VettaFi recently sat down with Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, strategic advisor to the ROBO Global Index Suite, to discuss AI, robotics, and work.
VettaFi: Thanks for joining me today. In your view, what will the relationship and environment between robotics, humans and AI look like, either 10 years from now or by 2040?
Nourbakhsh: It’s a great question, what this kind of interesting three-way relationship will be like between robotics, AI and human beings. One aspect, or one dynamic of that relationship that I think is really important is human upskilling. We’re going to find more and more that we humans, just like a really good pilot in an Airbus or a Boeing airplane, we’re going to learn to adapt to the competencies of AI by further developing the skills we have that are complementary to AI, rather than the same skills.
So we’re going to change. We’re going to evolve in terms of what we learn to do and how we interact with AI, to be kind of the best version of ourselves and the best version of our team together.
In terms of robotics, I think a major aspect of change we’re seeing in robotics is that we’re at the very beginning of a flourishing of robot systems that can interact in our spaces. Robotics of the past was all about systems that worked behind a chain link fence. Don’t let humans near them, they might hurt us, and we might hurt them. And really, where we’re headed is a place where robots and humans can work shoulder-to-shoulder in all kinds of environments, whether it’s a nursing home or a sidewalk or a factory.
On the AI side, we are just beginning to see the hints of AI systems that can really adapt and learn with us, and unlearn the wrong things and learn the right things better. So generative AI has been cool, but what we really need are highly interactive AI systems that we can train and mold so that they can be the best partners that they can possibly be for us. That’s a major change we’re going to see in the next 10 years, that’ll mean that you and I and everybody else are really interacting with AI systems that are customized to us over time and co-evolving with us.
VettaFi: What are the hardware, software, supply chain and infrastructure changes that market watchers and investors could expect would drive that?
Nourbakhsh: There are so many changes that are critical to this. One aspect of it is actually business analytics and business case making. If you read modern business analytics on AI, often the value of AI is computed in terms of its labor replacement costs, the idea that it’s going to cost less to do the exact same thing that humans do.
That is not the long term solution, because all you’re doing, if you do that, is creating something that, at best, is about as good as a human, or a little bit better than a human, but maybe cheaper if you can amortize the cost over time.
The business analysis shift that we’re going to see, first of all, is the shift from the idea of business replacement valuation to business optimization, where the AI system and the humans and the robots work together to create better product, more productive operational efficiencies and products that consumers want more. So it’s going to be about excellence rather than replacement.
The second side of that is the underlying foundational technology change. One of the most important parts of that is we’re seeing computer vision expand in leaps and bounds, but if we’re going to truly support robotics right next to people, we need not only computer vision, but all the senses. That means not just hearing, not just vision, but touch.
And we have to get touch right, because we need systems that have very high torques so their joints, like our joints, can actually pick up heavy things, yet…have really good resilience when they are…getting near people. And that combination of high torque, but also the ability to be very lightweight and reactive. That isn’t something robots were good at 10 years ago, and now we’re seeing dramatic improvements in that. That’s motor technology, and it’s force control technology, and it’s computer vision and touch sensing, all of those co-developing together.
Lastly, what we need are what I call transparent models. We need cognitive systems in the AI side and the robotic side to be transparently accessible to humans, so humans know what the robot’s thinking. Why is it doing what it’s doing? Can I interrogate it and talk to it about what it’s doing and give it advice at the meta level?
If you’ve had kids, this is what we do. We talk to kids about what they’re doing, we don’t just interact with them at the ground level, we pop up at one meta level. We need robots and AI systems with which we can do that, so we can talk to them about a mistake they made and how to make it better next time. Today, you talk to Chat, it makes a mistake, you tell it that it made a mistake, it just says, oh, sorry. There’s no learning there. We have to get to the point where real learning is happening.
VettaFi: How do you think about the concept of quality of life and purpose, when AI robots do a greater percentage of overall tasks in the world? How do we envision a quality of life and purpose when there’s fewer things we need to be doing?
Nourbakhsh: It’s interesting. People talk about this idea of the age of leisure or the zero marginal cost society, like “Oh, we’re all going to do poetry, because robots are going to do everything.”
If you go way back to John Maynard Keynes, Keynesian economics, that guy, he wrote in 1920 that, given the productivity increases we’re seeing from technology like robotics, we have a GDP growth of [about]2% until the year 2030, so he was only thinking like five years ahead of today, we’re gonna have a 17-times or 19-times increase in productivity because of labor replacement by technology. He called it technology labor replacement.
So he invented this term in 1920 and so he said, “Well, by then, we’re only going to be working 10-hour weeks because we don’t need to do more work than that because of the productivity growth.”
Well, guess what? The economy didn’t grow by 2%, it grew by 3.5% which is 30 times bigger. So our productivity, compounded, is massive compared to even what he imagined. Population only grew by four times. So yeah, we should be working like three-hour weeks, but we don’t do we?
In fact, if you look at the third industrial revolution, which is the digital computer revolution, when the ’80s happened, the ’90s happened, people said, “Oh, my God, all the secretaries are going to lose their jobs. Anybody who writes is gonna lose their job, because CEOs will just use the word processors we’re inventing like WordStar.”
Well, CEOs did not start using WordStar, right? The admins did. What happened to their work week? Nothing. CEOs still work 60-hour weeks, just like they did in the 1980s.
We like to imagine that greater levels of productivity mean we just work less. But the truth of the matter, over 100 years, over a century of data from the second and the third industrial revolution, is that humans love to have a sense of purpose. They like to invent, and we’re constantly out there inventing. We’re not just writing poetry. I love poetry, but we’re inventing all kinds of things beyond poetry all the time.
Where are we going to be when robots and AI do a lot of the work that we do today? We’re going to be upskilled. We’re going to be learning how to use the robots and AI to do interesting new things that we haven’t even thought about today. There’s nothing about the trends I’m seeing today that would lead me to believe an age of leisure is any more likely than in 1920, 1940, 1960, and all those predictions have been dead wrong.
So, I just don’t see that world. Anybody who reads this text, think back on the enhancements of your cell phone over the last 20 years. Has it meant that you work less? I mean, that’s a laughable proposition, right? You have better communication technology, and we work more, not less.
Illah Nourbakhsh, PhD is one of the strategic advisors for the ROBO Global Index Suite. The ROBO Global Artificial Intelligence Index underlies the ROBO Global Artificial Intelligence ETF (THNQ). The ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index underlies the ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index ETF (ROBO). The ROBO Global Healthcare Technology and Innovation Index underlies the ROBO Global Healthcare Technology and Innovation ETF (HTEC).
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