Rob Nail: Dummy’s Guide to how robots are transforming the world of work

This special Podcast is brought to you by Barclays Africa, and Rob Nail is the Chief Executive of Singularity University, also an expert in robots. We’ll get onto the university itself, in a moment, but I loved your presentation, where you brought a little fellow called Wesley onto the stage.

Yes, Wesley he’s a good friend. My son, whose about two years old, absolutely adores and loves to play with Wesley.

Wesley is a robot. Are there many of them in the U.S.?

Yes, Wesley is a ‘Now Robot’ and built by a company called Aldebaran in France, and the ‘NEO’ platform is probably one of the most popular education robots out there. They’ve got thousands of these ‘Now Robots’ at universities all over the world. They’re used mostly for teaching people how to program, but also a lot of the basics of robotics. They’re also used, pretty extensively for a competition called the Robo-Cup and, interestingly the Robo-Cup started more than 20 years ago. When I was in college we would take part in this, sort of soccer competition and, interestingly, 20 years ago, the best we could do was build a platform that could follow a line on the ground and you could load it with a soccer ball and it could, sort of shoot towards a goal. Today, eight-year-old kids can program these bipedal robots, like Wesley, in teams to, strategically play soccer.

Eight-year-old kids?

Yes, it’s incredible. It’s insane. Obviously, at a very elementary level, but the fact that they can do it at all is extraordinary. In the Robo-Cup Games their aspiration is for the year 2050, we will have a robotic competition, where the robots will play at the Olympic level, so robot soccer team against human, top performers in 2050, and I think it may happen quite a bit sooner than that, actually, at that level.  It’s really exciting times for the field of robotics.

The whole way of programming, and you said eight-year-olds can do it clearly; it is very different to when you were at university, 20 years ago.

Yes, absolutely, 20 years ago you had to have a degree in robotics or computer science to understand how to program a robot to do the simplest things. Back then it was, really about very specifically controlling motors and specific sensor inputs and figuring out what to do with it. Today we have open source libraries of code repositories. We have Dragon Drop software tools that really, almost anyone can walk up to, for the first time, and do some pretty complex things.

Now, just leveraging years and years of code basis and sub-routines. Where if you picked up one of these flying drones that you can buy at airports now, it would be completely impossible for us to fly that as a remote control, if you were controlling the speed of each motor but, essentially the AI of that robot, understands your intention. You’d say, “I want to go left,” and then it varies the speed and the programming of everything else, so your programming is really around intention. That’s kind of the interesting wave of, now that we’re starting to have more and more sophisticated robotic systems. The way we program them is with our intentions. We don’t have to worry about the details of the sensors and the motors and all of the complexities of the control system. It only needs our input around what we want it to do.

So that’s all become commoditised.

Yes, absolutely, and I think this is what one of my most, I think one of the most exciting areas, where this is coming into form today, is a new wave of automation for manufacturing for products and services. In the 80’s we had a lot of new robotic arms, doing hardcore assembly processes, and there was a big fear that those were going to replace jobs, which they did. But it also created productivity, allowed for lots of new jobs to be created, and you know that’s actually an interesting thing we can come back to, with regards to jobs.

But today the robotic systems are smart enough and safe enough that we can work with these robots, right. In the 80’s those robotic facilities had to have gates and fences around them because if a human walked in there, the robots were so dumb that they wouldn’t see you coming and if you walked in the wrong place it could literally kill you. There were many mishaps, working with early automation systems.

Today these systems are… They have sensor rays and they’re smart enough that you can interact with them. In fact, you have line manufacturing workers that will teach the robot what to do today, and working with it during the day. When it’s finished with its task, you can teach it to do something else, and so it’s about empowering the workers to do more than they could ever before, and to  have a lot of adaptability and variability in the line.

Rob, that’s the bright side. When you come to a developing country like South Africa, where a lot of people are doing robotic-type work, just to stay employed.

Yes.

They’d be extremely fearful to hear the developments that will, perhaps, take away their wage.

So this is a big concern, I think, that we all have and rightfully we should have, because there is a reality of, what we call the ‘technological disruption of jobs’. In the 60’s there were some really brilliant engineers and business people, who wrote a letter to the President of the United States, saying, “Hey, this new computer thing is very disruptive and we’re going to have a huge problem with jobs.” What happened?  Well, we lost certain types of jobs, but millions of other types of jobs were created because it empowers us to be able to do things we couldn’t imagine before.

These new robotic platforms are going to do the same. The challenge is there is a transition period, right, where we have to adapt and figure out what those new jobs are going to be, so there’s a transition, where it’s going to be pretty challenging, socially. But there is also research showing that in some areas, specifically like South Korea and the United States, and a few other countries that have deployed robotics dramatically. Those are creating higher levels of productivity, boosting economy, which allows companies to grow and actually create more jobs, so more robots sometimes means more jobs as well.

It’s a bit of a paradox.

It is an interesting paradox, and it’s a pretty complex situation because in some countries, absolutely more robots has meant the loss of certain types of jobs completely, so there’s an interesting challenge that we’re going through today. I’m very optimistic long-term because I do believe there will be a great empowerment that robotics will do things that we don’t want to do, right. But we don’t yet have the social structure to allow for the stability and for all of our basic needs to be met yet.

Robotics will allow us, in the not too distant future, in our lifetimes, the ability to have all of our basic needs met. The growing of food, we’re looking at, sort of a lot of transformations in the health industry, a lot of the things that we need on a day-to-day basis. The automated systems could provide for us, and that will allow us, I believe long-term, to focus on our passion and curiosity. It will allow us to explore space, externally, and explore internally, in our creativity, right (in our minds), and that, I think, is a great future for humanity.

It’s interesting to talk to and to be exposed to people from your university, Singularity University, because there’s an overriding optimism that comes through. The idea that you can harness energy from the sun, to make all energy very cheap. The idea that you could transform water, from the oceans, to be useable for mankind, is that a theme that I’ve just picked up here from here or is that the way that you guys really think? 

No, I think we really do believe that if you look at research around all of the human issues, around our health, around poverty, what you will find is that by every measure, humanity has progressed dramatically over the last 100 years, due to technology, right. The maternal health rates are longevity. What it means to be in poverty today is dramatically different than what it meant 50 years ago, and so the bottom line, the worst off amongst us, has risen dramatically.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we still don’t have a long way to go, but technology has allowed us to move very far forward, so long-term, yes. We are extremely optimistic but we’re not deluded to think that we don’t have a lot of really fundamental challenges today. In fact, a big part of the university, not only do we have subject matter in the exponential technologies, but we also teach around policy, law, and ethics, economics and finance, design, entrepreneurship because it is not just technology. It’s the social and political issues that are going to allow for technology to empower us or to disable us, right and there are some major, major threats that technology also brings with it.

That we need to be discussing and, truthfully, one of my biggest senses of urgency comes around the fact that our politicians and many of our global leaders have no idea of what we’re capable of with technology today. Both good and bad, right, so the university’s really drive is to bring forms, to bring the conversation to the entire planet around ‘this is what technology is capable of’, the opportunities, and the implications. Now, where do we want to go with it and let’s make our future an exciting and successful one?

Now, you brought the university to South Africa. It’s almost like you’ve transplanted Silicon Valley into Johannesburg for three days. What happens next? Can you come back again? Will you keep in touch?

Yes, that’s a good question, so interestingly I see Singularity University very much not just Silicon Valley. We have thousands of alumni now, in more than 90 countries, right. It is very much… I feel like it is, very much a global movement. In that, we have a growing population of people, thinking differently about the future and the opportunities that really are around.

But how do they think differently?

They see technology moving exponentially, in our regulatory processes and in our politics, in our education systems, being based, and having started hundreds or thousands of years ago, when the mindset was completely linear, right. So technology is moving too fast for any of those systems to keep up, which is going to create great strife.

So everyone that comes through Singularity University recognises that the biggest opportunities that we have at hand, are going to be leveraging these technologies. Peter likes to say, “If you want to make a billion Dollars, positively impact a billion people,” which is at the reach of everyone on the planet that has access to the internet today, and that is growing rapidly as well, right.

So doing good in the world?

Yeah, doing good and, you know, there’s a common saying, “You can do good and do well along with it,” and in fact, I think that’s the only way forward, and technology provides that for all of us, so I think we do have a growing alumni base. That really wants to engage with technologies. They want to engage with corporations. They want to engage with entrepreneurs and start-ups and they want to engage with the government, to really work together to, kind of point the directions, of where the future should head.

Singularity University is identifying the interesting movements that are happening all over the world. It is not just in Silicon Valley, right. These amazing ideas can come from anywhere. In fact, they do and, interestingly we’re in a fun time where the U.S. is so heavily regulated that we’re slowing down, stopping many of the new, latest breakthroughs, and slowing the potential opportunities that come with it, which gives a great opportunity for other nations and cities, to completely leapfrog what is happening in the United States. So it is an amazing time right now, for a local region to take advantage of the capabilities of 3D printing, and new robotics that empower workers.

If South Africa wanted to create its own new manufacturing base. It could, overnight, right, there are incredible opportunities. If South Africa wanted to revolutionise the urban environment around robo-cars and autonomous vehicles, it could, overnight. It’s just a political and social courage problem, right. First, understanding the opportunities, and then doing it.

So back to your question about ‘are we coming back’? What we want to do is find local partners that we can sort of engage, and inspire and learn from, because there’s some amazing uniqueness to this region. That’s unlike anywhere else in the world, you know, it’s a very interesting, kind of crazy place. Just like every place is, but in its own unique way, so there are unique resources and assets and people and talent here. That if we can inspire them to think similarly about an amazing future using technology, we want to support the growth of that community. We want to be a part of that and we want to connect that to all of the other communities that we’re empowering around the world.

Rob Nail, is the Chief Executive of Singularity University, and this special Podcast was brought to you by Barclays Africa. 

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