Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (53 page)

Among white-collar workers, the losers will be those involved in middleman work taking inventory and “bean counting.” This means low-level agents, brokers, tellers, accountants, etc., will be increasingly thrown out of work as their jobs disappear. These jobs are called “the friction of capitalism.” Already, one can buy a plane ticket by scanning the Web for the best prices, bypassing a travel agent.

Merrill Lynch, for example, famously stated that it would never adopt online stock trading. It would always do stock trading the old-fashioned way. John Steffens, Merrill’s brokerage chief, said, “The do-it-yourself model of investing, centered on Internet trading, should be regarded as a serious threat to America’s financial lives.” So it was humiliating, therefore, when it was finally forced by market forces to adopt online trading in 1999. “Rarely in history has the leader in an industry felt compelled to do an about-face and, virtually overnight, adopt what is essentially a new business model,” wrote Charles Gasparino of ZDNet news.

This also means that the corporate pyramid will be thinned out. Since the people at the very top can interact directly with the sales force and representatives in the field, there is less need for middlemen to carry out orders from the top. In fact, such job reductions occurred when the personal computer first entered the office.

So how will middlemen survive in the future? They will have to add value to their work and provide the one commodity that robots cannot deliver: common sense.

For example, in the future, you will be able to buy a house on the Internet via your watch or contact lens. But no one is going to buy a house this way, since this is one of the most important financial transactions you will perform in your life. For important purchases like a home, you want to talk to a human who can tell you where the good schools are, where the crime rate is low, how the sewer system works,
etc.
For this, you want to talk to a skilled agent who adds value.

Similarly, low-level stockbrokers are being thrown out of work by online trading, but stockbrokers who give reasoned, wise investment advice will always be in demand. Brokerage jobs will continue to dry up unless they offer value-added services, such as the wisdom of top market analysts and economists and the inside knowledge of experienced brokers. In an era when online trading mercilessly drives down the cost of stock trades, stockbrokers will survive only if they can also market their intangible qualities, such as experience, knowledge, and analysis.

So among white-collar workers, the winners will be those who can provide useful common sense. This means workers involved with creativity—artwork, acting, telling jokes, writing software, leadership, analysis, science, creativity—qualities that “make us human.”

People in the arts will have jobs, since the Internet has an insatiable appetite for creative art. Computers are great at duplicating art and helping artists to embellish art, but they are miserable at originating new forms of it. Art that inspires, intrigues, evokes emotions, and thrills us is beyond the capability of a computer, because all these qualities involve common sense.

Novelists, scriptwriters, and playwrights will have jobs, since they have to convey realistic scenes, human conflicts, and human triumphs and defeats. For computers, modeling human nature, which involves understanding motives and intentions, is beyond their capability. Computers are not good at determining what makes us cry or laugh, since they cannot cry or laugh on their own, or understand what is funny or sad.

People involved in human relations, such as lawyers, will have jobs.

Although a robolawyer can answer rudimentary questions about the law, the law itself is constantly changing, depending on shifting social standards and mores. Ultimately, the interpretation of the law boils down to a value judgment, where computers are deficient. If the law were cut-and-dried with clear-cut interpretations, there would be no need for courts, judges, and juries. A robot cannot replace a jury, since juries often represent the mores of a specific group, which are constantly shifting with time. This was most apparent when Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once had to define pornography. He failed to do so, but concluded, “I know it when I see it.”

Furthermore, it will probably be illegal for robots to replace the justice system, since our laws have enshrined a fundamental principle: that juries be made up of our peers. Since robots cannot be our peers, it will be illegal for them to replace the justice system.

On the surface, laws may seem exacting and well-defined, with precise and rigorous wording and arcane-sounding titles and definitions. But this is only an appearance, since the interpretations of these definitions constantly shifts. The U.S. Constitution, for example, appears to be a well-defined document, yet the Supreme Court is constantly split down the middle on controversial questions. It is forever reinterpreting every word and phrase in the Constitution. The changing nature of human values can be easily seen simply by looking at history. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 ruled that slaves could never become citizens of the United States. In some sense, it took a civil war and the death of thousands to overturn that decision.

Leadership will also be a prized commodity in the future. In part, leadership consists of sizing up all the available information, viewpoints, and options and then choosing the most appropriate one, consistent with certain goals. Leadership becomes especially complicated because it deals with inspiring and providing guidance to human workers, who have their own personal strengths and weaknesses. All these factors require a sophisticated understanding of human nature, market forces, etc., that is beyond the ability of any computer.

This also means that entire industries, such as entertainment, are undergoing a profound upheaval. For example, the music industry since time immemorial was based on individual musicians who went from town to town, making personal appearances. Entertainers were constantly on the road, setting up shop one day and then moving on to the next village. It was a hard life, with little financial reward. This age-old pattern changed abruptly when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and forever changed the way we hear music. Suddenly, one singer could produce records sold by the millions and derive revenue on a previously unimaginable scale. Within a single generation, rock singers would become the nouveau riche of society. Rock stars, who might have been lowly waiters in a previous generation, became the venerated idols of youth society.

But unfortunately, the music industry ignored the predictions of scientists who foresaw the day when music would be easily sent over the Internet, like e-mail. The music industry, instead of laying the groundwork for how to earn money selling online, instead tried to sue upstart companies that offered music at a fraction of the cost of a CD. This was like trying to sweep back the ocean. This neglect is causing the present turmoil within the music industry.

(But the good thing is that unknown singers can now rise to the top, without having to face the de facto censorship of the big music companies. In the past, these music moguls could almost choose who the next rock star would be. So, in the future, the top musicians will be chosen more democratically, via a free-for-all involving market forces and technology, rather than by music business executives.)

Newspapers are also facing a similar dilemma. Traditionally, newspapers could rely on a steady stream of revenue from advertisers, especially in the classified ads section. The revenue stream came not so much from the purchase of the paper itself, but from the ad revenue those pages generated. But now we can download the day’s news for free and advertise nationwide on a variety of online want-ads sites. As a consequence, newspapers around the country are shrinking in size and circulation.

But this process will continue only so far. There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom. Random facts do not correlate with wisdom, and in the future people will be tired of the rants of mad bloggers and will seek out respected sites that offer this rare commodity of wisdom.

As economist Hamish McRae has said, “In practice, the vast bulk of this ‘information’ is rubbish, the intellectual equivalent of junk mail.” But he claims, “Good judgment will continue to be highly valued: successful financial analysts are, as a group, the best paid researchers in the world.”

But what about Hollywood actors? Instead of becoming box-office celebrities and the talk of society, will actors find themselves on the unemployment line? Recently, there has been remarkable progress in computer animations of the human body, so that it appears nearly real. Animated characters now have 3-D features and shadowing. So will actors and actresses become obsolete anytime soon?

Probably not. There are fundamental problems modeling the human face by computer. Humans evolved an uncanny ability to differentiate one another’s faces, since our survival depended on it. In a flash, we had to tell if someone was an enemy or a friend. Within seconds, we had to rapidly determine a person’s age, sex, strength, and emotion. Those who could not do this simply did not survive to pass on their genes to the next generation. Hence, the human brain devotes a considerable amount of its processing power to reading people’s faces. In fact, for most of our evolutionary history, before we learned how to speak, we communicated through gestures and body language, and a large part of our brain power was devoted to looking at subtle facial cues. But computers, which have a hard time recognizing simple objects around them, have even greater difficulty recreating a realistic animated human face. Kids know immediately if the face they see on the movie screen is a real human or a computer simulation. (This goes back to the Cave Man Principle. Given a choice between seeing a live-action blockbuster action movie with our favorite actor or seeing a computer-animated cartoon action picture, we will still prefer the former.)

The body, by contrast, is much easier to model by computer. When Hollywood creates those realistic monsters and fantasy figures in the movies, they use a shortcut. An actor puts on a skintight suit that has sensors on its joints. As the actor moves or dances, the sensors send signals to a computer that then creates an animated figure performing the precise movements, as in the movie
Avatar.

I once spoke at a conference sponsored by the Livermore National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed, and at dinner sat next to someone who had worked on the movie
The Matrix.
He confessed that they had to use an enormous amount of computer time to create the dazzling special effects in that movie. One of the most difficult scenes, he said, required them to completely reconstruct an imaginary city as a helicopter flew overhead. With enough computer time, he said, he could create an entire fantasy city. But, he admitted, modeling a realistic human face was beyond his ability. This is because when a light beam hits the human face, it scatters in all directions, depending on its texture. Each particle of light has to be tracked by computer. Hence, each point of skin on a person’s face has to be described by a complex mathematical function, which is a real headache for a computer programmer.

I remarked that this sounded very much like high-energy physics, my specialty. In our atom smashers, we create a powerful beam of protons that slams into a target, creating a shower of debris that scatters in all directions. We then introduce a mathematical function (called the form factor) that describes each particle.

Half jokingly, I asked if there was a relationship between the human face and high-energy particle physics? Yes, he replied. Computer animators use the same formalism used in high-energy physics to create the faces you see on the movie screen! I never realized that the arcane formulae that we theoretical physicists use may one day crack the problem of modeling the human face. So the fact that we can recognize the human face is similar to the way we physicists analyze subatomic particles!

These new technologies that we have been discussing in this book are so powerful that, by the end of the century, they are bound to have an impact on capitalism itself. The laws of supply and demand are the same, but the rise of science and technology has modified Adam Smith’s capitalism in many ways, from the way that goods are distributed to the nature of wealth itself. Some of the more immediate ways in which capitalism has been affected are as follows:

•
Perfect capitalism

The capitalism of Adam Smith is based on the laws of supply and demand: prices are set when the supply for any good matches the demand. If an object is scarce and in demand, then its price rises. But the consumer and producer have only partial, imperfect understanding of supply and demand, and hence prices can vary widely from place to place. So the capitalism of Adam Smith was imperfect. But this will gradually change in the future.