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Your Job Has Been Robot-sourced

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rosie-the-robot

“People are racing against the machine, and many of them are losing that race…Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine.”

– Erik Brynjolfsson, Innovation Researcher

Libraries are busy making lots of metadata and data networks. But who are we making this for anyway? Answer: The Machines

I spent the last week catching up on what the TED Conference has to say on robots, artificial intelligence and what these portend for the future of humans…all with an eye on the impact on my own profession: librarians.

A digest of the various talks would go as follows:

    • Machine learning and AI capabilities are advancing at an exponential rate, just as forecast
    • Robots are getting smarter and more ubiquitous by the year (Roomba, Siri, Google self-driving cars, drone strikes)

Machines are replacing humans at an increasing rate and impacting unemployment rates

The experts are personally torn on the rise of the machines, noting that there are huge benefits to society, but that we are facing a future where almost every job will be at risk of being taken by a machine. Jeremy Howard used words like “wonderful” and “terrifying” in his talk about how quickly machines are getting smarter (quicker than you think!). Erik Brynjolfsson (quoted above) shared a mixed optimism about the prospects this robotification holds for us, saying that a major retooling of the workforce and even the way society shares wealth is inevitable.

Personally, I’m thinking this is going to be more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution, which stirred up some serious feelings as you may recall: Unionization, Urbanization, Anarchism, Bolshevikism…but also some nice stuff (once we got through the riots, revolutions and Pinkertons): like the majority of the world not having to shovel animal manure and live in sod houses on the prairie. But what a ride!

This got me thinking about the end game the speakers were loosely describing and how it relates to libraries. In their estimation, we will see many, many jobs disappear in our lifetimes, including lots of knowledge worker jobs. Brynjolfsson says the way we need to react is to integrate new human roles into the work of the machines. For example, having AI partners that act as consultants to human workers. In this scenario (already happening in healthcare with IBM Watson), machines scour huge datasets and then give their advice/prognosis to a human, who still gets to make the final call. That might work for some jobs, but I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that being a little redundant at some point, especially when you’re talking about machines that may even be smarter than their human partner.

But still, let’s take the typical public-facing librarian, already under threat by the likes of an ever-improving Google. As I discussed briefly in Rise of the Machines, services like Google, IBM Watson, Siri and the like are only getting better and will likely, and possibly very soon, put the reference aspect of librarianship out of business altogether. In fact, because these automated information services exist on mobile/online environments with no library required, they will likely exacerbate the library relevance issue, at least as far as traditional library models are concerned.

Of course, we’re quickly re-inventing ourselves (read how in my post Tomorrow’s Tool Library on Steroids), but one thing is clear, the library as the community’s warehouse and service center for information will be replaced by machines. In fact, a more likely model would be one where libraries pool community resources to provide access to cutting-edge AI services with access to expensive data resources, if proprietary data even exists in the future (a big if, IMO).

What is ironic, is that technical service librarians are actually laying the groundwork for this transformation of the library profession. Every time technical service librarians work out a new metadata schema, mark up digital content with micro-data, write a line of RDF, enhance SEO of their collections or connect a record to linked data, they are really setting the stage for machines to not only index knowledge, but understand its semantic and ontological relationships. That is, they’re building the infrastructure for the robot-infused future. Funny that.

As Brynjolfsson suggests, we will have to create new roles where we work side-by-side with the machines, if we are to stay employed.

On this point, I’d add that we very well could see that human creativity still trumps machine logic. It might be that this particular aspect of humanity doesn’t translate into code all that well. So maybe the robots will be a great liberation and we all get to be artists and designers!

Or maybe we’ll all lose our jobs, unite in anguish with the rest of the unemployed 99% and decide it’s time the other 1% share the wealth so we can all, live off the work of our robots, bliss-out in virtual reality and plan our next vacations to Mars.

Or, as Ray Kurzweil would say, we’ll just merge with the machines and trump the whole question of unemployment, let alone mortality.

Or we could just outlaw AI altogether and hold back the tide permanently, like they did in Dune. Somehow that doesn’t seem likely…and the machines probably won’t allow it. LOL

Anyway, food for thought. As Yoda said: “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”

Meanwhile, speaking of movies…

If this subject intrigues you, Hollywood is also jumping into this intellectual meme, pushing out several robot and AI films over the last couple years. If you’re interested, here’s my list of the ones I’ve watched, ordered by my rating (good to less good).

  1. Her: Wow! Spike Jonze gives his quirky, moody, emotion-driven interpretation of the AI question. Thought provoking and compelling in every regard.
  2. Black Mirror, S02E01 – Be Right Back: Creepy to the max and coming to a bedroom near you soon!
  3. Automata: Bleak but interesting. Be sure NOT to read the expository intro text at the beginning. I kept thinking this was unnecessary to the film and ruined the mystery of the story. But still pretty good.
  4. Transcendence: A play on Ray Kurzwell’s singularity concept, but done with explosions and Hollywood formulas.
  5. The Machine: You can skip it.

Two more are on my must watch list: Chappie and Ex Machina, both of which look like they’ll be quality films that explore human-robot relations. They may be machines, but I love when we dress them up with emotions…I guess that’s what you should expect from a human being. 🙂

Future is More than just Mobile

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Prediction season is upon us. We’re coming up on 02012, and prepping for my library’s 6 month review of our annual plan. So, why not a few thoughts on the future of libraries?

Obviously annual plans only look a year out and so immediate technologies are top of mind in that particular document: mobile, Quick Response Codes (QRC’s), location-based services (LBS) and eBooks, to name a few. But I’m a far-focused futurist, so allow me to indulge that perspective as I consider the future of libraries and what we’re doing at DePaul University’s Libraries.

Let’s start with mobile. This is a hot topic among librarians, but few understand that the long-term mobile story is just getting started. In just a few years, brands such as Android and Apple will offer the truly killer app of mobile technology: Google Goggles and iShades. And when that happens, those augmented reality devices will dwarf the techno-social impacts the Internet has stirred thus far.

Think back to when Bill Clinton began heralding the age of the Information Super Highway back in the mid-1990s. Readers of Mondo2000, that shining, but short-lived Silicon Valley technobabble magazine (before there was Wired!), will recall its pages filled with dreams of global social uprisings spawned by the freeing of information from the oppressive clutches of the physical world. Anything would be possible…perhaps, gulp, a psychedelic, neo-anarchistic Utopia that would make Occupy Wall Street shudder!

Mondo2000 and the Clintonians had big ideas and many have come true in one way or another. But nowhere in that vision was mobile.

Fast forward to 02012 and mobile is changing the Internet once again. We hear about “responsive design” for our websites that take the mobile view as the starting place and build out from there. We hear about mobile reference services. QRC’s in the stacks. Mobile-friendly knowledge management services embedded in our web services.

But this is near-focused planning that, by 02022, will prove as naive as Mondo2000’s 01991 musings on Mandelbrot fractals that will one-day synch with your CD Player!

Google Goggles and iShades will be about taking the Internet and laying it over the physical landscape: Your street, your friends, your sports, your own person and, yes, your libraries. Information formerly at your fingertips, will now be on your eyeballs, on demand, curated to your personal, social and professional history with relevancy also weighted by your actual location. And I might emphasize, that physical location itself will be embedded with a history of FAQs built up by previous Killroys that stood there before you.

So, you might ask, if I’ve got Wikipedia, Yelp, Google and Angry Birds super-imposed over my world, why do I even need a library in my town or university?

Let’s be honest, many people will not. Quasi-intelligent web services (akin to today’s forerunners like IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri) will be able to field most public library-type questions, basing their answers on all the kinds of data curation variables listed above. Information commons will also be made redundant for most people as software moves to web versions that you can manipulate in the air just in front of your physical body. And books…give me a break. Print…and text for that matter…will soon be confined to a narrow set of use cases. Video, web-demos and avatar instructors will be the new medium of most communication in the world of Augmented Reality. And I would add, web pages will be as antiquated in 02022 as the yellow pages are in 02012.

But all this said, the library will still have a role, some of it fulfilling its traditional mission of bringing information to those without the means or skills to access it on their own. And let’s face it, we are moving into a world of reduced resources and scaled-back prosperity; a world that will need to go through some painful transitions in how it supplies affordable energy, right down to affordable calories for those 7+billion human engines going viral on Spaceship Earth. So, there will be no shortage of people requiring a central technology and information access point…that place we will call the library.

But new services will also be core to their work. Despite a more humble economic outlook, the world of 02022 and beyond will hardly be standing still. Technological change will be accelerating and with it, there will be pressure for even extraordinary people to cope. Enter the techbrarian: an expert in emerging devices, web services and information resources whose job it will be to train students, business people and the general public on how to keep up with the dizzying changes hurdling us into Tomorrow.

At DePaul’s Libraries, we’re laying the groundwork for this Age of Augmentation (and disruption). QRC’s are our starting point, even though they are really just a bridge technology like the Prius is to Electric Vehicles and the Walkman was to the iPod. Layering our stacks with those distorted crossword-puzzle-looking codes is akin to assigning a URI to a physical location, which is a baby-step toward augmented reality.

Our plan comes in three initial phases, starting with creating QRC access points to reference services, leading to integration of our LibGuide Research Guides with relevant sections of our stacks and then on toward taking the QRCs outside the library to other locations around campus. Eventually, we envision applying this technology to allow users to check out computer terminals and reserve rooms.

But QRCs are small potatoes. Ultimately, we envision taking the URI’s assigned to physical locations and generating augmented reality services. Imagine walking into our library with your iShades on and being able to instantly identify available rooms based on green indicators super-imposed over our library doors. Imagine being able to have a virtual chat with a reference librarian/machine whose avatar appears in a window hovering over the rare book you are examining…a librarian who can see what you see on the page and help you understand the nuances of the book’s illustrations. Imagine coming in to the library broke and confused, but with an urgent information need that requires you to visit the sub-surface oceans of Ganymede to understand the recently discovered xenocology swimming in all that Jovian brine.

Welcome to DePaul’s Libraries of 02022! This is your techbrarian speaking: Check out the latest in augmented eyeware, sit back and prepare for liftoff!

Elementary, Dear Watson

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Talking robots are nothing new. My toy robot, 2XL, could do that. He could even laugh, and make me laugh. But of course 2XL, like every talking machine since, wasn’t really exhibiting intelligence. Behind those words, were just some tricks. In 2XL’s case, it was a clever use of an 8-track tape.

And, as computer science has advanced, so too have the tricks. In fact, the tricks may be getting so advanced, that it soon may be impossible to tell where tricks stop and intelligence begins. Indeed, we may discover that intelligence is really just a very advanced bag of biological gimmicks.

But the language trick for computers is a serious challenge. I remember when I worked in a Board of Education office in Japan, one of my Japanese colleagues approached me with a print-out with some text on it. Looking it over I could see that it was English…or was supposed to be. The words were English alright, but their meaning was lost in a scramble of nonsensical grammatical errors. I was then told that this was the work of a computer translation program and I was asked to judge its quality. Well, I had no idea what it was talking about, even after several minutes of decoding work.

This kind of linguistic screw-up by a computer won’t surprise anyone. What would be surprising is a computer that could talk…for real. No matter how great our machines, they just can’t crack the mysteries of language (and frankly I think this is perhaps the most intriguing mystery yet to be solved).

Despite the difficulty, we are getting closer to intelligent machines, at remarkable speed. Google Translate is now catching people’s attention for its “uncanny” ability to get translation right much more of the time than we’ve been used to. And now, comes next week’s Jeopardy match-up between the two best Jeopardy players and a computer from IBM called Watson.

[A small aside here: 2XL once told me how Stanley Kubrick came up with the name for HAL, the killer AI computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick just took the letters IBM and used the letters that preceded them in the alphabet. After explaining this, 2XL then gave one his endearingly ridiculous laughs.]

Anyway, it was interesting when Deep Blue (that other wonderbot from IBM) beat the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov…but that wasn’t really that amazing since we’ve known that games are often just plays on probabilities and statistics, things that computers can do quite well. Jeopardy, on the other hand, that’s a game based on language…at least to a large extent…so getting Watson to even be able to compete is a big deal.

As a librarian, this is starting to cross the interesting-line. Watching Watson tackle complex questions (or answers in the case of Jeopardy), sorting through the immensity of online databases and digital materials and then coming up with the right answer (in spoken language no less!), well, this is worth a standing ovation, if only Watson would appreciate that. In a sense, he’s doing reference work…a very challenging job indeed.

But watching this spectacle, you can quickly see the potential for online versions of Watson, which hopefully IBM will be working toward shortly after their PR coup on America’s smartest quiz show whets our appetite for interfacing with this proto-entity. We’ve seen similar tools through Google and, especially, through Wolfram-Alpha, which can use natural language questions and return quite accurate results. But what is really neat about Watson, is that he can actually learn from mistakes and get better over time.

Remember my posting about the kinds of skills incoming librarians need? Add statistics and computer learning theory to the mix. And if you’re Watson, take a tip from 2XL, and get yourself a cute laugh. People won’t be afraid of you so much.