New technologies and advances in articifical intelligence are posing a major threat to traditional professions such as lawyers, doctors and even fund managers, Ben Hammersley, editor at large at Wired Magazine, told delegates at the annual INREV conference in Vienna on Wednesday.
'Many jobs are being taken over by artificial intelligence. We're just meat puppets keeping the seats warm and waiting for the robots to come.'
Hammersley pointed to examples in the legal and financial sectors where software programmes can scan legal documents or spreadsheets and spew out a fundamentally sound analysis. New technologies are not creating as many jobs as they are destroying, he added. 'It's a huge social problem…fund managers are screwed.'
Pointing to Moore's law, Hammersley said Gordon Moore's observation in the 1960s that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years continues be true. Moore's prediction was subsequently used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.
That pace of development has simply accelerated in the past decades, Hammersley said. 'The amount of computing power is doubling every year. That has fundamental implications for everything we do.'
Computing power is getting cheaper every year
In the past, swords didn't get twice as sharp every year and horses didn't get twice as fast, he noted. 'We now use digital tools to make new tools and it doesn’t seem to be stopping. And the inverse of Moore's law is that with the same amount of computing power, the price halves every year. The whole of the world’s industries are having to deal with that.'
The role of the real estate industry will also change, he predicted. 'Our role over the next 20 years will be to create incredibly human buildings today that will allow us to live tomorrow alongside these new amazing technologies.'
Increasingly people will want to live in an environment that facilitates electric charging, solar panels and drone deliveries, he added. 'The desire to use these technologies is so great that some people are actively looking to move to housing developments that have them…Real estate is both the stage for life and the enabler for it. As we head into the future, it is incredibly important to think about the buildings you are offering to the market and whether they can use those new technologies. If they don’t that will be a huge detriment to you as a business.'
Professional jobs are on the chopping block
In recent decades, it was the car workers or miners that were put out of work by the capitalist system and advances in production methods. In the coming decades, professionals will find themselves without a job, Hammersley predicted. 'Moore's law is unleashing tidal waves of new forms of jobs. That will cause all people with old jobs to reassess their old lives and their environment and what they do.'
While sceptics may doubt whether software programmes can perform as well as humans at picking stocks for example, there are also doubts in the market about whether humans are any good at that job, Hammersley pointed out. In the long run, software tools incorporating artificial intelligence perform pretty well on average, he said. 'Even professionals can be replaced by a piece of software…everybody will be better off.'
