There are many things to be learnt from visiting an airport. A trip to Stansted Airport, for instance, will teach you that Stansted is a really dim place to locate an airport. Meanwhile, JFK in New York City will inform you that America is becoming seriously pricey for European tourists.
But a recent trip to Bangkok airport taught me something more profound. There I was, supping some pleasant Singapore Laksa, and I saw this thing hove into view. It was an autonomous robot cleaner, busily keeping all the shiny floors of Suvarnabhumi airport in pristine condition.
Instead of desperately needing more workers to make up for low birth rates and ageing populations we are going to need far fewer workers
It was not the technology that surprised me – you can of course buy domestic robot vacuum cleaners on Amazon – it was the fact I had not anticipated this development, despite it being obvious, in retrospect. On all my previous visits to Bangkok, this cleaning job was always done by teams of women, probably quite low-paid women from Myanmar, say, or Cambodia (where Thailand sources a lot of workers for low-skilled jobs).
Now those women have been replaced by robots. Where have they gone? What jobs are they doing now? Airport cleaning does not equip you for many other roles. You don’t leap from swabbing out a Duty Free concession to teaching physics or trading Treasury bonds.
The more I stared at the robot cleaner, doing its job tirelessly, effortlessly, and 24/7, the more I realised I was staring at a future that almost everyone seems to deny. And that future is a world where, instead of desperately needing more workers to make up for low birth rates, ageing populations, and all that, we are going to need far fewer workers. Fewer people in general. And definitely fewer migrant workers.
Because it ain’t just the cleaners of Bangkok departure lounges that are threatened by robots, automation and the advent of Profound AI. As has been discussed for several years now, almost every human role, from the most humble to the most exalted, is in danger of being robotised, and many careers face near-certain extinction.
Let’s run through them, and get depressed. Though the advent of the self-driving car has taken much longer than expected – they are, it turns out, really hard machines to get right – they are now finally here. Autonomous cars can be seen buzzing around San Francisco, and various Chinese cities. Self-drive buses are now a thing in Japan – and, soon, Edinburgh. Lorries and vans will eventually go the same way. Put that all together and it’s an awful lot of people and an awful lot of jobs – truck drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers. All gone. What will these millions of people do instead?
As on the roads, so with the arts. In this magazine, I have already described how AI will replace writers. The intelligent chatbot ChatGPT is right now churning out decent poetry, in a few years it will be outmatching Milton. I have, likewise, in these pages described how AI will come for painters, illustrators, photographers, and graphic designers, via image machines like Stable Diffusion and Dall-e. If you don’t believe me, consider this: an AI just won a Sony World Photography Award, without the judges realising an AI ‘created’ the photograph.
The future for the legal profession is not exactly rosy, either. In a recent paper, it was shown that the latest version of ChatGPT can not only pass the US bar exam, it can ace it, better than 90 per cent of human examinees. Other studies have shown that ChatGPT is a better coder, better sub-editor, better research assistant, than any actual person, and so on.
Nor, ironically, is the future overly bright for the scientists who made these machines: one recent paper on the scientific capabilities of the new AI concludes: ‘[this] Intelligent Agent system [is] capable of autonomously designing, planning, and executing complex scientific experiments. Our system demonstrates exceptional reasoning and experimental design capabilities, effectively addressing complex problems and generating high-quality code.’ So that’s the boffins gone, as well. They’ve boffined themselves into the bin.
Some people, hearing all this, may be tempted to take comfort from the experience of previous technological leaps. That’s not unreasonable, at least at first glance. For instance, when farming was mechanised, rendering men with scythes redundant, the result was that new urban roles were created higher up the scale, making people more productive and eventually more prosperous; the workers of the countryside moved to the city, where they toiled in profitable factories.
Then, when the factories got automated or moved abroad, the factory workers moved up the scale again, shifting into knowledge jobs: becoming managers, bankers, clerks, teachers, accountants, doctors, researchers, actors, advertising executives with extrovert bow-ties and Spectator journalists given to writing pessimistic columns about ominous technology.
The difference with this latest industrial revolution – the robot-AI revolution – is that the new technology is going to threaten every single job at every level, simultaneously: menial and managerial, basic and bourgeois. So there will be no shift up to more productive tasks fit only for uniquely gifted humans. And this is because it is genuinely hard to think of any task – apart from vicar, stripper, and care worker – that sophisticated robots and highly advanced AI could not do.
All of which brings me back to Bangkok airport and those robot cleaners, replacing the nice migrant ladies from Mandalay. That is the future for all of us: watching AI do our jobs. In which case, why on God’s newly-automated earth are we arguing about the need for more migrants, the urgent search for workers around the world, amid the panic of a low birth rate and the desperation of ageing demographics?
What AI offers is a precious escape from this problem, avoiding the friction and stress which accompanies mass immigration. Freed of the need to import people, openly acknowledging that we need fewer workers, allowing our population to gently decline, we might even find our environment is less pressured, our rivers cleaner, and our housing a lot cheaper. Young British people will be able to buy homes in nice places. This is a major upside of the robot-AI revolution, even as there are serious downsides, still to be navigated.
And yet, no one ever seems to discuss this. Instead, we have immigration of net 500,000 a year and evermore debates about how to import evermore people. We are like Londoners sagely discussing the need for extra stables in Piccadilly and the necessary training of a million blacksmiths in 1898, even as the first cars are rolling out of the factories. It is surely time to think a lot smarter about this. Alternatively, if we are incapable of grasping these basic truths, we could get the machines to think it through. They are good at it.
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