Is the sun setting on the age of human endeavour? Should we all be buying shares in Skynet? These are questions that have doubtless been racing through the minds of City workers following the recent statement by Dave Coplin, Microsoft’s chief envisioning officer, that robots could be running the City within a decade.
Before you get too concerned, or (if an optimist) excited about the prospect of hoverboarding to the office to oversee your army of trading robots, there is a theory that suggests you shouldn’t cancel your season ticket just yet. While Moravec’s Paradox, which first surfaced in the 1980s, does not offer much comfort – it is defined on Wikipedia as the discovery that “contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources” – David Autor, the MIT professor, prefers the term Polanyi’s Paradox, which explains the basis of Moravec’s Paradox by asserting that humans “know more than they can tell”. This means that while a computer can easily crunch its way through complex multiplications (or anything that is readily codifiable and adheres to a closed set of rules), it will struggle to make you a sandwich, due to the “tacit knowledge” that the latter involves. Autor suggests that tasks involving flexibility, judgment and common sense are particularly difficult to automate for this reason, and it is this that offers City workers a hope of employment in the late 2020s.
Further, Autor makes the point that there is too much focus on substitution of robot/computer for human, and not enough focus on how they can complement each other. History does not back up the supposition that advances in technology necessarily result in employment reductions. The employment to population ratio actually increased during the 20th century, while the rate of unemployment has shown no long-term increase. Where sectors have seen reductions in employment due to increased automation, this has often been offset by an increase in the value of the jobs that remain. So, if advances in technology mean that trading will become increasingly automated (which is already gaining traction in some markets, e.g. in futures markets), the role of the person who oversees this automation is likely to increase commensurately in terms of value and importance. What is more, the inability to codify “tacit knowledge” means that humans will always retain their value in the employment market – the real value of robots will be their ability to complement the human traits that they cannot replicate.