What if Barbie could pass the Turing Test?

If you’re a movie fan or a cryptologist, you probably know who Alan Turing was.  In the movie ‘The Imitation Game’, the code breaker savant was portrayed by the omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch.  Among his contributions to society is the Turing Test. A machine passes the test when a human interlocutor cannot determine if they are conversing with said machine or with a human.

Toymaker Mattel now endeavors to have its classic doll, Barbie, pass the Turing Test – at least when conversing with a 9 year-old girl.  In a wonderful article in the New York Times magazine, James Vlahos describes the development of a soon-to-be released Barbie with the artificial intelligence to hold a real conversation with its (her?) human companion. 

What most interested me is the idea that it’s not necessary to pass the Turing Test if your human companion knows a machine’s limitations but treats it like a human anyway.  If you’ve had kids (or remember being one), you know that a youngster can have elaborate, imaginary conversations with a stuffed bunny, the family pet or with Barbie.  No response required. 

So, what if Barbie could talk back?  Would a child know that Barbie is just a toy just as she knows that Fido is just a dog?  Probably.  Would Barbie pass the Turing Test?  Probably not.

The implications are interesting if not yet well understood.  A study done by economists at Deloitte and Oxford University reports that technology has been changing the nature of the work we do for centuries, eliminating the most monotonous, dangerous or physically challenging work.  Yet, when technology destroyed jobs, it created many more new ones.

The report also provides a list of those likely to lose their jobs to technology in the next 20 years. At the top of the list – are you ready for this? – Telephone Salesperson.

It took a moment for that to sink in.  What if the recorded robo-call you received just as you sat down to dinner was from Barbie instead of a recorded message?  Or, to turn it around, what if Barbie were programmed to answer 800 numbers instead of being programmed to talk with 9 year-olds?  Hold queues would disappear. 

Could she handle it?  Maybe not today…. But soon!

What of the workforce as a whole?  It’s easy to assess the historical impact of creative destruction on people’s jobs.  Assembly line workers who lost jobs to robots needed to be retrained for something new. 

On the other hand, it was once thought that accountants would lose their jobs to Excel Spreadsheets.  Instead, they have prospered by using that tool to offer new services. 

And, so it goes.  Jobs that barely existed at the turn of the Century are now plentiful --- webmasters, solar panel installers, optical engineers – while others have faded away – telephone operators, draftsmen, travel agents.

Futurists like MIT’s David Autor and Andrew McAfee suggest that we might see a barbell effect.  Those in very high skill professions – brain surgeons, for example – will use technology to be more productive and effective at their jobs.  Others, like legal secretaries and the aforementioned Telephone Sales people, are vulnerable to being pushed down the compensation ladder to personal service jobs like nursing assistants or hotel workers. So, high-income professions will become more productive and create more value while low-income jobs become more numerous.  The middle gets hollowed out.

McAfee is optimistic, telling the Huffington Post “the technological progress we are experiencing is the best economic news on the planet, bar none. It will increase the material bounty of our world, giving us higher volume, more variety and better quality goods and services at lower prices.”

He worries, however, about how quickly the workforce can adapt.  Our public schools still prepare students for the jobs of the 20^th Century.  Our infrastructure is crumbling and our government’s policies stifle entrepreneurs.

Technology improves productivity and drives economic growth.  People lose jobs as it happens.  It’s an unstoppable force. 

Big companies and government are not driving these changes.  Consumers are.  We prefer low-friction, efficient service.  It’s easier to shop on your smartphone than to go to Wal-Mart.  It’s easier to print your boarding passes at home than to wait in line at the airport.  And, it’s easier to send an email than to mail a letter. 

We can’t stop the unstoppable.  We need to find ways to deal with it.

WHO WILL LEAD?

The Evolution of the Employee

A while back, a friend of mine posted this graphic on Facebook. It’s a well-presented picture of the changing landscape for 21^st Century participants in the economy. 

The next to bottom rung of this ladder resonated most with me.  For much of the last 15 years, I have earned compensation by virtue of results I have achieved.  No salary – just commissions or splits of revenue or profit.  So, rather than being paid for my time, I was subjected to the forces of the market without an employer as an intermediary.   

Sometimes it’s more than a little nerve wracking.  I spent five years as an intermediary representing private businesses for sale.  In a good year, I would get five or six paychecks. In a not-so-good year, three.  It’s hard to plan your future when you’re not sure what you’ll be making this year or next. 

On balance I like the flexibility of being an independent contractor.  But, I am a professional earning a good living.  At the other end of the pay scale, there are legitimate concerns.  Our social insurance system has been built around traditional employment.  In the sharing economy, workers are typically independent contractors.  For some, that’s not an appealing arrangement.

The online forum for Uber drivers (UberPeople.net) captured this sentiment from a driver using the pseudonym Honkadonk, "Uber's whole game … is to make everything some weird frayed-line, grey area where nothing is their responsibility. It's ride share but Uber is "everyone's private driver". We're IC but we have rules, answer to bosses, and can be fired. We're illegal cabs but it's okay because we're not cabs. We earn $35/hr except we f---ing don’t.”

Well, he’s right of course and Uber isn’t the only example.  It is the basic nature of corporations to shift liability to third parties.  That’s why we need regulation.

But, how much regulation?  Smartphone apps and the Internet reduce the ‘friction cost’ of doing business.  It’s to everyone’s advantage to benefit from the efficiency that’s created.  The challenge is finding the right regulatory balance so as not to stifle innovation and the disruption that is native to the free enterprise system.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers and politicians continue to try to reinforce the fraying social contracts of the last century.  An article written for the website Hill.com predicts that the National Labor Relations Board will soon tighten rules for independent contractors so that even franchise owners – the millionaires who own McDonalds franchises, for example – would be considered employees. 

We would be better served if we endeavored to place this new reality at the center of our values.  After all, market forces are unstoppable.  It’s not the consumers or the Uber drivers really being hurt by this new paradigm, it’s the entrenched interests of taxi companies, unions and regulators who have the most to fear.

We should be asking this question: how can we decouple the employee safety net of unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation and social security from the framework of full-time employment?  Like it or not, Obamacare has already done so for health insurance coverage. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Weber has suggested a new status – the‘dependent contractor’ to which we might extend some of the same benefits. 

For their part, Uber contracted with a Princeton economist to analyze the relative pay of Uber and taxi drivers in key markets.  The results show an Uber driver makes an average of $6 per hour more than the average taxi/chauffeur/limo driver.  Here is the chart they have published:

The Huffington Post followed up with an analysis of their own suggesting that the fallacy of Uber’s study is that it doesn’t consider that Uber drivers bear the cost of operating their own vehicles. 

Fair enough.  However, the line of thought that suggests that the sharing economy is sucking jobs from traditional 9-to-5 employment is off-base. 

In a survey of its drivers, 78% reported being satisfied working for the company.  The survey also revealed that many drivers (32%) consider their Uber gig as a fall back while they are looking for a better job.

Would we rather have them depending upon unemployment compensation?

Whatever it is that draws workers to this kind of work and consumers to this kind of service should be embraced not resisted.   The only question…

WHO WILL LEAD?