PassWord – 11th November 2015

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Password Radio Show on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. The program that asks, just who is technology for? Do we need it? Are we addicted to it? And if so, who is pushing it? In today’s show, are the robots taking our jobs? A year ago, Oxford University released a report claiming that one-third of jobs will be in robot hands by 2024. Last week, a debate took place in the Science Museum over the issue. We asked one of the world’s leading robotic experts whether we should be signing on for good. Also on the programme, and in the same vein, we have Nicholas Roop, the head of the Lovies, the high-tech awards for achievement, who claims the internet is now part of our DNA. DNA. Also possibly in the same vein, the tsetse fly, carrier of the parasite that causes sleeping sickness, and how technology is being used to eradicate it. And staying with insect parasites, we have a world first on the programme, a malaria-diagnosing iPhone app. So technology can be a good servant if we get the balance right by, for example, making any home smarter according to Martin Vesper, whose company wants to make your house look after you properly. First The robots are coming. Research by Mike Osborne, Professor of Machine Learning at Oxford University, has predicted that artificial intelligence systems will be taking our jobs. We’ve talked about it a lot on this programme. Machine production lines that can be reconfigured overnight, computers that drive trains remotely. The writing is not on the wall, it’s in the code that now runs our existence. Or is it? Professor Murray Shanahan, Head of Cognitive Robotics and the author of Embodiment and Inner Life, the book that the acclaimed film Ex Machina was based on, thinks things might might not be so bleak?

Speaker C: I guess the issue really is whether we’re in the same position now as, you know, we have been since the Industrial Revolution, which is where people lose jobs because jobs become automated in various ways. And of course, that’s very, very sad on an individual level whenever a person loses their job, whenever that type of job disappears, that it’s an individual tragedy often if they can’t retrain and find another job. But the tendency has always been for new kinds of jobs to become possible, to become available. So, you know, just 20 years ago, the very idea of a web designer was completely— nobody had that concept, whereas now it’s a whole industry. And in fact, for, you know, over a century, there have been inventions of whole new types of jobs as old types of jobs have disappeared. There are many few Fewer people are needed now to shoe horses, but a lot more people, you know, have been needed in the 20th century to drive cars around.

Speaker D: Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I mean, basically, I’ve just received a press release today saying that there’s a terrible, terrible shortage in the pharmaceutical industry. There’s terrible shortages in the computing industry and the computer security industry. So really, the new jobs are in the new industries, and it’s the old industries that are being wiped out just because than they could be because of the way that our industries had formed in response to the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker C: The tendency has been, I think, for the new jobs that, you know, the new kinds of labour market that arise tend to require more education. And so generally as a society in the West, you know, there’s been a drive towards increasing levels of education in order to get people who can take on whole new kinds of jobs. So you get this sort of increase in the level of education to match the sort of different types of jobs that become available. But the question about AI is, is that tendency actually going to change? So is it going to become the case that even jobs that require, you know, a lot of education and more kind of knowledge jobs, are they increasingly going to be taken over so that the gap between what can be automated and what humans can do is going to be gradually closed and closed and closed until eventually you just have leftover things, jobs that are very highly creative, for example.

Speaker D: I see. So perhaps then with AI, the prognosis is a little more gloomy. Does that mean that you yourself are under threat?

Speaker C: Well, possibly, but I think it’s a while yet before people who are, you know, work in academia and sort of thinking about I’m thinking about engineering and design and science, that before those jobs are under threat. But certainly, they’re going to change a great deal and many kinds of jobs are going to change. And ultimately, I mean, we’re talking, you know, maybe 30, 40, 50 years, there’s no job that in principle a robot or an AI couldn’t do, I suppose.

Speaker E: Do you think though that, I mean, isn’t there one job that is left to us and that is to consume?

Speaker D: There’s one job that’s left to us and that is to create desire.

Speaker C: We don’t really know what’s going to happen, but we can imagine that society will move to a position where there’s increasing abundance and leisure. So, you know, we’re going to have to figure out ways to use our time fruitfully and beneficially and constructively and creatively. The time, we won’t have to earn our keep perhaps anymore, but we’ll want to occupy ourselves in meaningful ways.

Speaker D: Does this also perhaps mean that the two economies could develop? There could be one, a human-based sort of artisan artifact economy, and then this very, very high-tech economy, and to an extent the transition across them. It will be between goods that we’ve created that the robots see will have some value to them.

Speaker C: Actually, we can imagine lots of classes of jobs, jobs where you need the human touch or you need some kind of authentic human aspect to them. For example, we all rather like handcrafted artefacts, and it’s not, you know, it’s not— in some ways it’s their imperfections that are created by the human hand that we rather like, the authenticity of that. So that will be around indefinitely, I imagine.

Speaker B: Professor Murray Shanahan on why we should love labour-saving robots. Tech is a part of us is a point point made by my next guest, Nicholas Roop, who heads up the Lovie Awards, when the great and the good of the internet get together to celebrate what they’ve done. Nick, welcome to the program.

Speaker F: Hello, how you doing?

Speaker B: Not so bad. Now, Nick, the Lovies is a relatively new phenomenon, isn’t it? A sort of mark of how recent the internet is.

Speaker F: It is, it’s relatively new, although it’s, it’s the sister awards of the Webby Awards, which is actually going in its 20th year. So we’ve been around for 5 years, but they’ve been around for 20. So it has its roots in something with more longevity. But that does give you an idea of kind of how long the phenomenon’s been significant enough to bother making some awards around.

Speaker B: Okay, now your address to the lovies is that the internet is now irreversible and cannot be taken out of their lives. Isn’t that a bit strong?

Speaker F: It depends what you mean. I mean, I think if you went up to the average sort of UK punter in the street and tried to prise their smartphone out of their hands, they would probably put up a reasonable fight, I would imagine, particularly if you told them they couldn’t run into a phone shop and get it replaced the next day. I think that’s sort of interesting and brilliant and terrifying in probably equal measure. But I think it’s definitely true to say that we we are incredibly reliant on digitally enabled things, whether those are experiences or services or whatever, and to a point where you just can’t see it going the other way because so many things are organized around it, not least our own brains.

Speaker B: [Speaker:ANDY] Right. And what, you really think that? I mean, you’re a real internet and technology convert. You don’t think that it’s just a fad and we’ll start to get bored with it Yeah, I mean, some people would say that already there are some signs of that occurring.

Speaker F: I think there’s lots of aspects of it that are probably becoming boring. I mean, if we look back at film, you know, the emergence of film as a medium, what you look at, what you see in the beginning of people, you know, theaters, the early, early, you know, cinematic theaters being filled full of audiences quite happy looking at a train. Scouring along towards the camera, and some people would run out because they thought the train was actually going to crash into the screen. And then people tired of that sort of novelty, those spectacles, because once you’d seen it 10 times, there wasn’t really anything new to learn. And obviously then the film as a medium developed and matured and has become what it is today, which is still full of a lot of novelty and spectacle, but at the same time is an incredibly rich and culture-changing, culture-making medium that I think if you removed it, it would leave the world a lesser place. So I think what we’re seeing with the internet is much the same. We have been beguiled by all these spectacles and the sort of magical things, and those things are tiring. And what we’re seeing in human behavior, the way that we, everything from the way that we meet each other to the way that we live our lives is increasingly sort of entangled in digital media in one way, shape, or form.

Speaker B: [Speaker:DAVID HEATHFIELD] I mean, a lot of people would say that with Twitter and Facebook that we’re doing the digital equivalent of looking at trains. They would say that that’s all, you know, a lot of rubbish really. But do you think that there isn’t any way back? It’s only a few bits of wire going down to a BT exchange or a radio signal to a mobile phone from a tower connected to a BT exchange. Hopefully we can just pull all of that out.

Speaker F: [Speaker:ANDREW] Well, we could and we probably should from time to time. I mean, I’m on your side in the, you know, playing devil’s advocate about asking the question whether this is a good thing for us as human beings and humanity in general or not, because there are clearly lots of aspects of it that aren’t positive and that are probably detrimental to our experience of the world around us. And they definitely take, you know, they detract from certain aspects of relationships.

Speaker B: But I mean, there’s some research that’s coming out at the moment that shows that we’re actually getting a bit thicker, that we’re unable to do things anymore because this world is taking us over. Are we caught up in the web, or are we masters of it?

Speaker F: I think Both. And interestingly, I mean, hearing the last discussion about robots, I mean, I think the internet is very much, you know, it’s the same, it’s an aid and it’s also a crutch at the same time. I think like, you know, in the same way that automation has rendered a lot of activities meaningless or valueless, the same is true of the internet, it’s made certain experiences, you know, and activities seem no longer worthwhile or no longer worth participating in or too much effort or too inconvenient, whatever that might be, and there is a loss in it. What you’re saying about people losing some intelligence, that’s clearly the product of— I never thought Jimmy Wales would be cast as the bad guy, but I mean, what conversation do you have these days which doesn’t require at least 2 or 3 visits to Wikipedia to consult the truth.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And Jimmy Wales is comparing your do, isn’t he?

Speaker F: He came a couple of years ago.

Speaker B: Yeah, good.

Speaker F: I think we’d all generally agree that Wikipedia is one of the most awesome things on the planet, so I’m having a bit of fun casting him as the bad guy, the guy responsible for us all collectively losing our intelligence.

Speaker B: Okay, well, wonderful. Nick, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.

Speaker F: Thank you, Peter.

Speaker B: That was Nick Roop, Lord of the Lovies. And while we might be accidentally caught up in our own web, increasingly we’re using technology to control our environment and other species. The latest target is the tsetse fly, a biting insect that carries the parasite that causes fatal sleeping sickness in people and cattle, killing 3 million animals a year. According to experts, it’s holding up Africa’s development because of its impact on farming methods. I asked Jérémy Boucher of the French research organization CIRAD, who with Google is focusing satellite technology on the tsetse fly to break the fly’s stranglehold on the continent, how it works.

Speaker G: With the satellites, and particularly with the MODIS images, you know, it’s a satellite that was developed just for scientific purpose a little bit more than 10 years ago, and the data are completely free. And they take many pictures of the same site on Earth every day, so the resolution is very high, it’s between 250 meters and 1 kilometer. And you can get data on the, for example, the temperature of the ground, the infrared emittance of the ground, and but also you have more complex indexes like the tree cover. So we used many metrics derived from, derived from this tree cover, and we saw that we could find a component on the environment that is very much associated to its resistance to movement, in fact.

Speaker E: So once you’ve decided, once you’ve worked out what the movements are in a landscape, then presumably that means that you can chart the paths that the, the, the particular flies will follow, and also, as you’ve said, whether they’ve— they’re isolated or not. So what you’ve done is you found all of the barriers in the landscape that are moving.

Speaker H: Exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker G: So because in the past, you know, most of the tsetse control campaigns failed because sometimes they succeeded to eradicate the flies, but the areas that were cleared were reinfested quickly, you see.

Speaker E: So this means then that Google and the scientists at Google Maps, etc., etc., are taking the information that you’re discovering or the common factors that you’ve found in creating these natural barriers, and they’re looking for those in other bits of Africa or in other parts of the world.

Speaker G: Is that right?

Speaker I: Yeah.

Speaker G: In fact, I don’t know if you know the Earth Engine of Google. Yes, it’s a program, you know, that they have, and they have decided to use it to try to inform on mosquitoes for the control of malaria. And they were interested by our approach because they would like to see if we can transfer it to mosquitoes and also if we can upscale what we did at the continent scale, you see.

Speaker E: So are you optimistic that using the methods that you’ve identified that you will be able to eradicate particular populations and create these safe havens for cattle and animal breeding that you’re after?

Speaker G: Yeah, you know, we have to be realistic. We will not solve the problem of all the African countries at once, but the method that we developed, if we can apply it to the different countries, it’s possible to identify targets that will be much more easy to eradicate than than what is done now. So what I hope is that we can, you know, do this in other countries everywhere and try to focus the money that we have and the efforts towards places where we have chances to be successful, you know. And of course it will not solve the problem in places which are not isolated, but in these places we can also decide to go, you know, for farmer and vet empowerment instead of eradication programs. And still it will, it will save a lot of money.

Speaker E: I mean, it’s interesting too, isn’t it? Because one of the things that you’re also making a very strong case for is for, um, people in these particular areas to actually look after their habitat, to look after their environment. Because if there is a particular band of vegetation that is forming a barrier to the tsetse fly, it’s in the farmer’s interest to leave that there, isn’t it?

Speaker C: Exactly, yeah.

Speaker G: And if you look at the situation in Africa, you know, I live there, I’ve been living there for 14 years now, and it’s really obvious that the environment is being degraded, you know, and the people need this environment to produce. And if we don’t do something, if we continue to produce what we are doing, it will lead to major environmental problems, but also to failure to produce proteins that are needed to feed the population. So we don’t have the choice, we need to innovate, and clearly these eradication projects are an innovation in comparison to what was done in the past.

Speaker B: That was Jérémy Boucher on the tsetse fly and its malign role in Africa, speaking from Ethiopia. Now, another insect that’s been causing trouble for as long as the tsetse fly is the mosquito, which, like the tsetse fly, carries a parasite that cripples large areas of the world. If the infection is caught early, The disease can be dealt with, so news that an iPhone app has been launched that allows early disease diagnosis is exciting those treating malaria. Here is Professor David Mendels, the head of the Centre of Mobile Micro and Nanotechnology at Suraya University in Jakarta, to tell us about it. David, hello and welcome.

Speaker H: Hi, Pete, thanks for having me.

Speaker B: That’s very, very good. Now, you’ve developed something that’s an iPhone app. I mean, it’s not It’s not the sort of iPhone app that everyone’s going to download, is it?

Speaker H: No, even though everyone could potentially because, well, the app is free. We made it free and you can try the demo which will show you for a sick smear and a thin smear, I’ll explain that later, what the malaria parasite looks like, how it infects red blood cells. That can be funny.

Speaker B: So how does this work? I mean, obviously, you know, theoretically I should have to take a prick of my blood, don’t I?

Speaker H: So it works— the only thing that the app is doing, we’re shipping the app with a microscope because everything needs to be calibrated to work perfectly. Now it just works As the usual gold standard diagnostic is performed, so you’ve got to prick the finger and get one droplet of blood on a microscope slide, from which you do either a thin smear, meaning you spread the blood, after which you just stain the, the blood using a Giemsa stain, which gives you the red blood cells in pink and all the nucleated Cells, so white blood cells and the parasites, the malaria parasites, are stained in blue, in dark blue. And after that, it’s just a matter of segmenting the image, so identifying what is the background, what are the cells, and identifying what are parasites.

Speaker B: Now, I suppose that, you know, there’s going to be a lot of people who are going traveling internationally who will be perhaps a little concerned about their health, maybe a little overly concerned, and they might take this with them. I mean, it’s not really meant for them, is it? It’s not meant for the hypochondriacs.

Speaker H: No, no, it is, it is not actually. It’s really meant for all the dispensaries typically. Dispensaries, laboratories, hospitals. One of the main problems that the app and the kit addresses is the lack of trained microscopists. It seems quite unbelievable nowadays, but the gold standard for malaria detection remains microscope diagnostic on its simple smear, and it’s exceedingly difficult to read slides. It takes time, you know, it takes about, for a good microscopist, it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to read a slide. So that means only a maximum of 20 diagnostics per day.

Speaker B: And that’s the big issue, isn’t it? Because apparently, or I mean, definitely malaria can be eradicated, can’t it? It can be eradicated if you you can find it and get good enough information on it. So then if you can take the parasite out of the equation and get the parasite out of people’s bloodstreams, then you can begin to have a hope of dealing with malaria.

Speaker H: Isn’t that the case? Definitely, yes. That’s, that’s our big hope. There’s really two things. The first one is that you want to cut the cycle of malaria, the cycle of reproduction of the parasite. And it means that if from first infection to spreading an insecticide, you can get down to under 48 hours, the parasite will not transfer. So any mosquito that comes and takes your blood that has been infected will have to— will be able to transfer it to cattle. For example, or other humans. And from that point onwards, it’s very difficult actually to eradicate. Now, if you can have a swift response, you’ve got a good chance to eradicate malaria in regions. And our biggest hope is that the kit is used just to do that, meaning we’re displacing the problem from being a medical problem to being a sanitation problem.

Speaker I: Right.

Speaker B: And just how much, I mean, just to put this into context, how much of a problem is malaria? I mean, we all know people die from it, but what does it do in the areas that are affected by it?

Speaker H: Ah, well, there are various kinds of statistics that will give you that. The one that I find the most useful is that, 1.5 kids dies every minute in the world.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker H: So during the time that we’ve talked, we’ve probably had 5 to 10 kids dying of malaria. That’s basically the kids and the seniors that are the most exposed to it.

Speaker B: And so, very quickly, I mean, because we haven’t got much time, but I mean, one of the interesting ways way to do that is with, by putting sterile insects in to mate with the females and then basically nothing happens.

Speaker H: Yes, that’s one of the avenues that are being explored. I know of two other ones. There’s a Star Wars one where lasers are shot at mosquito flocks and and are sterilizing the mosquitoes. The other one is the nets.

Speaker B: Right, okay, which is the most effective? And well, maybe at some point—

Speaker H: effective, that’s something that is questionable. We’ve seen in Indonesia in particular that it just displaces the problem.

Speaker B: Okay, well, let’s hope that we would be able to displace it a bit more. Professor David Mendelssohn, Thank you very much. You’re very welcome. Now, from satellites and the microscopic and the mobile to the home, everyone is being linked and connected in a bid to control our environment. Technology apparently can do everything more efficiently, and the key would appear to be take people out of the equation. Here’s Martin Vesper, the head of a connected home company that can link the windows in an Elizabethan house and make it smart.

Speaker I: At cars today. You know, we are trying to do what we have in a car already today to do in a house. So your gearbox, your engine, your brakes, everything is communicating to each other to make the optimum solution for the whole driving experience from emergency situation over comfort over energy efficiency. And I think that’s what we see from a car. We look at the house today. It’s not that way. Electronic doesn’t mean you have more trouble if it’s done right. It will just help you in everyday life.

Speaker J: I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I was listening to a program the other day where it was saying that there were two people who were poorly sighted, partially sighted. They’d never been able to control their central heating before. Now they could do it via voice, and they were starting to live a much, much more comfortable life because they had to guess at the settings.

Speaker I: Before. That’s one way, and there are a lot of facets of it. And the good thing is once you have everything connected, you have this infrastructure in place. What application you want to use, you might use, is up to you. So you might use voice control, but you might use still your push buttons. Both in the digitization environment, both will work absolutely fine. And whatever is more convenient and easier for you to do, that’s what you want to do. And as I said, you can change it very fast over time. So I had it in my family. My wife had a knee operation. Suddenly voice control was very important to her, whereas in everyday life when everything was fine, it wasn’t that big issue. But from one minute to the other, you just change. And that’s another advantage you have because once everything is connected, the infrastructure is in place, You are free to choose how you want to set up certain things.

Speaker J: But one of the big concerns that a lot of people have is about hacking or about people knowing where they are. There are some people who have been saying that these devices will allow people to spy on them within their own houses or to make them captive within their own houses if they were taken over by hackers. How are you going to deal with that?

Speaker I: There are two things to it. I mean, number one is a connected home has a higher safety and security level because it can inform faster. It will detect things easier. Smoke detectors being connected can alarm everybody in the home and not only in one room and all these type of things. But yes, you have an additional risk on the data and hacking side. But the industry is working on getting this safer and safer, and on the other hand, you reduce the risk by using electronic on the other hand. To give you an example, because the technology is advancing, your regular house key, the mechanical house key, is getting less and less safe or secure because of 3D printing. Today, you’re close to the moment that just by taking a picture of your key, you can reprint your key and so enter your house. So by doing it electronically, you get— you can fight against those problems because you make it actually more safe. And the hacking is a very special element where we might not see that the whole good internet community is working heavily on that. This risk gets reduced day by day by getting better encryption and all these type of things.

Speaker B: Well, that was Martin Vesper of Digital Strom on the artificial intelligence smartening our houses up, although Hacking is something we have to watch out for. It was only announced today that a hacking gang had been arrested for a $100 million heist. This program began wondering if robots are taking our jobs. Now we find that they appear to be even taking over our lives, which leaves me wondering, what will we do in the future? According to the Oxford research we mentioned earlier, creative people will be the hardest to replace. What do you think? Let us know at Future Intelligence, and we will put your thoughts to the experts. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM. With me, Peter Warren. And if you’ve just joined us, you’ve missed it, but we are here again next week. Password is brought to you by Future Intelligence. To find out more about the world we’re—

Speaker A: This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.