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 common 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 of work? will a machine soon be doing your job? 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, one that will transform the way we work, the way we live, and even what makes us human. michael: there is a group of technologies that are combining to create transformation across almost every industry at the moment, and those technologies include things like artificial intelligence, 3-d printing, robotics, big data, and then

some things on the sort of life sciences front in terms of genetics and medical imaging. these things are sort of combining in a way that is bringing a host of transformative changes across industries. i would describe the fourth industrial revolution actually quite similarly to how i would describe the past three. and that is, technology that leads to 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, then electronics, then the digital revolution all profoundly changed the world's economies. but this revolution could be even more disruptive. >> i think in previous revolutions, you could really talk about them as industrial revolutions. what was changing was how things were made -- factories, industry, often heavy industry in particular. here you see transformation across a range of not just industry but services and the creation of whole new business models that didn't exist before. what is different about this particular revolution is that it gets into a whole range of things that people only thought were ever only possible for humans to do, jobs where human jobs will not be human jobs anymore. narrator: at the heart of the fourth revolution is artificial intelligence, the ability of machines to match and perhaps one day surpass the cognitive ability of their human creators. >> what is happening now is a big deal. it is making a bug difference in

the way people live, the way people interact with each other. it is sort of obliterating distance. it is in some cases removing humans from tasks that we once thought were the sole province of the human mind. these analytic tasks that we thought only a human brain can do, we are suddenly finding algorithms can do them, machines can do them. narrator: these are the early days in the brave new world of artificial intelligence, but the potential benefits are vast. >> one of the liberating benefits, there are actually a lot. if you think of driverless cars, autonomous vehicles which is one use of ai that people are talking about, that could have a really liberating impact on a lot of peoples' lives. if you think about older people who can no longer drive, they are very shut in their houses right now, very dependent on others for transportation. with driverless cars, they would be able to go about their daily life. and then you are seeing with big data, that this may have a profound impact on drug development. you will find new pharmaceuticals being developed at a faster rate to cure diseases because the computers are essentially able to sort through the data and pick up connections that otherwise would be missed. for health in particular, the advantages of machine learning and data science are immense. those have an incredible chance

to address infrequent diseases and diseases that affect different parts of the population very differently. if we are going to cure cancer, it is probably going to come through data science. narrator: but 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. a good example of that that is feasible over the near-term is truck driving. you have self-driving trucks, you don't need the 3.5 million truck drivers that you have right now in the u.s. what is key, as part of this revolution, as productivity goes up, 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. that is what the key is. will all of them be? no. but i think the key point is you need to make sure if you lost 3.5 million jobs in one sector, how do you create more than that in another sector? and i think in pindurial revolutions, that is what we have seen happen. and hopefully, and i think it will, it will be what happens again. narrator: but what if this doesn't happen? martin ford is a software entrepreneur. he has peered into our future economy and sees a world where potentially hundreds of millions of skilled workers are out of a job. martin: 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. and that includes even artists and novelists, and, you know, the kinds of jobs that you would imagine right now are completely beyond the scope of artificial intelligence. millions and millions of those jobs are going to be lost. and is unlikely that enough jobs are going to be created to

absorb all of 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 its 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 which is nearly upon us but which governments and businesses are only starting to comprehend. martin: well, the central idea in my latest book, "the rise of the robots," is that over time, machines, computers, smart algorithms are increasingly going to substitute for human labor. i think that that is inevitable. technology is eventually going to be able to do many of the things that people now do, and i think 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 it impossible to adapt to that because they are notoing to have capabilities that really exceed what machines can do. and that is i think going to be

a genuine concern both for our society, of course, and ultimately for the economy too. narrator: some of those machines are already with us. martin: there are already algorithms that can interpret things like body language, and respond to some extent to emotion -- it can determine your mood for example -- and so forth. and, you know, it has big implications. imagine what that could mean for example for advertising if an algorithm can determine exactly how you are feeling and then target advertisements at you based on that? some of the language translations 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. so you know, that has real implications for the job market obviously.

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

is different. martin: what transformed agriculture was a specific mechanical technology. now we have got a technology that is really just ubiquitous. it is across the board. artificial intelligence is something that is just scaling across our entire economy. it is not something that is impacting just 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 a new virtual world, the world of big data. martin: well, big data essentially is the collection and use just of massive amounts of data.

big corporations for example, these companies are collecting all kinds of information about their customers, about their business operations, about the actual processes in industrial environments and factories. about the things that their employees are doing. all of this data essentially becomes a kind of feedstock for these smart algorithms, the information they use to learn and figure out how to do things. that is something that i think is going to be dramatically disruptive going forward. narrator: the total data stored on the world's computers is now believed to be well over 1000 billion gigabytes. and it is big data which is driving the most disruptive advance in technology, the ability of machines to think. martin: one thing that you will very often hear people say even today is that computers only do what they are programmed to do. and you know, this is really not right anymore. and the reason it is not right basically is because of machine learning. because we now have this technology that allows smart software algorithms to look at data, and based on that, to learn, to learn how to do things, to figure things out, to

make predictions. so 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, all kinds of industrial equipment, everything communicates and talks to each other. and i think that one of the things that will happen is that artificial intelligence will kind of use that as a platform. it will scale across all of that. everything will become more intelligent. narrator: the last great technological advance, robots, replaced millions of workers in factories and on production lines. martin believes this new disruption is going to target the white-collar workforce as well. martin: once a computer learns to do something, that information can be scalable out to any number of machines. so it is almost as if, like, you can imagine having a workforce of people, and you can train one employee to do a particular task and then you can clone that worker and have a whole army of those workers.

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

transform that data into a very compelling news story that many people would read and they can't tell if it was written by a machine. in the future, maybe 90% of news stories will be machine generated. narrator: the number of jobs displaced has the potential to utterly transform the economic landscape. martin: there have been a couple of studies done, most notably by a couple of researchers at oxford university, and they have 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. martin: that is a staggering number. and obviously, we have a massive social problem. you have tremendous stress on government in terms of trying to take care of all these people that no longer have an income. i think that you would see the potential for a massive economic downturn because you would run out of consumers. you no longer have people capable of buying the products and services that are being

produced by the economy. narrator: a revolution on this scale wouldn't just transform an economy. it would have immense implications throughout society. martin: we could really have just what you might call inequality on steroids. the very wealthy people who own all of this technology are going to do extraordinarily well. you woulhave t potential for civil unrest, perhaps even riots or massive crime waves. in the united states, during the great depression, we had an unemployment rate of about 25%. and back then, there were many people genuinely concerned that that would result in the collapse of both democracy and capitalism. narrator: the situation amounts to just about the end of the world as we know it, a science-fiction nightmare straight from the movies.

martin: there are some very prominent thinkers like, for example, stephen hawking and elon musk who have raised genuine fears about the potential for advanced artificial intelligence. their concerns are that someday we will build a superintelligent machine. imagine a machine that is 100 or maybe 1000 times smarter than any living person. what would that system think? how would it act? would it have a use for us? it might decide that we are simply a burden. it might decide to just get rid of us. so it could potentially present an existential threat. is that something to worry about? i think that is not a silly concern. it is not something that we should laugh at and just dismiss. there is really no endpoint to this. there is no point at which you can say, this is absolutely 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, and we need

to adapt to that. narrator: health care is one area of the economy already adapting to this disruption. and 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 now 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 impcations. >> in general, rob one form or another are going to become much more omnipresent in our lives, in a good way. they will replace a lot of repetitive activities that people are currently doing. >> robots will have a dramatic effect on the labor pool. lower the cost of products. people will start to realize that just about every manual task will eventually be done by a robot. narrator: martin ford's books have highlighted the threat to

the job market. but even he sees areas where artificial intelligence could be beneficial. martin: i do think that in health care is actually 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, especially in the united states. so if we can deploy more artificial intelligence and robotics there to make it more efficient, that would be a great thing. narrator: analysts expect the ai health care market to generate revenues of over $6 billion by 2021, 10 times its current total. young companies like hindsight in new jersey and in california are mining data to improve patient outcomes across a range of illnesses. and in new york, ibm researchers have developed watson, an

intelligent software system at the forefront of this revolution. guru: it can understand somebody's personality type. it can look at e-mail for example and tell you what is the tone of the e-mail, you know, what kind of messages are coming through. if you read through them or not. they can look at, for example, a big encyclopedia, extract all of 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. guru: i look at the world from the point of view of, you know, the data that there is, and the amount of knowledge that is embedded or inside, embedded inside the data that we are not able to extract today. and therefore, we are not able to make the right decisions. so the whole 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. john: melanoma is a very deadly form of skin cancer. and it is something where early detection and intervention is key. so a dermatologist faced with a patient who has a skin lesion will make some assessment about the likelihood of a lesion being melanoma. so unfortunately today, dermatologists can make errors. some melanomas are being missed, and some skin lesions which are perfectly benign are being excised needlessly. so what we can do here is essentially ask the computer to make a deep analysis over an image.

so this image is then being sent to the computer, and is being automatically analyzed. and what the computer is telling us about this image is there is a very high probability that it corresponds to melanoma. what we are finding in our own internal, retrospective research is that the computer can be as accurate as 95%. so this compares to the best clinical experts today that are between 75% and 84% at 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's skills. guru: i look forward to a time when, you know, every professional, in fact, 2 billion to 3 billion professionals are all able to have their own personal cognitive assistant that can help them do their daily jobs. and that changes the nature of

expertise. humanity would move to a completely different place in terms of expertise and how we apply our knowledge and our 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, you know, search vast amounts of information like in the internet era, i look at the next revolution as machines augmenting people's 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. martin: 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 marketnd the impact onhe incomeand e livelihoods for average people. so you know, in the short term, things could be pretty difficult, but in the longer term, if we do adapt to this, then i think there are reasons to be really optimistic. you can imagine an almost utopian kind of future where no one has to do a job that is dangerous or that they really hate or that is really boring. where technology takes on more and more of that. and if we can get to that point, then of course that is a tremendously positive outcome. so i think that all of that is really possible, and it could be one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, but it will require we adapt to it. and that is going to be a staggering challenge. ♪ ♪

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