Wanted: an artificially intelligent travel agent

When my son told me his wife was pregnant, my first instinct was to let out a “whoop!”  My second was to buy a plane ticket so I could meet my grandson.  The due date was February and I knew it would be tough (and expensive) to get a ride to Fort Lauderdale at that time of year. 

It turns out that when you make a plane reservation seven months in advance of the trip, you are likely to have your airline change your itinerary unilaterally.  When the change came through in December, I frankly took no notice of it.  Reviewing it now – a few days in advance of our departure – revealed that we are stuck with a four hour layover at JFK, which I look forward to about as much as a bout of e. coli. 

What to do… what to do?

I know what I would have done back in the day.  When I was a 100,000-mile per year business traveler, I would pick up the phone (or have my secretary do it) and ask one of the many travel agents who valued my business to find me a better itinerary without costing an arm and a leg. 

“What’s a travel agent?” you ask.  A travel agent is a person whose job has been disintermediated by the Internet.  There are a few left but many work out of their homes and concentrate on clients who want to go on cruises or exotic vacations.  According to the Department of Labor, their numbers have been reduced by about half since 1990.  The rest of us are stuck with Travelocity, Expedia or one of the many struggling-to-differentiate-themselves apps you can download to your smartphone.

When we think of artificial intelligence these days, we tend to focus on robots or perhaps the variety of devices that enable the smart home, like the Nest thermostat or the Roomba vacuum cleaner. 

But, another tool in this budding arsenal of enablers is Big Data.  So, someone, please invent an artificially intelligent travel agent who will take advantage of all that data.  We can call her Siri… no, wait…  That’s already taken.  How about Barbie?  Oh, no…  I’ll call her Cassandra.  (If you prefer a male, perhaps you can call him Brad.)

What would she do?  She would identify all options; call her contact at Jet Blue (or interact with its database) to see if we can make a change with little or no cost.  She would call me and offer a quick overview of the best options, taking into consideration that I would rather leave early than arrive late (Jet Blue’s imposed change has me doing both).

If I were traveling internationally, Cassandra would review the security recommendations of the US State Department; outline the risk of theft and assess the safety of any women on the trip.  She would summarize the best days to travel by reviewing the available fares from major airlines and know if we should wait a month before buying a ticket to get a better price. 

Then she would scan my social media to see which of my friends and colleagues have traveled to the same country recently and message them to gather any recommendations they may have.   She might check Yelp! while she was at it. 

Armed with all that information, Cassandra would plan my travel, make my reservations and send me on my way.  This is not a pipedream.  A startup tech firm, Wayblazer, is using IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson to create the future world of travel.  Doesn’t technology always provide a solution to the problem it creates?

I look forward to the day when Cassandra is my travel agent… at least to the extent that a voice recognition error doesn’t ship me off to Auckland when I want to go to Oakland. 

WHO WILL LEAD?

From Turing to Musk to Industry 4.0

We are on the cusp of major changes in education, technology and industry owing to forces that we are powerless to overcome.  It’s natural to fear change on a large scale.  But, we shouldn’t be afraid.  We should embrace the change. 

I’m talking about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on society and the workplace. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has labeled the coming paradigm Industry 4.0.  In their studies, nine technologies from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) to Big Data are integrated to change not just the factory floor but also how businesses will change their product and service offerings.

Our challenge is to understand how new technology will change the workplace and how we should educate our children (See “Is the Education WeWant the Education We Need?” and “Don’t Send Your Kids to College”).  Is it a little scary?  Yes, it is.  Some fear that not only will robots take our jobs but also they might take over society.

Big thinkers from Alan Turing to Elon Musk have contemplated technological singularity for decades.  What’s that?  Here’s a simple definition from Wikipedia:

“The technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which artificial general intelligence (constituting, for example, intelligent computers, computer networks, or robots) would be capable of recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself…”

Many think machines will never outsmart humans.  After all, how can a machine know more than its human programmers?  Rather than debate how we might determine if we have reached singularity, Turing designed a test to take the guesswork out of the evaluation.

The Star Trek series showed us how it might happen as the impatient-with-human-failings Mr. Spock was replaced in the Next Generation by Data, an android with access to all the information in the universe and the irrefutable logic to apply it in any situation. 

The real-life manifestations of this Sci-Fi are everywhere.  But not in robot form.  Fitbit collects data and coaches us to be healthier.  Netflix collects our movie preferences and recommends films for us to watch.  Next we will see self-driving cars that use sensors and software to get us to work more safely than we can on our own.

How will Industry 4.0 change businesses and, by extension, jobs?  Futurists contemplate that product offerings will evolve into services.  Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) describes how it would look. GeneralMotors recently invested $500M in Lyft, a ride sharing company.  Why? Well, instead of buying a car in the future, you might buy transportation services. 

Does that seem far-fetched?  Well, when ride-sharing services evolve into fleets of on demand self-driving vehicles to take where you want to go when you want to go there, you won’t much care if you own a car.  And, further you won’t care if the self-driving car that picks you up is a Chevy, Ford or Toyota. 

Don’t believe me?  What kind of plane transported you on your last business trip or vacation?  You might remember the airline and whether you had a good experience with their service.  But, it’s unlikely that you remember whether Boeing or Airbus made the plane.  Nor, do you care!

So, what happens to your job in this new world?  BCG concludes that government and industry should work together to “[a]dapt school curricula, training, and university programs and strengthen entrepreneurial approaches to increase the IT-related skills and innovation abilities of the workforce.” (I speculated about this need in “Our Future:Educated People or Just Educated Robots?”)

In other words, we need to change the way we educate our children.  Workers of the future will be required to understand how to interpret data as well as turn a wrench.  Low cost labor will no longer be a global competitive advantage.  The spoils will go to those who those who can provide a high-skilled workforce. 

Politicians on the left and right seek to make us afraid of the foundational changes necessary to support this paradigm shift (free trade agreements, common core, charter schools, immigration, automation of the factory floor).  After all, if you want to get elected, tell people what to be afraid of and who to blame.

But, it’s fair to say that technology has consistently improved our lives for centuries – from steam engines to electrification to car and air travel to modern electronics.  Rather than raising the specter of job losses from automation and free trade agreements, our political and thought leaders should be creating a vision of a future of better schools, better jobs and better lifestyles.

WHO WILL LEAD?

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?

Your iPhone Will Take Your Job

“Maybe not today…  maybe not tomorrow…  but soon and for the rest of your life…”*

   

Technology -- driven by customer interaction or some algorithm much smarter than we are – is taking our jobs.  It’s been going on for decades.  We gladly did the work of a bank teller in exchange for 24/7 access to an ATM beginning in the 1970’s.  No more standing in line to cash our paychecks.   More recently, we quickly adopted the convenience of using a kiosk rather than dealing with an airline employee to get our boarding passes or better yet printed them at home. 

In economic theory, capital investment creates jobs.  Yet, technology investment is booming and employment languishes. 

Ken Jennings, who famously won over $2 Million on Jeopardy, was soundly whipped by an IBM computer dubbed Watson on that same game show.  Combine Watson with the Siri app on your iPhone and guess what happens next.  Your doctor’s job is in jeopardy.

If you think the technology is too rudimentary, consider this.  Visionaries like MIT’s Andrew McAfee point out that Moore’s Law correctly predicted that computing power would double every 18 months way back in the 1960’s.  And Moore was right.  Now, apply that theory to Siri and Watson.  If I ask my doctor about a particular drug, he looks it up on his iPhone.  It’s a short hop to the iPhone looking it up and giving me clinical advice.

In the 20^th Century, science assumed an important role in society.  Great inventions  were born at institutions like Bell Labs or MIT.  Today, the Internet has taken the process of innovation global.  This democratization portends great progress – both economic and social.  McAfee suggest we will “live more lightly on the planet” and “eradicate poverty”.

Yet, I am not so easily convinced that the progress of innovation will mean progress for everyone.  America, the land of opportunity, has been sliding backwards in terms of upward mobility.  The OECD’s latestreport on economic mobility rates the U.S. poorly on that score.

Germaine Smith-Baugh

How will great technological progress provide for the poor uneducated masses in the developing world and in our own inner cities?  A good friend, Germaine Smith-Baugh, is CEO of the Urban League of Broward County.   Their mission?  “To assist African-Americans and other disenfranchised groups in the achievement of social and economic equality.”

I am overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.  Yet, Germaine and her underfunded organization soldier on undeterred.  I asked her how she goes about making a difference.  “I start with a family,” she says.  “If I can get a family, I can get a block.  If I can get a block, I can get a neighborhood.  If I can get a neighborhood, I can get a community.”  And so on.

But the problems of income inequality are much bigger than the Urban League and its like across the U.S. can solve.  For all to thrive, for the middle class to remain a stable economic and social force in this country, we need to address the structural impediments to the solutions. 

Those solutions lie in the need for massive investments in education and infrastructure.  Conservatives eschew such investments by government in favor of free market solutions.  Liberals misallocate funds to projects that focus on social outcomes rather than economic ones. 

A college degree is so expensive to obtain that many people are beginning to doubt there is a financial return.  And colleges themselves seem stuck on providing a great 20^th Century education.  For this country to thrive in the 21^st, our education system must be revamped to train more engineers, moreentrepreneurs and more technicians. 

Budget cutting fervor has reduced aid through Pell Grants and student loan interest rates have skyrocketed because, in the absence of government guarantees, bankers will not loan money to poor students whose prospects are not certain.   If we are to produce a better educated workforce, we must identify the skills and knowledge valued by enterprise.  If government were to work hand and hand with industry to provide graduates with the skills that are in demand, the landscape would change.

Government spending on infrastructure is funneled to unproductive projects by politicians who want to make sure that their district gets a share of the pork that’s being doled out.  If we were to focus our infrastructure investments on the large urban centers that produce a return, we must overcome a political battle over how funds are allocated. 

For sure, non-profits like the Urban League must play a role in bolstering a sense of family and community among our nation’s poor.  However, our dysfunctional government structure and its sour relations with corporate America must be resolved before we can make substantial progress on behalf of the middle class and those less fortunate.

WHO WILL LEAD?

*One of my favorite lines from the movie Casablanca.