A fascinating time capsule of human feelings toward AI Lucy FareyJones
I’m here, because I’ve spent
far too many nights lying awake,
worrying and wondering
who wins in the end.
Is it humans or is it robots?
You see, as a technology strategist,
my job involves behavior change:
understanding why and how
people adopt new technologies.
And that means I’m really frustrated
that I know I won’t live to see
how this all ends up.
And in fact, if the youngest person
watching this is 14
and the oldest, a robust 99,
then together,
our collective consciousnesses
span just 185 years.
That is a myopic pinprick of time
when you think of the evolution
and the story of life on this planet.
Turns out we’re all in the cheap seats
and none of us will live to see
how it all pans out.
So at my company,
we wanted a way around this.
We wanted to see if there was
a way to cantilever out,
beyond our fixed temporal vantage point,
to get a sense of how it all shakes up.
And to do this, we conducted a study
amongst 1,200 Americans
representative of the US census,
in which we asked a battery
of attitudinal questions
around robotics and AI
and also captured behavioral ones
around technology adoption.
We had a big study
so that we could analyze
differences in gender and generations,
between religious and political beliefs,
even job function and personality trait.
It is a fascinating,
time-bound time capsule
of our human frailty
in this predawn of the robotic era.
And I have five minutes
to tell you about it.
The first thing you should know
is that we brainstormed
a list of scenarios
of current and potential AI robotics.
They ran the spectrum from the mundane,
so, a robot house cleaner, anyone?
Through to the mischievous,
the idea of a robot pet sitter,
or maybe a robot lawyer,
or maybe a sex partner.
Through to the downright macabre,
the idea of being a cyborg,
blending human and robot,
or uploading your brain
so it could live on after your death.
And we plotted people’s comfort levels
with these various scenarios.
There were actually 31 in the study,
but for ease, I’m going to show you
just a few of them here.
The first thing you’ll notice,
of course, is the sea of red.
America is very uncomfortable
with this stuff.
That’s why we call it
the discomfort index,
not the comfort index.
There were only two things
the majority of America is OK with.
And that’s the idea
of a robot AI house cleaner
and a robot AI package deliverer,
so Dyson and Amazon, you guys should talk.
There’s an opportunity there.
It seems we’re ready to off-load
our chores to our robot friends.
We’re kind of definitely on the fence
when it comes to services,
so robot AI lawyer
or a financial adviser, maybe.
But we’re firmly closed
to the idea of robot care,
whether it be a nurse,
a doctor, child care.
So from this, you’d go,
“It’s OK, Lucy, you know what?
Go back to sleep, stop worrying,
the humans win in the end.”
But actually not so fast.
If you look at my data very closely,
you can see we’re more
vulnerable than we think.
AI has a branding problem.
So of those folks who said
that they would absolutely reject
the idea of a personal assistant,
45 percent of them had, in fact,
one in their pockets,
in terms of a device
with Alexa, Google or Siri.
One in five of those who were against
the idea of AI matchmaking
had of course, you guessed it,
done online dating.
And 80 percent of those of us
who refuse the idea
of boarding an autonomous plane
with a pilot backup
had in fact, just like me
to get here to Vancouver,
flown commercial.
Lest you think everybody
was scared, though,
here are the marvelous folk in the middle.
These are the neutrals.
These are people for whom you say,
“OK, robot friend,”
and they’re like,
“Hm, robot friend. Maybe.”
Or, “AI pet,”
and they go, “Never say never.”
And as any decent
political operative knows,
flipping the ambivalent middle
can change the game.
Another reason I know
we’re vulnerable is men –
I’m sorry, but men,
you are twice as likely than women
to believe that getting
into an autonomous car is a good idea,
that uploading your brain
for posterity is fun,
and two and a half times more likely
to believe that becoming a cyborg is cool,
and for this, I blame Hollywood.
(Laughter)
And this is where I want you
to look around the theater
and know that one in four men
are OK with the idea of sex with a robot.
That goes up to 44 percent
of millennial men
compared to just one in 10 women,
which I think puts a whole new twist
on the complaint of mechanical sex.
(Laughter)
Even more astounding
than that though, to be honest,
is this behavioral difference.
So here we have people who have
a device with a voice assistant in it,
so a smart speaker,
a home hub or a smart phone,
versus those who don’t.
And you can see from this graph
that the Trojan horse
is already in our living room.
And as these devices proliferate
and our collective defenses soften,
we all see how it can end.
In fact, this may be as good
a time as any to admit
I did take my Alexa Dot
on vacation with me.
Final finding I have time for
is generational.
So look at the difference
just three generations make.
This is the leap from silent
to boomer to millennial.
And what’s more fascinating than this
is if you extrapolate this out,
the same rate of change,
just the same pace,
not the accelerated one
I actually believe will be the case,
the same pace,
then it is eight generations away
when we hear every single American
thinking the majority
of these things here are normal.
So the year 2222 is an astounding place
where everything here is mainstream.
And lest you needed any more convincing,
here is the generation’s
“excitement level with AI.”
So not surprisingly,
the youngest of us are more excited.
But, and possibly the most
paradoxical finding of my career,
when I asked these people my 3am question,
“Who wins in the end?”
Guess what.
The more excited you are
about AI and robotics,
the more likely you are to say
it’s the robots.
And I don’t think we need a neural net
running pattern-recognition software
to see where this is all headed.
We are the proverbial frogs
in boiling water.
So if the robots at TED2222
are watching this for posterity,
could you send a cyborg, dig me up
and tell me if I was right?
(Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause)