narrator: the challenges facing our world are growing all the time. how do we build stronger economies with equal opportunities for all? how do we build a sustainable world for generations to come? how do we protect our cities and harness the power of technology for our own benefit? humanity has always been good at forward thinking. in this series, using the latest bloomberg research and analysis we will make sense of the problems of tomorrow.

inequality, sustainability, urbanization, the gender gap and the demographic time bomb. and in this film, the march of the machines. what effect will artificial intelligence have on the world? does the rise of the robot mean the fall of humanity? narrator: the world is changing. today, we stand on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution that will transform the way we work, the way we live, and what makes us human. >> there is a group of technologies combining to create transformation across almost

every industry at the moment and those technologies include artificial intelligence, 3-d printing, robotics, big data, and life sciences in terms of genetics and medical engineering. these are combining in a way that is bringing a host of transformative changes across industries. >> i would describe the fourth industrial revolution similarly as the past three. technology that leaves massive gains in productivity, and massive gains in productivity means substantial improvements to everyone's quality of life. narrator: the world has been through revolutions before. the advent of mechanization, electronics, and a digital revolution profoundly changed the world's economy. this revolution could be more disruptive. >> in previous revolutions you

could talk about them as industrial revolutions, changing how things were made, factories, heavy industry in particular. here you see a range of not just industry but services and new business models that didn't exist before. what is different is that it gets into a range of things that people only thought were possible for humans to do, jobs where they will not be human jobs anymore. narrator: at the heart is artificial intelligence, the ability of machines to match and surpass the cognitive ability of humans. >> it is a big deal. it is making a difference in the way people live, interact with each other. it is removing humans from tasks that we thought were the sole task of the human mind.

machines can do them. >> these are early days in the brave new world of artificial intelligence but the benefits are vast. >> one of the benefits, there are a lot. if you think of driverless cars, that could have a really liberating impact. if you think about older people who can no longer drive, they are shut into their houses and dependent on others. with driverless cars they would go about their daily life. with big data this may have a profound impact on drug development. new pharmaceuticals are developed at a faster rate to cure diseases because computers sort through the data and pick up connections that otherwise would be missed. for health in particular the advantage of machine learning data science is immense.

those have an incredible chance to address infrequent diseases. if we are going to cure cancer, it is going through data science. narrator: there is potentially a darker side to this technological revolution, one which could profoundly change the world of work as we know it. >> a technological revolution will cost jobs. it will cost jobs in the areas that see the biggest advancements first. forseeable in the near term -- truck driving. self driving trucks, you don't need the 3.5 million truck drivers you have now. what is key, as part of this revolution, as productivity goes up and as the economy continues to evolve and new jobs are created, you need to make sure those displaced workers are given the skills to move into these new positions. the key point is you need to

make sure if you lost 3.5 million jobs, how do you create more than that and another sector? in past industrialevolutions, that is what we have seen happen. hopefully, i think it will be what happens again. narrator: what if this doesn't happen? martin ford is a software entrepreneur. he has appeared into the future economy and sees the world where potentially hundreds of millions of skilled workers are out of a job. >> i would say that if you look far enough into the future, there is no job anywhere in our economy, there is nothing that anyone does that is completely safe. that includes artists and novelists, the jobs you would

imagine now are completely beyond the scope of artificial intelligence. millions of jobs are going to be lost. it is unlikely enough jobs will be created to absorb those workers. ♪

narrator: martin ford is a software entrepreneur who has a

chilling vision of the future. his best-selling books have put him at the forefront of a movement which worries about technology, the speed of growth, and the immense potential it has to change the world. this is the fourth industrial revolution, the advent of machines powered by artificial intelligence, which have the potential to make redundant hundreds of millions of workers across the planet. it is a world that is nearly upon us but which governments and businesses are only starting to comprehend. >> the central idea in my latest book, "the rise of the robots," is that over time machines, computers, smart algorithms are going to substitute for human labor. i think that is inevitable. technology is going to be able to do many things people now do and there is a chance that will result in unemployment. it's going to push people out of the labor force. many people are going to find impossible to adapt to that because they are not going to

have capabilities that exceed what machines can do. that is going to be a genuine concern for our society and for the economy. narrator: some machines are already with us. >> there are already algorithms that can interpret things like body language, and responded to some extent to emotion and determine your mood. this has big implications. imagine what that could mean for advertising if an algorithm can determine exactly how you are feeling and target advertisements at you based on that? some of the language translation things that are being demonstrated are truly remarkable. imagine if anyone in any country who speaks any language would now be able to do any job because we have perfect machine translation in real time between languages. that has real implications for the job market obviously.

narrator: we may be already seeing the effects on the wider economy. in the first decade of the century, the net total number of jobs created in the united states was zero. >> what we see is in the united states, we have been having what we call jobless recovery. clearly there is something happening there. part of what is happening is jobs disappear when a recession happens and finally recovery comes back, companies find they are able to leverage technology to avoid rehiring those workers. it's taking longer and longer for jobs to reappear. narrator: throughout history, technology has disrupted economies and societies. in the 19th century, 50% of u.s. workers were employed on farms. by 2000, it was less than 2%. those workers found work and

other sectors. martin thinks this time, it is different. >> what transformed agriculture was a specific mechanical technology. we have a technology that is ubiquitous across the board. artificial intelligence is something that is scaling across our entire economy. it is not just impacting one sector. it is something that literally is everywhere and as a result, there isn't going to be any safe haven for workers. narrator: what makes the new technology so ubiquitous is the development of the new virtual world of big data. >> big data, essentially, is the collection and use of massive amounts of data.

big corporations are collecting all kinds of information about customers, about their business operations, about the actual processes in industrial environments and factories. about things their employees are doing. all of this data becomes a stock for these algorithms, the information they use to learn and figure out how to do things. that is something that is going to be dramatically disruptive going forward. narrator: the total data stored on the world's computers is believed to be well over 1000 billion gigabytes. big data is driving the most disruptive advance in technology -- the ability of machines to think. >> one thing you will hear people say is that computers only do what they are programmed to do. this is really not right anymore. basically machines are learning. we have this technology that allows smart software algorithms to look at data and based on that, to learn how to do things, to figure things out, to make predictions. it really is no longer the case that some human being is sitting

down and telling a computer exactly what to do step-by-step. computers are now having the ability to figure that out for themselves. you can imagine a future where every device, every appliance, everything communicates and talks to each other. one of the things that will happen is that artificial intelligence will use that as a platform, it will scale across that. everything will become more intelligent. narrator: the last great technological advance will place -- will robots replace millions of workers in factories and on production lines. this new disruption will target the white-collar workforce as well. >> once a computer learns to do something, that information can be scalable out to any number of machines. you can imagine having a workforce of people, you can train one employee to do a task, and then you could clone that worker and have an army of those workers.

that is a bit like the way artificial intelligence works. machine learning is scalable. if you have the job where someone else, another smart person could maybe watch what you are doing and study everything you have done in the past, and figure out how to do your job, it is a good bet eventually there will be an algorithm that will come along with that same approach. that is a lot of jobs. narrator: many of the jobs are those occupied by educated, highly paid workers. >> you can see across the board that anyone sitting in front of a computer doing some sort of routine, predictable knowledge work, cranking out the same analysis again and again, all of that is going to be susceptible. journalism is an interesting area that is being impacted by this. there are now systems that can essentially tap into data and

they can transform that data into a compelling news story. many people would read and cannot tell it was written by a machine. in the future may be 90% of new stories will be machine generated. narrator: the number of jobs displaced has the potential to utterly transform the economic landscape. >> there have been studies done, most notably by a couple of researchers at oxford university. they looked at a number of countries, and most of the results have come back suggesting that up to half of the jobs could be susceptible to automation perhaps over the next 20 years. narrator: that is 60 million jobs in the united states alone. >> that is a staggering number. obviously, we would have a massive social problem. we have tremendous stress on government. trying to take care of all of these people who no longer have an income. i think that you would see the potential for massive economic downturns. you would run out of consumers.

you no longer have people capable of buying the products and services being produced by the economy. narrator: a revolution on this scale would not just transform an economy, it would have immense implications throughout society. >> we could have just what you might call inequality on steroids. the very wealthy people who own all of this technology will do extraordinarily well. we have the potential for civil unrest, perhaps even riots or massive crime waves. in the united states, during the great depression, we had an unemployed a rate of around 25%. there were many people concerned that would result in the collapse of both democracy and capitalism. narrator: the situation amounts to the end of the world as we know it, a science-fiction nightmare straight from the movies. >> there are some very prominent

thinkers like stephen hawking and elon musk who have raised genuine fears of the potential of advanced artificial intelligence. their concerns are that someday we will build a super intelligent machine, 100 or 1000 times smarter than a person. how would that system think? how would it act? would it have a use for us? it may decide we are a burden and decide to get rid of us. it could present an existential threat. is that something people worry about? i think that is not a silly concern. it is not something we should laugh at and just dismiss. there is really no endpoint of this. no point in which we can say this is as far as we can go and machines will never go beyond this. we are reaching a new era of time when things are going to operate differently. we need to adapt to that. narrator: health care is one area of the economy adapting to this disruption.

in this field, researchers hope that intelligent humans and intelligent machines can work together for everyone's benefit. ♪

narrator: the fourth industrial revolution, the era of artificial intelligence, has arrived. computers are mastering tasks once considered the sole preserve of humans and putting millions of jobs at risk. and now business leaders are wrestling with the potentially huge implications. >> in general, robots of one form or another will become much more omnipresent in our lives. in a good way. we will replace a lot of repetitive activities that people are currently doing. >> robots will have a dramatic effect on the labor force. lower the cost of products. people will realize every manual task will be done by robots. narrator: martin ford's books have highlighted the threat to the job market.

but even he sees areas where artificial intelligence could be beneficial. >> i do think health care is one of the areas where the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics could be extraordinarily positive in the future. the burden on our economy is growing at a remarkable rate in the united states. if we can deploy more artificial intelligence to make it more efficient, that will be a great thing. narrator: analysts expect the ai health care market should generate revenues of $6 billion by 2021, 10 times its current total. young companies are mining data to improve patient outcomes across a range of illnesses. in new york, ibm researchers have developed watson, an intelligent software system at the forefront of the revolution. >> it can understand somebody's

personality type, look at e-mail, for example, and tell you what is the tone of the e-mail, what kind of messages are coming through. it can look at a big encyclopedia, extract the concepts and the relationships among those concepts. narrator: watson operates in the world of big data, extracting knowledge from the billions of facts and figures floating through cyberspace. >> i look at the world from the point of view of the data that there is, and the amount of knowledge that is embedded or inside the data that we are not able to extract today. therefore, we are not able to make the right decisions. for the industrial revolution, to me, is the ability to have a much better understanding of the world through all of the data, and therefore, making better decisions for it.

narrator: ibm is currently running a research project in which watson augments the intelligence of medical professionals, helping doctors treat the most dangerous diseases in the world including skin cancer. >> melanoma is a deadly form of skin cancer. it is something where early detection and intervention is key. a dermatologist faced with a patient who has a skin lesion will make some assessment about the likelihood of a lesion being melanoma. unfortunately, today dermatologists can make errors. some are being missed. some skin lesions which are perfectly benign are being excised needlessly. what we can do here is essentially asked the computer to make a deep analysis over an image. this image is being sent to the computer and automatically analyzed. what the computer is telling us

about this image is there is a high probability that it corresponds to melanoma. what we are finding in our internal, retrospective research, is the computer can be as accurate as 95%. this compares to the best clinical experts today that are between 75% and 84% recognizing melanoma. it is not a tool that would replace the clinical experts. rather, it provides them with additional analysis over the skin lesion images by providing reaches into large databases of similar lesions. narrator: this is a vision of a future where humans and machines work hand-in-hand, complementing one another skills. >> i look forward to a time when every professional -- 2 billion to 3 billion professionals are all able to have their own personal cognitive assistant to

help them do their daily jobs. that changes the nature of expertise. humanity would move to a different place in terms of expertise and how we apply our knowledge and experience into real-world problems and therefore make the world a better place. just like we have had machines that could augment people's muscles in the prior industrial revolutions, or can help people search vast amounts of information like the internet era, i look at the next revolution as machines augmenting peoples cognitive capabilities. that is how i think about it. narrator: martin ford remains cautious. believing artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally change the way we live and work. and challenge us like never before. >> we are not prepared for the disruption that is coming. we are going to see things get

worse before they get better, in particular the impact on the job market and the impact on the incomes and the livelihoods for average people. in the short-term things could be pretty difficult, but in the longer term, if we do adapt to this, then there are reasons to be optimistic. you can imagine a utopian kind of future where no one has to do a job that is dangerous or that they really hate, or is really boring. technology takes on more and more of that. if we can get to that point, then that is a positive outcome. all of that is possible and could be one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, but it will require we adapt to it. that is going to be staggering challenge. ♪

never stops. electric self driving cars, social apps, integrated smart homes, even your mattress is high tech. it seems every product has advanced light years ahead except for your pillow. many contain the same phil they always have -- the same