Unexpected person in the bagging area

Picture: LG

Amongst the supersized TV screens and Internet of Things-enabled toothbrushes unveiled in Las Vegas at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, the South Korean firm LG showcased the future. Yes, the future. And I know that’s what they all say (and, in my own CES history, I probably have, too..), but what LG revealed should make the blood run cold amongst any of the paranoid theorists who believe that we humans are to be replaced by robots.

LG revealed a conceptual family of robots designed to do menial tasks at airports, hotels and in supermarkets, such as carrying suitcases or giving directions. LG's 'CLOi' (pronounced "klo-hee") family all have faces - all bright eyes and a friendly, smiley appearance, just what might appeal to patrons of aforesaid airports, hotels and supermarkets. The added bonus is that they won't require salaries, health plans, paid holidays and sick leave. Unfortunately for LG, the CES demo of its first 'GLOi' machine - a cute-looking, voice activated kitchen assistant - didn’t go so well as the little fella refused to respond to instructions from the very human LG marketing man, David van der Waal. It won't be the first time a demo at CES has fallen over, but for tech companies like LG banking on artificial intelligence as the next big thing, it's a little embarrassing, to say the least.

Artificial intelligence has been a holy grail in the technology world for decades. It has also been a mainstay of science fiction for even longer, where robots have been a source of both whimsy and menace, be it Star Wars' R2D2 for cuteness or Gort in The Day The World Stood Still for fear (a post-Hiroshima metaphor for 1950s Cold War paranoia). But while droids in a galaxy far, far away, might be useful for fixing vaporators on Tatooine or keeping X-wing fighters in the battle, back here on Earth (i.e. the real world), robotic artificial intelligence has a long way to go, as LG's CES demo seems to suggest.

There is, though, no denying that it is coming. The question is, how quickly? And what will be the true cost to society when workers are replaced by a variety of gizmos? The service economy alone represents almost a billion employees worldwide, including the likes of airport, hotel and supermarket workers, such as those LG's CLOi robots could usurp. The Institute for Public Policy Research think tank in the UK argues that automation could help business productivity, but it also warns that that benefits could be concentrated among a narrow group of people such as investors and highly-skilled workers, at the cost of everyone else. Indeed, an IPPR report last year estimated that jobs generating wages of £290 billion annually - a third of all earned wages in the UK economy - have the potential to be automated.

And it has already begun. Remember that 1980s Fiat Strada advert showing the first industrial robots building cars? And remember the Not The Nine O'Clock News spoof, with the British Leyland 'Ambassador' being "built by Roberts" ("Bob - have you got Bob's tool wrench?"). That, though, was in the realms of the third, so-called industrial revolution, the evolution from mass production assembly lines to human-assisted automation. Today, however, the buzzword is 'Industry 4.0' - the fourth industrial revolution. Here, robots would transform from relatively dumb instruments in factories performing recurring tasks, to the use automation and data exchange, Internet of Things technology, cloud computing and, eventually, 5G - the next mobile broadband platform - to a point where data processing becomes cognitive. So-called "cyber-physical systems" will learn, making decisions for themselves about physical industrial processes. So the theory goes, computers can make decisions about how an airliner flies or a car travels, far faster than any human brain, so why not robotic factory production?

Machine learning is also already here. The American scientist Claude Shannon (who worked for my own company's Bell Labs, conducting encryption research during World War 2) developed early 'learning' electrical circuits in the 1930s, leading to research on natural language processing, work whose traces can be found in many devices today in daily usage as well as, critically, the search algorithms that are the basis of 'virtual assistants' such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. Similarly, the somewhat creepy face recognition algorithms Facebook uses (and which are in common use for security applications) is also an example of the machine-based learning that is a core part of the move towards full artificial intelligence and, yes, intelligent, cognitive robots.

Businesses and industries already using artificial intelligence and robotics will avoid the elephant in the room, the replacement of human workers, by claiming that automation frees up employees and makes them more efficient. But business is business. It operates for profit - and maximising that profit, in particular - so if a machine can do the job of a human, it will.

The most obvious example of this are the self-service tills now prevalent in supermarkets. Clearly designed to replace paid-for till workers (despite being positioned as customer conveniences...), they still require a shop employee to keep watch on shoppers and - frequently, in my experience - come and sort out a terminal when it refuses to work.

Actually, self-service tills are an example of flawed logic in automation: just before Christmas it was revealed that British shoppers steal £3.2 billion via self-service tills every year, with nearly a quarter admitting to taking at least one item without paying for it, with toiletries, fruit and vegetables the most popular products for pilferage. In fact, over the past four years theft via self-scan tills has more than doubled. The research, carried out by VoucherCodesPro.co.uk, found that shoppers were awarding themselves discounts - pricing up one type apple by selecting a different, cheaper variety, for example - or simply finding ways of sneaking items into their shopping bag without being scanned. Another common scam is shoppers 'forgetting' to add the 5p charge for a carrier bag. Almost two-thirds of those surveyed, though, said that taking an item was due to a technical difficulty with the machine. Easy to say that, of course, but not impossible. Self-service tills are an odd compromise between cost-saving and a trusting nature. Clearly, too trusting.

They are, though, the thin end of the wedge. We're already reading about drones taking care of pizza and Amazon deliveries, and active thought is being given to drones delivering medical supplies, particularly in hard to reach parts of the developing world. Driverless vehicles are now being tested out and 5G connectivity will bring them even closer to reality, meaning taxis, buses and freight trucks without humans at the wheel could happen.

The online grocery company Ocado announced last week that it will introduce humanoid robots in its warehouses in 2025, supporting human workers with tasks like ladder moving and using a combination of artificial intelligence and speech recognition. Ocado already employs robots at its depot in Andover to move groceries around the site, but insists that it doesn't see the use of robots is a step towards getting rid of human employees: "The idea of [the SecondHands concept] is not to replace people," as spokesperson said, "it is to take away an element of a technician's job that is physically demanding, boring or unpleasant. We are removing the physical labour but you will still need the human. The idea is they work together and are more productive as a pair."

I suppose that if you apply this notion to science fiction, R2D2 and C3PO weren't acquired to replace Luke Skywalker, but to assist him on his uncle, Owen Lars' moisture farm. The other extreme is The Terminator, and Cyberdine Systems' Skynet artificial intelligence defence network becoming self-aware and causing nuclear holocaust. In the real world, somewhere between the two will be the likely scenario. The question is, at what cost to human employment? Could you be replaced by a robot...?