One wonders why our ancestors went to such trouble. Cellars are useful, of course, especially in a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters; but to keep on digging downwards must have required a huge effort in an age before digging machinery. If they needed more space, why didn’t they just build a bigger house out of town?

The answer is that you had to be in town to benefit from the protection of city walls – and so when there was no more space at the surface, and houses had as many storeys as was feasible back then, the only other way was down.

In the global cities of the 21st century, the Middle Ages are back. Constrained not by city walls, but by property prices and planning restrictions, we’re digging down again.

Further reading

Should the rich be allowed to destroy their own wealth?

By Peter Franklin

In an article for the Guardian, Bradley L Garrett describes the land grab now taking place beneath our feet. Most notoriously, there’s the fashion for basement extensions in the posher part of central London:

“In London, a city with 150 years of trenching, digging and boring to its name, the chaos is reaching new depths. According to Newcastle University’s Global Urban Research Unit, more than 4,600 basements have been granted planning permission in the last decade – in just seven of London’s 32 boroughs…

“…Many of the basements contained cinemas, gymnasiums, pools, wine cellars and panic rooms. One even included plans for a subterranean beach with an accompanying waterfall.”

An especially weird aspect of these subterranean follies is that the diggers used to excavate them are often left behind. Having dug their way down into a confined space, the only way of getting them back up is by lifting them out with a crane – the costs and complications of which can be greater than buying a new digger. Therefore the last thing they do is dig their own graves to one side of the main development. That should be something for the archeologists of the future to puzzle over.

Technology, however, is moving on. Garrett mentions Elon Musk’s Boring Company – whose mission is to use tunnelling machines to create a 3D road network beneath Los Angeles. DARPA, the inventor of the internet, is also on the case:

“…the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is currently funding a “subterranean challenge”, soliciting bids for techniques to enhance “situational awareness” of global underground spaces, with a $2m prize. The challenge is to create machines that can make their way through tunnel systems, urban undergrounds and natural caves.”

Another initiative worth a mention is the EU’s BADGER programme which aims to develop an autonomous burrowing robot.

If these and other technologies succeed in bringing down the costs of exploring and excavating the ground beneath us, then a new dimension of urban development will open up. We could afford more of what we already construct below ground e.g. road tunnels, car parks, sewers etc; and also some revolutionary applications. How about basement extensions for the masses? Or ubiquitous ducting for public utilities so that the roads never have to be dug up again?

And here’s another one: The reason why it’s so hot on some London underground tube lines is because the energy generated when the trains break has accumulated as heat in the clay surrounding the tunnels. In over a century of operation the ambient temperatures have gone from 14°C to more than 20°C. If we had an affordable and precise way of running a heat exchange network around these tunnels, we could extract the energy and use it to provide heating at the surface. Cool!

Of course, as Garrett points out, we’re going to need 3D maps of our poorly documented sub-cities and we’re going to have to properly sort out who owns what underground.

However, assuming that the technology and the regulation comes together, the space beneath us may turn out to be more significant than the space above us.

Further reading

The false promise of the vertical city

By Peter Franklin

But a lot can happen in two years. A report just published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers should go some way to calming such hysteria. It argues that AI will create slightly more jobs in the UK (7.2 million) than it displaces (7 million). So rather than lamenting an apocalyptic tomorrow in which we are ruled by our robot overlords, a more useful way to think about the future would be to consider how we can interlace the strengths of machines with those of humans.

John Giannandrea who left his role as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, to head up AI at Apple, is already doing so. “There’s just a huge amount of unwarranted hype around it right now,” he says, “[much of which is] borderline irresponsible.” We shouldn’t be using it to match or replace humans, but to make “machines slightly more intelligent — or slightly less dumb”. He isn’t dismissing the potential of computers to radically alter the way we work, but is thinking about the ways it will do so in a slightly more nuanced fashion.

He knows that the better we understand the differences between the way people think and the way in which machines calculate, the better we can assess how to work with them. For example, unlike machines, humans typically lean on a variety of mental rules of thumb that yield narratively plausible, but often logically dubious, judgments. The psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls the human mind “a machine for jumping to conclusions”.

Machines using deep-learning algorithms, in contrast, must be trained with thousands of photographs to recognise kittens— and even then, they will have formed no conceptual understanding of cats. Small children can easily learn what a kitten is from just a few examples. Not so machines. They don’t think like humans and they can only apply their ‘thinking’ to narrow fields. They cannot, therefore, associate pictures of cats with stories about cats.

But, counterintuitively perhaps, the tasks humans find hard, machines often find easy. Cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik summarises what is known as Moravec’s Paradox: “At first, we thought that the quintessential preoccupations of the officially smart few, like playing chess or proving theorems — the corridas of nerd machismo — would prove to be hardest for computers.”

Further reading

Robots will take many of today's jobs and tomorrow's jobs? They'll be dominated by women

By Nigel Cameron

But as we have discovered, this isn’t true. Computers do these terrifically complicated things effortlessly. As  Gopniks says: “It turns out to be much easier to simulate the reasoning of a highly trained adult expert than to mimic the ordinary learning of every baby.”

We are bound to learn more as we work out how our strengths can work in concert. Humans, for example, will employ inspiration, judgments, sense and empathy; computers will bring brawn, repetition, rules adherence, data recall and analysis.

The psychologist and computer scientist JCR “Lick” Licklider, mentor to John McCarthy who coined the term Artificial Intelligence in 1955, predicted this future harmony in 1960. Rather than speculate on computers achieving human-style intelligence, Licklider argued with remarkable prescience that humans and computers would develop a symbiotic relationship, the strengths of one would counterbalance the limitations of the other.

Lick said:

“Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinisable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. … the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

It’s a far more productive guide to the future than alarmist preditions of ‘super-intelligent’ AI. The advent of AI is simply the latest in many phases of automation, each of which has begun with fear and ended with more jobs, economic growth and prosperity. Indeed, the history of automation since the industrial revolution shows us that the introduction of machines reshapes jobs, rather than replacing them. They take on the mundane tasks, as humans move on to more complex – often more highly valued and meaningful – work. New technology tend to eliminate tasks, not work.

The goal now is subtly shifting from building machines that think like humans, to designing machines that help humans think and perform better. Most work, after all, is comprised of a mix of tasks: some of which are better suited to humans and some of which could one day be done better by machines.

As the capabilities of machines grow, managers will redesign work to take advantage of the strengths of both their human workers and their machines. Last month, Nestlé announced a new automated plant in the Midlands in which German logistics giant DHL will be installing collaborative robots, or “co-bots”, that will work alongside humans to pack goods.

While on one level, AI is but the latest phase of a centuries-old process of automating human labour, on another, this new breed of machines can sense, learn and adapt in ways that far surpass previous technologies. And as a result, it will ask new questions about human exceptionalism and how work is best done.

Let’s not forget that the heavily automated production of the Model 3 Tesla ran quickly into delays prompting Elon Musk to make an interesting volte-face. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,”he wrote in April this year. “To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”

***

Five ways humans are collaborating with intelligent machines

1. Assigned work 

Certain tasks in a human workflow are outsourced to a machine. The machine completes the task unaided, with varying levels of instruction.

• Industrial robots welding and spray painting car parts on a production line, while human workers perform other tasks like fitting the IP panels and custom parts. Industrial robots labouring 24/7 in ‘dark factories’
• Autonomous vehicles in fully autonomous mode on a motorway

2. Supervised 

Decision making processes are automated, but under a human eye. This mode requires the machine to be aware of and communicate risks and unknowns to human users.

•  Airline flights in which the pilot intervenes only in certain circumstances
•  Autonomous vehicles, which require ‘driver’ oversight.

3. Coexistent 

We will increasingly live and work alongside intelligent machines, sharing the same spaces, but focusing on separate task-flows. Machines in these scenarios must be able to effectively negotiate shared space and anticipate human intent.

• Pedestrians sharing paths with delivery robots
• Warehouse staff working in parallel with and alongside robots

4. Assistive 

Machines that will help us perform tasks faster and better. They support particular tasks in human workflows, and will excel in on discerning human goals and learning their preferences.

• Writing assistants that suggest words and how to improve text
• Exoskeletons assisting factory workers in strenuous work

5. Symbiotic

This emerging mode of collaboration is a highly interactive and reciprocal. People input strategic hypotheses and the machine suggests tactical options.

•  Chess teams comprised of humans and computers, which beat the best computer-only systems
• Adobe Sensei which automates tedious design processes, and generates options, giving the designer more time for creative tasks

Today, this can be done in a matter of hours and the plant remains fully operational. Aerial drones fitted with cameras and other sensors are can effortlessly access those areas that previously required complicated rigging or scaffolding in order to accommodate the human inspectors.

Falls from a height were responsible for 28% of fatal injuries to workers between 2012-2017, according to the UK Health and Safety Executive – making them the leading cause of death at work. These deadly falls aren’t specific to industrial inspection, but it’s a stark reminder of the dangers involved in sending workers to climb tall buildings or equipment, and an indication of the lives that could be saved by reducing such work to a minimum.

Further reading

The robodoctor will see you now

By Mark Piesing

That’s why for companies involved in the field, incorporating aerial drones and other kinds of unmanned vehicles into security, surveying and maintenance practices has the potential to both lower costs and increase safety at the same time. That’s one of the reasons why in 2017, PwC estimated that the global market for drone-powered solutions for the power and utilities industry was worth around $9.46 billion per year, with that figure set to grow as the technology is more widely adopted into standard practices.

One company which has already carved out a niche in this market is Cyberhawk, which specialises in aerial surveys of power infrastructure systems.

Founded in 2008, Cyberhawk provides data collection and photographic analysis of power stations, wind turbines, and oil and gas rigs. To conduct these surveys, an experienced pilot (counting a minimum of either 18 months’ experience or 500 hours of flight time) partners with an inspector to carry out an onsite examination.

For the power generation and resource extraction industry, surveying has historically been a costly and dangerous job. But as more parts of the process can be outsourced to machines, this is rapidly changing, as Patrick Saracco, VP for Technology Solutions at Cyberhawk, explains to me.

Before the current era, Saracco says, “Either you had people on rope access or scaffolding, or they were unable to do it at all. So now the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicles] is taking people away from risk, which is one of the biggest benefits, and also allowing the client to obtain much better and more detailed information about their specific assets.”

Use cases like these are a counter to the somewhat dystopic image of drones that has made its way into popular culture, in which the hovering robots have come to be seen as a symbol of surveillance culture or an intrusive public nuisance.

Further reading

AI will change war in unimaginable ways

By Mike Martin

A recently published report produced by the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, titled Drones In Service Of Society, argues that there are numerous applications for drones in the fields of journalism, environmental research, political activism and humanitarian aid, all of which can bring large benefits to society provided that ethical and technical regulation is implemented correctly. “I have long campaigned against the excessive use of drones in armed conflict and policing as well as their erosion of our privacy,” said Professor Noel Sharkey, co-director of the Foundation, on the report’s launch. “However, we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Most current uses of drones pre-suppose a human operator in direct control of the vehicle, whether in line-of-sight or elsewhere at a remote control station. Over time however, as the field evolves, a gradual shift is underway towards the deployment of more autonomous drones, which will be able to carry out detailed safety observations with a minimum of human involvement – a process that has just as much to do with breakthroughs in software as hardware.

As one example, in Boston, Massachusetts, autonomous inspection company Avitas Systems has been developing robotic systems capable of detecting faults with a minimum of human intervention.

According to the MIT Technology Review, Avitas Systems makes use of drones, wheeled robots, and autonomous underwater vehicles to collect images required for inspection from oil refineries, gas pipelines, coolant towers, and other equipment. The data collected is then fed into a neural network which has been trained with a large dataset of images of faulty equipment and, in theory, can be flagged as potentially dangerous if any of the same features are detected.

And while the machine learning technology supplied by Nvidia is an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution, even more can be achieved with custom development. In one example, a research team from MIT recently succeeded in producing an ultra-low power chip with a size of less than half a square centimetre, which can process camera images and inertial measurements in order to pilot drones about the size of a bee.

Though this particular technology isn’t yet ready for commercial deployment, it points toward a future where small, cheap surveying robots will be a standard part of industrial plants of all kinds, able to perform regular fault detection routines without human supervision.

Further reading

All hail the autonomous automobile!

By Henry Olsen

While there are concerns about the jobs that such autonomous systems will replace, large-scale electronic data capture can provide a level of reliability beyond the ability of even the most experienced human surveyor – and without the drawbacks of fatigue or lapses in attention; a huge bonus for the maintenance of critical infrastructure and much safer for workers.

Although some market analysts have drawn attention to the fact that adoption has been somewhat slow so far, the potential gains for the power and utilities sector are unambiguous. We’re still a good few years, perhaps even a decade or two, from the era of ubiquitous drone use in the power sector, but at this stage the question is not one of “if”, but “when”.

For the past four years, I’ve been keeping a careful eye on the sex robot market, researching the technical, ethical and legal landscape these artificial lovers inhabit. The concept is catnip to tabloid journalists seeking salacious and ultimately scary visions of sex robots that could herald the end of sex and replace and/or steal your women. The reality is more staid and nuanced.

Arguments against sexual companion robots hinge on the worry that sex robot-human relationships will be detrimental to society, damaging human-human relationships. There is also concern they will reinforce or reproduce existing inequalities, especially given their incredibly gendered appearance. Will our sex robots spill our data and our secrets to the world? And what happens, people ask, if child sex robots are manufactured?

These are all valid points and there are no easy answers. While we should be conscious of the potential pitfalls of sex technology, we also need to avoid moralistic knee-jerk responses. Stigmatisation and taboo around sex and sexual practices has caused untold misery for many people down the centuries.

There’s no evidence to suggest that human-human relationships will be damaged. Indeed, it may be a chance for people to experience feelings of love that they are otherwise denied, for any number of reasons. Whether or not that love is considered valid by society is a different matter. And while objectification is definitely an issue, it may be an avoidable one. Security and privacy breaches are a worry in any smart technologies, which puts a whole new spin on safe sex.

Suggested reading

Robots will take many of today's jobs and tomorrow's jobs? They'll be dominated by women

By Nigel Cameron

As for child sex robots – an abhorrent image – people have already been convicted for importing child-like sex dolls. But we shouldn’t shy from considering whether research might deem them useful in a clinical setting, such as testing rehabilitation success, as has been trialled with virtual reality.

While non-sexual care robots are already in use, [1. Companion robots have proved a great success helping with healthcare and providing therapeutic companionship. Manufacturers are well aware that people might turn to their creations for services that could void the warranty. In fact, Pepper, a companion robot built in collaboration between Aldebaran Robotics and the SoftBank Corporation, comes with terms and conditions that forbid the use of it for “the purpose of sexual or indecent behaviour”] it was only three months ago, that the race to produce the first commercially-available model was won by an lifeless sex doll with an animatronic head and an integrated AI chatbot called Harmony.[2. Abyss Creations is developing a male robot called Henry — but that’s a much smaller part of their business.] She might look the part but she doesn’t move from the neck down. We are still a long way from Westworld.

Naturally, a niche market will be delighted at the prospect of bespoke robot pleasure to come. But many others are worried about the impact these machines will have on our own, human relationships. These concerns aren’t dispelled by the fact that the current form of the sex robot is a reductive, cartoonish stereotype of a woman: all big hair and bigger breasts.

Why, though, does a sex robot need to be an exaggerated version of the human bodies we are so familiar with? The technology is giving us the scope to bring intimacy into the lives of people who may lack it, or to enhance existing relationships, and I don’t believe that our sex robots have to take humanoid form. In fact, I think it’s much better if they don’t.

In 2016 and 2017, I ran sex tech hackathons at Goldsmiths, University of London, where over 50 people from all walks of life formed teams to prototype new forms of technology for intimacy. The ideas that the teams came up with were far more interesting and abstract than a life-size doll.

Instead, they envisaged blankets with sensors to stimulate you, and inflatable tubes to hug, pulse and hold you; tentacle-like soft robotics that could curl around the body, and vibrators powered by mid—air hand gestures. The emphasis shifted from sexual activity to sensuality. The technology they envisaged wasn’t just to replace human lovers but to bring people closer together.

The people who currently buy sex dolls – the people who are most likely going to buy sex robots – often cite companionship as their reason for doing so. Matt McMullen from Abyss Creations, describes his customers as “a group of really nice people who just happen, by choice or not by choice, to have difficulty in forming relationships”. It’s the AI that will make the big difference in his dolls, adding the longed-for animism. Harmony’s AI is designed to exist outside of the body too, as an app on your phone or tablet: the perfect pocket girlfriend.

So sex robots don’t need to look like us, nor do they necessarily need to be designed to have sex. The rise of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa has brought basic forms of AI into our homes like never before. And you won’t be surprised to know that lots of people try to talk dirty to their artificial helpers. Some are just testing the boundaries, but others are secretly hoping for a hot reply. Perhaps they took Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with an operating system in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film /Her/, a little too seriously.

That instinct to see more personality — and even sexuality — in our robot partners is pretty understandable. We humans are social creatures with an in-built tendency to anthropomorphise, projecting our own traits onto the plastic lump or genderless helper bot working with us, presuming a personality even if one hasn’t been programmed into it. We will map our expectations onto the technology, just as we see elaborate personalities in our pets.

There’s a safety in the artificial lover: a programmable partner who is always there for you and who will never let you down. The path of human love never did run smooth but the programme of a sex robot can run entirely to your liking. It’s a difficult tension – the appeal of artificial adoration but the natural human fear of technological change.

If we are happy using machines to offer companionship to older people and to improve care in hospitals, then it seems contradictory to not allow it in to our own bedrooms. There are already some incredibly inventive designs on the market taking their cue from the health industry which are indicating where technology can go in the future — machines that can learn what we want and respond accordingly; robots that don’t look like us but know what we like. That’s why the notion of humanoid sex robots replacing sex workers or destroying marriages is far fetched – not least because it’s so difficult to make a robot look, sound and act convincingly human.

It’s all too easy when talking about sex and technology to become entirely obsessed with the pure mechanics of the process. But there’s more to it than that. This technology can reduce distance between lovers and enhance what our bodies and even our brains can do in intimate encounters. Rather than thinking of machines as other, we should be considering how best to integrate them into our lives: enhancements, not replacements.

Most people aren’t that shocked by someone owning a vibrator anymore. Introducing greater levels of technology into our sex lives will be the same. As long as we’re careful to consider the ethical development of these innovations, we have nothing to lose except our inhibitions.

These days, barely a week goes by without some politician pronouncing on cyber warfare, or new space systems, or next generation warplanes – not to mention voicing concerns about Chinese laser systems, or drone swarms, that could make those investments nugatory, for a much lower cost.

This obsession with ‘kit’ almost eclipses the fact that war is a human endeavour. One which involves beating hearts, and blood, and guts. And most important of all, brains. Wars are won when opposition make the decision that they don’t want to fight anymore — they are won when you have a better strategy than your opponent. And strategy, at its core, is and always has been about deception, or chutzpah, advance, or retreat; it is about surprise. But that may be about to change.

How so? At its simplest, strategy is two human brains trying to outcompete each other. How do I (or we, if you are the leader of a group) get him/her/them to do what I want? In warfare, the means of executing this strategy are often violent and lethal. Though not always. Russian information activities around recent plebiscites in the West demonstrate that you can achieve the desired effects non-violently. The key thing, though, is that strategy is about influencing the way an opponent thinking.

More on Automation

Would you trust a robot to build your house?

By Peter Franklin

The key thing about strategy is that it scales: the dynamics of the competition are the same, whether it is a bar brawl, two platoons fighting hunter-seeker style, two divisions in clash, or two multi-national coalitions viewing each other across a global ideological divide: all of these levels of conflict have the same dynamics of retreat, advance, bluff, feint, counter, lure, deceive, charge, and of course the goal — surrender.

Strategy is also timeless. The dances on ancient battlefields are studied for strategic insights; military officers go on battlefield tours; and business executives study Sun Tzu. Ancient strategists have something to teach us about the present, and about the future.

Strategy scales across time and space because the competing brains have barely changed in the period of recorded history. The Sapiens brain evolved on the African Savannah between about 250,000 years’ ago. It had a specific evolutionary environment: the brains of other humans in their social group of around thirty hunter-gatherers.

Because our brains have evolved in social competition with other humans, we all have the same emotional responses (more or less). We are all — at times — jealous, angry, proud, and sad. These emotions, and these ways of psychologically relating to others, are the basis for strategy. They form the timeless essence of warfare. We know how our opponent thinks and can play him at his own game. What is a ruse, if it is not playing on the opposing commander’s pride?

The mode in which we fight is less timeless, however. A mode of warfare is the method or tools which we use to fight it. Thus, we have gone from spear chucking, to phalanxes, the legions, to infantry companies, to submarines, to drone swarms. The actual physical fighting has changed beyond wildest dreams, while the dynamics of the fight have remained the same. But, artificial intelligence could be the first technology in the Anthropocene to change that.

Neural networks, a specific aspect of AI, are the closest, virtual equivalent of the human brain. They learn in analogous ways. After being exposed to stimuli, certain pathways degrade, and others reinforce.

More on Automation

Under-reported: The now proven ability of AI technology to outwit us

By Emily Thornberry

With neural networks this happens in two different ways. Either they are exposed to huge data sets, like NHS patient records, and can spot patterns of, say, cancer occurrence, and help prioritise treatments. Or they are trained on each other, in a very similar way to how the human brain evolved in social competition with other human brains.

One of the leading lights of AI is a company called DeepMind. A British start-up, it was acquired by Google in 2014 for £400m. Among their achievements, they designed the first AI system, called AlphaGo, that beat the world champion at Go — a game of abstract strategy invented in China more than 2,500 years ago. It is fiendishly complex, much more so than chess.

Essentially, DeepMind taught AlphaGo the rules of Go. Then they set it off to  learn from itself. So AlphaGo played itself tens of thousands of times over a period of three days. And then it beat Lee Sedol, the Go World Champion.

The match was then studied by other Go experts and champions. They stated that, retrospectively, they could see how AlphaGo had won, but they would never have worked out its strategy as humans. One, Ke Jie said:

“After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong … I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.”

The AI system simply thought in a different way.

Human brains that evolved through competition with other human brains create the psychology that underpins strategy, which creates the essence of warfare. But these human brains evolved in order to maximise survival and reproduction: to find food and water, and sexual partners, to form coalitions, and to avoid being killed.

AlphaGo has none of these ultimate goals: and so its strategy has an entirely different essence. That’s why, if applied to the battlefield, AI could change the essence of warfare in a way that is beyond human speculation.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

Of course, my argument relies on AI being in the decision-making loop, and we are unlikely to see this at the strategic level for some time. But at lower levels — like individual and squad — we are already there: advanced militaries are prototyping how AI can power autonomous ‘individual’ weapons (that is, killer robots).

How these robots interact when they fight each other is the preview, if you like, of how the essence of warfare could change in the future. We can’t predict how it will be different, but we can be certain it will change the rules in a way that will leave us us, like the Go grandmasters, scratching our heads.

So it’s time to correct that misconception, and fast. There is an increasingly urgent need to overhaul a sector many of us will come to rely on in later lives and, whether we like it or not, automation is the hero and not the villain of this piece.

The UK’s social care sector is facing may of the same crushing pressures that are being inflicted on the NHS, with familiar rising costs and falling funding nixing any real advancements. One in 10 older people is likely to pay more than £100,000 for their social care needs over their lifetime, and a tightening of criteria for receiving publicly funded care led to 400,000 fewer people receiving state-funded care between 2012/13 than in 2009/10, according to the Health Foundation, a healthcare policy charity.

Given the UK’s gradually increasing ageing population (18 per cent is aged 65 or over), our need for social care is only going to intensify – and the issue is made more acute by the fact that an average of 900 care workers per day are estimated to being leaving the profession. According to the National Audit Office the exodus is due to the work’s low wages and tough conditions. And it’s not just a retention problem – there’s also a severe lack of new workers joining the profession.

Enter automation. The application of AI, robotics and other technologies to the sector could help to narrow dramatically the gap between costs and revenue (which is projected to reach £2.1bn by 2019/20) and to relieve human staff of certain menial or physically demanding tasks, freeing up their time for face-to-face care of patients.

The health and social care sector has been earmarked by Deloitte as the third most vulnerable industry to rapid advances in technology, behind wholesale and retail, and transportation and storage, with some 1.3m jobs at high risk in the UK. But the advent of automation isn’t about replacing human staff with robots. Just as within the wider health sector, there will always be a clear need for the calm, reassuring and caring bedside manner of professional humans, particularly when it comes to caring for patients with complex needs.

Further reading

The robodoctor will see you now

By Mark Piesing

That high degree of social and emotional intelligence is still beyond machines, and, some experts argue, always will be. Instead, automation can help with tackling everything else, from tedious tasks such as budgeting and record-filing to more significant tasks such as monitoring patients more closely than humans can, projecting future health risks and assuming physically strenuous roles such as lifting; they don’t need paying, rarely make mistakes and don’t get tired.

They’re well ahead of us in Japan, which is facing a predicted shortfall of 370,000 caregivers by 2025. The Japanese research institute Riken has created Robear, an experimental bear-shaped robot designed to lift and carry elderly patients from beds into wheelchairs. Similar robotics are currently used in around 8% of Japanese care homes, and are expected to become more widespread thanks to a government-backed initiative to fund robotic nursesto take care of the country’s rapidly ageing population.

But there has been a certain unwillingness on the part of care-givers to relinquish their bedside duty of care, not to mention a reluctance on the part of patient to accept care from a robot. Cyberdyne, another Japanese robotics firm, is circumventing this problem with its Hybrid Assistive Limbs, a powerful exoskeleton suit which can be worn by either carers or disabled or elderly patients to enhance their movements and assist in rehabilitation.

Let’s not forget that many of us already have our own digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. These can be care-givers if they are programmed to remind patients to take medication at certain points throughout the day; they can also answer repeated questions about the time, date and so on without losing their cool. They also adjust lights, open blinds and change temperature in smart homes. For patients with limited mobility, this could provide a much-missed feeling of autonomy.

In Japan, the early reluctance to embrace the robo-carer is now dwindling, partly thanks to a sophisticated media campaign and partly because there is no alternative. In one care home in Tokyo, 20 different robot models are being used to care for elderly residents. The West may cringe, as machines become the sole carers and companions of the elderly and confused, but as similar demographic challenges sweep in our direction, we would be foolish not to be paying attention.

The robot that performed this stunt was the called the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR). It wasn’t a humanoid robot like we’re used to in seeing on screen. Instead, it was a one-arm machine that looked as though it belonged on the factory floor of BMW.

Nor was it completely autonomous. Using a near-infrared camera, the robot followed tiny marks that the researchers had placed on the tissue beforehand. A human was also needed to vacuum away the vapours from burning fat and tissue.

In 2016, the robot performed a similar stunt when it sewed together two segments of pig intestine with stitches that were more regular and leak-resistant than those of experienced surgeons.

For some – the surgeons themselves, perhaps; and those who harbour worrries about robot overlords – it is the stuff of nightmares. But to its creators, it is the future of surgery.

The heroic age of the surgeon, they believe, is coming to an end for the same reasons the age of the pilot and driver did. Robot surgery offers patients more precise and less invasive keyhole surgery than they get from a human with a scalpel, gown and mask. In time, whole new operations may become possible.

More precise surgery means faster operations, quicker recovery times and less chance of secondary infection – of vital importance with an ageing population and the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections. It is predicted that in some countries, 40% of the population may be over 65 by the middle of the century. And deaths from these opportunistic infections could amount to 50 million a year globally by 2050. The robots could save them.

Robotic surgery would also mean busier operating theatres and patients spending less time in hospital beds afterwards. It would make recruitment easier, when the predicted shortage of 100,000 doctors in the USA becomes a reality.

Once humans got over the fear factor, it would also mean fewer mistakes on the operating table. The researchers behind STAR believe that the autonomous features of their robot will develop in a similar way to the autonomous features that are now common on cars. Forward collision avoidance and lane detection were once novel features: now they are standard in the family car.

Likewise, they believe that robots like STAR will slowly take over specific functions from human surgeons until they eventually morph into fully autonomous surgical robots.

Well – that is what the engineers hope. Medicine is a notoriously conservative field. Worries over the safety of the hardware and unforeseen side effects of the surgery have a tendency to reduce innovation to a crawl. This in turn can eliminate competition and drive up prices.

For now, the dominant robot machine on the market is one that was approved 18 years ago, called da Vinci and made by Intuitive Surgical. It is probably better described as a robotic assistant as it is directed by the surgeon.

The surgeon controls the robot’s four arms via a 3D HD screen on a console, allowing her to operate with joysticksand a pedal; computers translate her movements into precisemovements of the robot’s micro-tools, offering greater precision than the human hand. The da Vinci has no autonomous features at all.

Nor are there many of them in existence. For pretty obvious reasons. Each costs an eye-watering $2m to buy and is large enough to fill a standard-sized room – permanently. Furthermore, the yearly maintenance charge can be close to $200,000.  This is the robot for the 1%.

Happily, many of the over 650 patents that protect the technology of the da Vinci have recently expired or are due to expire soon, which should mean that cheaper generic copies will arrive at a hospital near you soon.

These copies won’t be the only new arrivals. We can expect quite a crowd of robotic assistants in the near future, given the size of the potential market that was last year valued at $3,000 million. In six years’ time, it is expected to be worth a whopping $11,000m.

Rushing in is CMR Surgical a British start-up keen to get in on the act. It has launched a robotic assistant called Versius, which has a set of independent, human-looking arms. Unlike the da Vinci, they are light enough to move from theatre to theatre. And they are much cheaper too. The Italian start-up Medical Microinstruments (MMI) has designed a robot intended for reconstructive microsurgery delicate enough to be used on babies. And Auris Health, from its patents, seems to have big ambitions to use to robotics to transform surgery. In all cases, this is man and machine in perfect harmony.

But there is a move to reduce human input behind all this. And, naturally, Google is already in on the act. Johnson & Johnson has teamed up with Google’s life-sciences division, Verily, to form Verb Surgical.Verb is developing a connected digital surgery platform that will incorporate robotics, visualisation, advanced instrumentation and machine learning. STAR’s developers, too, are pushing to make the robot fully autonomous.

It is difficult to imagine medical regulators agreeing to the kind of testing in surgery that has driven experimental self-driving vehicles on to our city streets, yet this would be the necessary step to accelerate the development of such a revolutionary technology.

As prices tumble, more companies enter the market and innovation increases, it’s clear that surgical robots now have the capability to revolutionise surgery for the 99%. But the question remains whether the regulators will let them.

There’s one big exception, however: the homes we live in. Most of those are hand-made. The building materials may be machine-made, but the piece-by-piece, one-off process of construction is labour-intensive, time-consuming and frequently unpredictable.

There’s got to be a better way. Prefabrication is one approach, but that involves a trade-off between the size of the prefabricated components and their transportability. It also tends to constrain the materials that can be used and the variety of forms the building can take.

In the early 20th century, Thomas Edison wasted a lot of time and money on the development of the single-pour concrete house. Employing a set of re-usable moulds, he believed he could mass produce affordable housing for all. Unfortunately, the moulds were so complicated and expensive that it was easier and cheaper to build the traditional way. A sideline in concrete furniture also came to a predictably sticky end.

Further reading

We must stop tolerating terrible architecture

By Peter Franklin

Edison’s single pour method didn’t just fail because of the practicalities; the principle was flawed too. A solid mass of concrete creates a structure that is virtually indestructible, but also unmodifiable – great for a bomb shelter, but not a home.

In an article for The Conversation, Seyed Ghaffar says that to successfully revolutionise house building we need to “automate and improve processes that have already been proven manually.”

A century on from Edison’s doomed attempt we might just be on the brink of getting it right:

“It’s often claimed that 3D printing – known in the trade as ‘additive manufacturing’ – will change the way we live. Most recently, a team from Eindhoven University of Technology announced plans to build the ‘world’s first’ habitable 3D printed houses…

“Additive manufacturing uses a combination of materials science, architecture and design, computation and robotics. Yet in some ways, it’s not as futuristic as it sounds. The simple approach of layer-wise construction… has already been practised for a long time in the construction sector, for example in conventional brick layering techniques.”

In fact, with 3D printing we might be able to go well beyond what even the most skilled human builders are capable of:

“When the printer and the feedstock have been properly set up, they will be able to produce full-size building blocks with a smart geometry which can take load without reinforcements. The shape stability of the truss-like filaments in these blocks is an essential part of printing, which provides strength and stiffness to the printed objects.”

Nature has all sort of cunning ways of creating light but strong structures – from the spider’s web to the bones of flying birds. The rapid, but precise, movements of 3D printers could allow us to draw inspiration from evolution, and extrude building materials to achieve great intricacy and efficiency.

Ghaffar believes that smart and automated construction methods could “revolutionise the industry within the next ten to 15 years”.

Will this make houses more affordable? It may well bring construction costs tumbling down – but, remember, not even a robot can make new land. Therefore, we’ll need policies to stop land monopolists from sucking up the value created by new technology.

Further reading

The cost of property may slowly kill Silicon Valley - but a Land Value Tax might give it new life

By Peter Franklin

That said, the automation of house building may make it harder for developers to manipulate land prices by manipulating the rate at which land with planning permission is built out. With robots greatly speeding up the pace of construction, there’ll be no excuse not to build new homes as fast as demand requires and planning policies allow.

One last thought: Though Edison’s poured concrete technology was misconceived, the prototype houses he built with it could be surprisingly beautiful. The developers of today’s new construction methods would be well advised to pay equally close attention to the aesthetics.

If you want the public to accept new development, then the golden rule is that it should make places better not worse.

We tend to ignore the good news, amid all the complaints about how driverless vehicles will cost working-class people – those who drive trucks, say, or buses for a living – their jobs. So let me remind you: self-driving technology will save hundreds of thousands of lives, re-invent public transport, reshape our cities, and even increase demand for cars, thereby creating jobs for those same working classes.

But the safety factor is the most important gain. And it’s hard to argue with the figures. American National Highway Safety Administration estimated in 2007 that about 94% of all fatal accidents involved some type of driver error. Eliminate those, and more than 36,000 lives would have been saved in 2017 in the US alone – that’s nearly 100 a day. Extending autonomous vehicle technology to EU nations and economically developed countries in the Pacific regions would save another 36-40,000 lives annually. Make the technology cheap enough to use worldwide, and more than 1 million people would be saved, each and every year.

Yes, self-driving cars have been involved in some highly publicised fatal accidents over the past year, but the current technology is by no means ready to be mass-marketed. The technology that ultimately becomes standard will certainly be more sophisticated than it is at present and the massive reduction in accidents caused by driver error will far outweigh the few crashes caused by software malfunction.

Almost as welcome is the fact that these cars will make traffic jams a thing of the past and massively reduce urban pollution. It would reinvent our public transport system. Currently, over 75% of all work commutes in the US and 62% of all car trips in the UK are made by solo drivers, which is hugely inefficient. The key to fixing this rests on an issue that managers of aeroplane fleets know well: ensuring that vehicles are as full as possible.

With the help of driverless technology, commuters could easily schedule trips in carpools whose schedules match theirs perfectly. And without there being a driver to pay, costs would be dramatically less than in today’s Uber economy. Buses, which in the US are all too often empty outside of rush hour, could also be reprogrammed. The effect would be dramatic. A recent OECD study found that replacing human-driven cars with on-demand, driverless vehicles could cut the number of cars on the road in a medium-sized city such as Lisbon by nearly 90%.

Further reading

Are traffic lights really "un-Conservative"?

By Peter Franklin

Imagine how the urban landscape could be reshaped. Cities would need far fewer parking spaces because so few cars would sit idle. The liberated space could be repurposed for much needed housing or parks.

The benefits from all this progress would flow directly to poor and lower-income workers. Since low-cost housing traps them far from their suburban jobs, expensive, complicated and time-consuming commutes hit them hardest. Access to cheap, driverless cars would give them could the same sort of friction-free commuting experience their wealthier co-workers already enjoy and leave them with more time at home, spent with family.

Meanwhile, the chances are the advent of this technology would mean the creation of more jobs. Owners of driverless taxi fleets would, taking their cues from truck and airline owners, schedule their vehicles so they sit idle as little as possible; the vehicles would wear out quickly and would need regular replacement. At the same time, the significant drop in the cost of a vehicle mile travelled should significantly increase the demand for travel. More cars are going to be needed, not fewer.

Which isn’t to say we should all sit idly by and wait for the driverless future to arrive. Governments should be anticipating the coming changes and considering how to manage a future economy without those jobs that pay decent wages but require little formal education. Development of the autonomous vehicle is picking up speed and will ultimately make our lives vastly better, but we shouldn’t take our hands off the wheel quite yet.

Further reading

Will driverless cars save our cities, or ruin them?

By Peter Franklin

After that came an era of compromise – not least with the continuing dependency of every developed democratic nation on a large-scale, redistributive state.

Nevertheless, some New Right old believers still cling-on to ancient certainties. For instance, in an article about transport policy for ConservativeHome, John Redwood opens up with the most New Right thing anyone has ever said about anything:

“Traffic lights are so un-Conservative. They are part of the top-down, government knows best model of bossing us about.”

Those three-eyed totalitarian monsters! How dare they tell us not to proceed into the path of an on-coming stream of traffic!

I would argue that traffic lights are not just conservative, but symbolic of conservatism. Indeed, they enact the quintessentially conservative balance between freedom and order.

Even more importantly, they are reflective of the dignity of the individual. They enable a frail old lady to stop a ten ton truck at a road crossing – because her right to do so does not depend on her physical strength or her economic value, but on her infinite worth as a human being. (I wonder if Ayn Rand ever contemplated the meaning of the traffic light).

Further reading

What's so monstrous about Ayn Rand?

By Peter Franklin

If anything is “un-conservative” it’s not traffic lights, but traffic. As I’ve written about before, cars, while greatly enhancing the freedom of some individuals, are also deeply destructive of community. It’s no wonder that the Amish, one of the few groups in society that consciously think through the impact of technology on their lives, reject the car.

The rest of us just have traffic lights, and the freedom they give us to momentarily reclaim the streets. That, however, could be about to change in a major way.

If, like John Redwood, you see traffic lights as a tool of statist control, then just you wait for the era of the driverless car! The term ‘autonomous vehicle’ may turn out to be deeply misleading – because any technology capable of allowing a car to do without a (human) driver would allow such vehicles to be networked and remotely controlled by the authorities.

Writing for The Conversation, Neil McBride is alarmed:

“For more than 130 years, cars have represented the ultimate in autonomy, individuality and democratic freedom. Our car trips are private and anonymous. We can go where we like and when we like. We don’t have to tell anybody. And we retain responsibility for whether we obey the law. Driverless cars will bring that to an end.”

It’s not just the individual vehicle that will be automated, but the overall pattern of traffic flows across an entire road network:

“Smart motorways will manage flows of traffic, slowing down driverless cars as part of a stream of communication between the car and the road. In smart cities, traffic lights will reroute cars into detours according to calculations and predictions about traffic jams, road works, or state requirements.”

McBride sees the potential for oppression – and it would be foolish to deny the danger:

“In the dictatorial state, the authorities can stop you going to a demonstration, or stop you going to church.”

Further reading

We're going to ban human-operated cars. Yes, all of them.

By Peter Franklin

However, there’s also the potential for liberation. The new technology doesn’t have to result in greater centralisation. Indeed, it could allow the radical localisation of traffic management, with the residents of each neighbourhood reaching their own judgements as to the balance between mobility and other claims on shared spaces.

Subject to the whims and (in)competence of the motorist, we’ve lived our whole lives in terror of the motorised vehicle, teaching that fear to little children as if things could be no other way.

Now, as computers begin to take the wheel, new possibilities present themselves – new choices and, therefore, new freedoms.

Further reading

The Amish: America's most sophisticated users of technology

By Peter Franklin

When John and Charles Deere first set up shop in 1837, nearly three-quarters of Americans worked the land. Their company has long dominated the market for agricultural equipment today it’s the largest company of its kind in the world.

Yet in 2018, back-breaking agricultural labour is just about over and Deere’s business model has gone digital. The ancient words of the Biblical curse – “In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread” Genesis 3:19 – no longer apply.

While machines from the plough and the adze onwards have made agriculture more and more efficient, the digital revolution is set to have dramatic effects. After decades of preparation, Deere took the key step for customers in 2012 when it launched MyJohnDeere – an information system to help agricultural producers optimise the management of production data, equipment information and farm operations.

In 1994, it created the Precision Farming Group to look for evolving technologies that could make GPS more accurate and cost effective for providing location information to create yield maps. At that time, no one had proven that GPS could be used for vehicle guidance.

Further reading

How social media is creating dangerous legal precedents

By Peter Franklin

Twenty years later Deere is operating one of the most accurate GPS-based location systems in the world, which lets farmers track their planting, harvesting and more to an accuracy of less than an inch.

And unlike in other areas of the economy – from retail to truck driving – where there is anxiety lest jobs be lost to the robots, in the agricultural sector in developed economies it’s increasingly hard to find that 1-2% still needed to plough and reap. And in both the US and the UK, the need for cheap immigrant farm labour has become entangled with wider immigration concerns.

So while there will be short-term disruption, whether for Mexican labourers in California or the farmers fighting John Deere’s software licensing – if your tractor goes wrong, according to a Draconian Deere licensing arrangement, you can’t fix it yourself,  – the core idea that back-breaking agricultural labour will be a thing of the past is wonderful.

Deere’s GPS-controlled tractors are just the tip of the digital iceberg. One report suggests there are already hundreds of thousands of fully-autonomous tractors sold every year. And they are aided by a growing number of specialist robots to carry out all manner of agricultural tasks:

• Using GPS to plant every seed in just the right place. We all know how farmers used to sow – way back, by throwing out handfuls of seed; more recently, they sit on tractors towing a machine around the field that does exactly the same thing. But now: “Autonomous precision seeding combines robotics with geomapping. A map is generated which shows the soil properties (quality, density, etc) at every point in the field. The tractor, with robotic seeding attachment, then places the seeds at precise locations and depths so that each has the best chance of growing.”
• In the same way, both water and fertilizer can be delivered direct to each individual plant but a robot working its way between the rows.
• The same for weeding, and there are options. A robot like AG-BOT II can deliver weedkiller. But it could also target weeds with a laser. Or RoboCrop will hoe the weedy area to destroy them that way.
• The LettuceBot specialises in thinning – deciding which are the weaker plants that need to be removed. Wall-Ye prunes vines.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has been funding efforts to invent specialist harvesting robots since picking soft fruit and other high-value crops is difficult and very labour-intensive. And in California a company called Abundant Robotics has built an apple-picking machine. This is like an enormous vacuum cleaner, but far cleverer:

“The robot’s got to be able to identify an apple, and then after that, tell if it is ripe,” said Dan Swafford, an agricultural technologist at Virginia Tech. “It takes a lot of specialized sensors and cameras to do that, and then they have to be able to pick the fruit without damaging it.”

Further reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

Strawberries? One Belgian company plans to market its machine in 2019. While humans can pick a strawberry in three seconds, the machine takes five, but they’re working to speed it up.

And it’s not just picking. Cattle ranchers in California and sheep farmers in New Zealand are using drones to round up their stock. In China, they are developing swaps of crop-spraying drones and in Japan, an automated lettuce factory is expected to reduce labour costs by 50%.

True it’s bad news for cowboys. But since the world bank has estimated that we are going to need to produce 50% more food by  2050, given the effects of population and climate change, high-input farming practices are going to have to change. By letting robots take the back-breaking strain, farmers can focus on how to feed the world.