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Off Centre | AI is coming, are we training our students for a world where robots work for free?

The advance of robots has profound implications for what people aspire to, not least in Hong Kong

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POMONA, CA - JUNE 06: Children interact with Aldebaran's Pepper robot during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge Expo at the Fairplex June 6, 2015 in Pomona, California. Organized by DARPA, the Pentagon's science research group, 24 teams from aorund the world are competing for $3.5 million in prize money that will be awarded to the robots that best respond to natural and man-made disasters. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP == FOR NEWSPAPERS, INTERNET, TELCOS & TELEVISION USE ONLY ==
According to research, levels of happiness among Hong Kong schoolchildren have plummeted to new lows. Homework and extra lessons are eating into students’ time for sleep and exercise and are held to be their chief source of distress. The findings follow a spate of recent suicides that have made the mental well-being of young people an especially vexed issue. It is all very alarming – but don’t expect to see attitudes changing any time soon. The educational stakes are just too high.
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Student in Hong Kong are driven hard to get good grades, but will this pay off in an automated future? Photo: SCMP Pictures
Student in Hong Kong are driven hard to get good grades, but will this pay off in an automated future? Photo: SCMP Pictures
In a competitive society, the imperative not to set one’s children at any disadvantage is an understandable one. A minimalist definition of aspiration might be the desire for your loved ones not to have to end up working until they drop.
What if technological change were happening so quickly that even the specialised skills we’ve convinced ourselves will power economic growth in the coming decades become irrelevant in the space of only a few years? These things are starting to happen, and with profound implications for jobs and education.

What, though, if everything we thought we knew about getting ahead, acquiring knowledge and expertise and securing an attractive career was being shaken up? What if technological change were happening so quickly that even the specialised skills we’ve convinced ourselves will power economic growth in the coming decades become irrelevant in the space of only a few years? These things are starting to happen, and with profound implications for jobs and education.

At some point in the present decade, we entered an age of drones, 3D printing, robots and artificial intelligence. Such marvels, it is a fair bet, will eliminate millions of low-skilled and unskilled jobs involving everyday tasks from cleaning and washing up to driving vans, sorting mail and serving food. In the United States alone, the predicted wave will make the offshoring of the country’s manufacturing in recent years look like small beer. Skilled jobs will be at risk, too, though.

Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, said recently on BBC radio: “In the industrial age we automated a lot of physical work, the work of our muscles. In the new machine age, we’re doing the same things for mental work. This is having as big an impact on humanity as the industrial revolution did.” Machines could end up doing the jobs of surgeons, teachers, firefighters, entertainers – even, one imagines, bankers.

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Hong Kong designer Ricky Ma, 42, with his life-sized Scarlett Johansson lookalike robot called Mark 1. Photo: Reuters
Hong Kong designer Ricky Ma, 42, with his life-sized Scarlett Johansson lookalike robot called Mark 1. Photo: Reuters
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