "Well, we're at the beginning of a journey to get to a point where we can safely have self-driving cars on the pavements." "These pods are designed for short, driverless journeys around Milton Keynes." "When you get to the train station, they'll take you home via the pavement at up to 15mph." "Being off the road means the sensors have to be more precise than in a driverless car." "We're interacting directly with pedestrians." "A pedestrian can elect to pass you on the left or the right." "They may stop, they may lie down in front of it, try and jump over it." "You just don't know." "Much more unpredictable." "There's still a very long way to go with driverless technology, but it's progressing fast." "Do you think we're close now to some kind of tipping point when it comes to self-drive vehicles?" "Absolutely." "There's a lot of work going on." "Audi are doing work, Jaguar Land Rover are doing a lot of work." "Google are doing work." "I think there's going to be an explosion in this stuff." "So, if you fast-forward ten years, what do you think we're going to see on Britain's roads?" "I can certainly see a situation where we perhaps have platooning of vehicles running on the motorway." "So a bunch of vehicles would be hooked up and run together, close to each other." "Both cars and particularly commercial vehicles." "There's big fuel-consumption gains to be had in that respect." "Sounds like science fiction?" "It's not." "The government's researching that right now." "But are we getting carried away?" "We've often made bold predictions for machines." "This is Unimate, short for Universal Automation." "And it can handle anything from a soft-boiled egg to a ladleful of hot, molten metal, and a pot of tea, if you like." "Even Panorama's indulged in a bit of future-gazing." "Out of space research, out of Moonwalker, has come this agile walking chair, offering the handicapped a more tolerable life." "This lorry driver doesn't think a machine could do his job." "Bob Wain is one of 875,000 people in the UK who drive for a living." "He says he wouldn't trust vehicles that could drive themselves." "I know that if anything jumps out in front of me, my right foot's going to hit that brake, even if I have to bounce my head off the windscreen." "I'll stop this truck on a sixpence." "I don't think a computer's going to have that." "In America, Google have racked up" " a million miles now of their self-drive cars." " Really?" "If the technology was there to do it, do you think that it should happen?" "For the cars, you'll probably get away with it," " because they can go anywhere." " Yep." "For a truck, it's a completely different ballgame." "Bob says too many practicalities would get in the way." "How would you know your load's safe?" "If it ever did get broken into, who's responsible for that?" "What will happen if it's driverless?" "That's not going to ring the police and say," ""Excuse me, I'm a driverless truck, I need your assistance"." "During testing, self-drive lorries will carry drivers." "The technology's advancing fast enough to answer these questions." "It's only been developed in the last ten years." "Academics Erik and Andrew say it's difficult for us to comprehend how machines will advance in the next ten years." "Most of us think technology will change at the same pace as before." "Like the speed of your car accelerating." "Most of us are really comfortable with progressions like 10, 20, 30, 40." "We can carry that forward." "If you graphed it, it would look like a line that goes like this." "We call that linear growth." "But technological change gets even faster the more it progresses." "Over past decades, the computing power behind machines has doubled every two years." "The truth is that computers get better faster than anything else ever." "A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 15 years ago." "As computing power doubled, the power of machines to do human tasks also increased." "This kind of growth is called exponential." "Most of us are not very comfortable, or not very intuitive when it comes to what we call exponential growth, which is constant doubling." "So, one, two, four, eight." "An exponential graph multiplies on each of the previous steps." "And that means that at first, the effects can be relatively small." "But it suddenly takes off." "And that inevitably catches us off guard." "These changes are happening in a digital world, where it's easier to create and replicate new things than in the physical world." "That's why progress is so fast." "When we look at some recent examples of the kinds of things that computers and AI and robots can do, it really does feel to me like we've just passed a tipping point." "We're just on the other side of it and we're in some really new territory." "Andy and I think this is one of the most significant changes, literally, in human history." "We compare it to the Industrial Revolution, when machines started automating physical work." "Companies in Britain are already using machines which can teach themselves." "But they say they won't threaten jobs." "Good afternoon, you're though to Vicky at Virgin Trains." "How can I help?" "Virgin Trains uses an artificially intelligent software program to handle customer queries." "Yeah, of course." "Yeah, no problem." "It reads every customer e-mail and understands them enough to sort them into one of 470 categories." "In the future, it'll even send them to the right people across the office." "It'll take a look at what you've said, how you've said it, the order of the words, the words you've used, what comes before and after those words." "So what is this e-mail that's come in?" "This one, someone's got in touch and said that they're ill, so unfortunately can't travel." "And did the machine get that right?" " I think it did, didn't it?" " It did, yeah." "Presumably it's got it's right because it's encountered" " similar sorts of queries before?" " Yeah." "'What makes it clever is that it learns from its mistakes.'" "Staff are teaching it so it doesn't make the same errors again." "It works like a human." "The more it sees, the more it learns." "The more it can associate with what it's seen in the past, the more accuracy it will get." "It's cut the time spent opening and sorting e-mails by 85%." "Has your use of AI changed the number of people you've had to have in your team?" "Has it helped to reduce the headcount?" "No, that wasn't the aim of bringing the tool in and there are no plans to do that." "We're using AI as a tool to free up some time that we would usually use on administrative tasks, to enable us to spend that time on the customer." "Could this be the first sign of an artificial intelligence that does our mundane work for us?" "Machines that behave exactly like us are still a science fiction dream." "Nobody must know about Tony." "I mean that he's a robot." "Tony?" "!" "But this robot tries to give me a human presence." "I'm wandering through Erik and Andrew's university in the US while controlling it from my living room in the UK." "'Hello.'" "Hey, Rohan, good to see you." "How are you?" "Robot Rohan." "How are you doing?" " We're doing great." "How are you?" " 'I'm all right...'" " VOICEOVER:" " 'Though it's still not that comfortable 'with human contact.'" "'Can I come and give you a sort of chest bump?" "'Here, look, there you go.'" "Whoa!" "ROHAN LAUGHS" "HE LAUGHS" "I can't help but think that ultimately we're talking here 'about an iPad on a stick.'" "We were promised jetpacks." "There's absolutely nothing that comes close to an artificial general intelligence." "In other words, any machine that can do all the things that we can do." "But, realistically, we can show you stuff on the blackboard or whatever, we can walk down the hallway, that's an improvement to what you were able to do before." " VOICEOVER:" " Smarter machines could save us time at work." "In the workplace a generation from now" "I can't imagine how much you're going to have to pay somebody to do boring, unpleasant, nasty labour of one kind or another, because we're going to have machines that can do that." "Why would you bother to pay a person for that?" "But shouldn't we worry about the jobs that'll go?" "Technology has replaced 800,000 UK jobs in the last 15 years." "But it's also helped create 3.5 million jobs at the same time." "And, on average, they pay more." "The work we've done looking at the last 15 years strongly suggests that automation has actually been very beneficial to the economy." "You talk about low-skilled jobs being replaced by automation, but new high-skilled, high-paid jobs popping up - it's not going to be the same people that benefit, you know." "If you've lost your job, you're not automatically going to jump into a high-skilled, high-paid job, right?" "Well, what we've found is actually people have been redeploying in the workplace and actually taking on new jobs." "What about the fact that the British economy is growing or the global economy is growing fast?" "Isn't that what's going on here, not tech?" "We're convinced that the main factor has been automation in terms of the changes in the job market." "If that pace of change continues at about the same rate going forwards, I think there's every hope that we will benefit from technology." "If it accelerates, we're into a whole new territory." "That could mean an era where new jobs aren't created as quickly." "If technology does replace people faster than before, some predict the rise of super rich companies, which only need small, highly-skilled workforces." "The great thing about some of these new technologies is they can create an enormous amount of wealth with much less work, but that also means that there are fewer jobs, fewer people employed." "A lot of the benefits have accrued to a relatively small group of people." "You can see it in the photography industry." "We're taking more pictures than ever before... but digitally." "Gone are the days of waiting for your film to be processed." "That's been bad for Kodak." "A factory here in the Midlands employed hundreds, packaging their film." "That closed ten years ago." "And in 2012, Kodak cut 2,700 jobs worldwide." "We capture and share them." "We carry them with us..." "The same year, popular mobile photo sharing firm Instagram was sold to Facebook for 1 billion." "Back then, it had just 13 employees." "Those who are wealthier, have higher income, more skills, more capital, have tended to gain as technology advances, and those with more routine skills, ordinary skills, haven't done as well." "I would say there's no worse time to be a person with only ordinary skills, because that's what technology does best." "But it's actually a great time for somebody who's highly creative or has special skills." "In the future, we're going to have to focus on the kind of work humans are good at and machines can't do." "Jobs involving creativity, problem-solving and empathy." "That means equipping people with the right skills they need." "This is a long problem." "How are we going to come up with an answer real fast?" "Well, we could use a computer!" "In schools, there's a push to make sure children are future-proofed." "And we'd have it much more accurately." "They never make mistakes." "A new computing curriculum has been introduced in England." "OK, ladies and gents, so if I can just have your attention for a moment, I'll just explain to you what we're going to be doing." "It teaches pupils how to write computer code, and it encourages them to solve problems together." "The only issue with Morse code is that you'd need to create some new thing for a full stop, for yes and no." "And a back space could be two blinks or something like that, if you've made a mistake." "This school in Berkshire is a centre of excellence for computer science." "I want them to understand responsible use of new technology as well, and its applications." "'But the head teacher says the benefits are being diluted 'by an insistence on old-fashioned exams.'" "The exam system really isn't keeping pace with the developments in teaching and learning." "We have a rigid system that continues to examine young people firstly, very much in subject silos, and secondly sits them apart from one another, unable to communicate, unable to access information via new technology - exactly the sorts of approaches" "that we want them to apply in the wider world." "The bigger challenge is adults who don't have high skills and whose jobs could be replaced." "Be adaptable." "Get used to the fact that you're probably going to have five or ten jobs in your life." "Get used to the fact they might actually be geographically in different places, and get used to learning a new adaptation of your skill." "Skilling up isn't finite." "You can't sort of say, "I've done it now"." "You have to do it all the time." "But in reality, that's difficult." "If this packed up and I was in a position to do it," "I'd like to take a carpentry course or maybe go into plumbing." "But the thing is, what you've got to look at when you say that, is you've still got to cover the costs of your mortgage and your bills and your living costs to do that." "Are we doing enough as a country to equip people to cope with automation?" "We've had this voluntary approach to skills investment and training that has delivered a very long tail of low-skilled, low-wage labour." "Many big companies do fantastically well, but many smaller companies really don't, and the market has failed." "The Government needs to step in and ensure that we have a fair system." "Digby Jones says we need massive public investment to help adults retrain." "So we're used to the taxpayer paying for railways and roads and hospitals and schools." "The taxpayer should facilitate the ability for people who need a new set of skills, and they haven't got the money to do it." "But will our system of further education be able to cope?" "I think there is a real concern about the availability of good training for people, really, once they finish the formal education system." "But high-quality technical education, we all know it's got to be done and we all talk about it, but we haven't put sufficient time, money, work, investment into it." "The Government told us it was working with employers to develop new apprenticeship standards to prepare employees for the changing workplace." "Back in the States, academics Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee say governments and society need to think radically." "Let's make sure the educational system is clicking on all cylinders and giving them the skills they actually need." "Let's really try to kick-start entrepreneurship, because entrepreneurship is the engine of job creation, it's where good opportunities come from." "If we don't make at least decent-sized policy changes, my most likely scenario for the future is a continuation of some of the troubling trends that we see already." "'But they remain positive about the future.'" "Let's not lose sight of the amazing news - our world is becoming more wealthy, more abundant, more bountiful," "I believe, like never before because of tech progress." "The real trick is to find ways not just to race against machines but we should think about racing with the machines, working with technology to enhance our own capabilities and solve the kinds of problems that we could never solve before." "SIREN WAILS" "Could hospitals, like this in Boston, point to how we might work with machines?" "It looks like your lab tests for your heart were fine yesterday." "And they did your stress test today..." "In this emergency department, they use an artificially intelligent supercomputer." "Every three minutes, it automatically collects and analyses every snippet of a patient's data, from their blood pressure to their oxygen levels." "Doctors are really good at certain things." "They're really good about empathising with patients, about being creative, and they're really bad about other things." "They're really bad about doing really repetitive tasks, because humans get bored." "And if you ask a human to do the same repetitive task a thousand times, they will mess up probably one in a thousand times." "While a computer, if you ask them to do that a million times, it will never, never mess it up." "Sometimes, it can even suggest what's wrong with patients before the doctor diagnoses them." "Our goal is not to replace the clinician." "A doctor plus a computer is always better than a doctor alone." "And as long as we believe that, and we really, really do, a doctor is always better with a tool than without." "It holds data for more than a quarter of a million patients from the last 30 years, so it can recognise rare diseases more quickly than the doctors." "Humans can only think about diagnoses that they've seen before, and they often at times will say, "Well, it's impossible," ""I've never seen it before."" "Well, the computer in 250,000 patients has seen it before, and so it can actually say," ""Wait a second, you should be thinking about this diagnosis," ""cos this looks exactly like that patient that I saw 20 years ago."" "Having all that data gives it one especially frightening application." "It can forecast whether you'll die in the next 30 days." "We can predict with almost a 96% confidence that these patients will have this probability of dying." "So if the computer says you're going to die, you probably will die in the next 30 days." "Though this is the first system of its kind, others are already being planned." "To keep up in this new digital age, we'll have to accept that machines will do some jobs better than us." "Some say we should see the positives." "We have got time, if we plan properly and we really train people and we really upskill and we really invest and we are much more nimble in the way we operate, we can actually seize this opportunity." "But it will only be positive if those opportunities are open to everyone... to help us master the machines, instead of them mastering us."