Beppe Coleiro
The world’s largest players in tech and capital markets are focused on understanding the grenade that has been thrown into our lives, and we should be too.
I was mingling at a tech conference in London last week, when a mid-sized, four legged robot trotted over to me and rolled over on it’s back like a dog. Seeing the robot-dog’s operator tapping away at a controller about ten feet across the room, I walked over to ask what his contraption was for.
“This robot” he said in a brashly confident Eastern European accent, “replaces human inspectors at oil refineries”. I looked back at the thing, which was by now sitting on its back legs begging in front of a group of Goldman Sachs investment bankers.
“A human safety inspector costs over one hundred pounds an hour, and if an injury occurs that causes big problems, but our automated robot can do it better at a fraction of the cost, without risk of injury to any staff.”
The rest of the conference was more of the same. Variations on the theme of AI replacing humans in ways too numerous to count. The world’s largest players in tech and capital markets are focused on understanding the grenade that has been thrown into our lives, and we should be too. We should all be thinking about how the AI boom will affect us, and how and how to emerge as winners in the AI revolution.
Before I go on, I know that many readers of this article have already come to the conclusion that technological disruption has always been with us, and that AI is just more of the same. Some human roles and skills will be replaced, while new ones will be created, to the net benefit of global production and wealth. But I don’t think it’s that simple this time.
Sure, we can look to the industrial revolution and note that the creation of machines to replace people in narrow skillsets like weaving fabric and harvesting corn, didn’t destroy the economy. But the truth is that the creation of machines only replaced aspects of what humans can do, pushing human workers to concentrate on intellectual tasks, and the physical tasks that machinery couldn’t effectively replicate. In the meantime, the explosion in machine-enabled productivity spawned new industries and jobs to replace the ones we lost.
When paired with robotics, like Tesla’s humanoid Optimus robot, AI solutions may become superior to human workers on such a wide range of tasks, that the jobs that remain are no longer enough. Today, AI makes things like research, copywriting, stock image creation, and itinerary planning so easy that companies can easily scale back teams and even lower their standards of hiring, since a single employee enabled by AI can now do the work of 3 or 4 people, with less training. We would all like to feel that AI will never be able to do what we do, but for a large number of people this is already the case today, and that number is growing.
Namely the fact that AI is still just a bedrock technology, and despite its many capabilities to date, it’s still not going to productise itself. Today entrepreneurs can tap into a new seam of opportunity, which is the chance to be among the first wave of companies to harness the power of AI to do useful, specific things – like automate digital media buying, build fully functioning websites, or be your dog’s best friend while you’re on holiday.
“And yet, within the chaos of AI disruption is a ladder of opportunity”
The beauty of AI businesses is that they don’t require vast infrastructure to start, just a good computer and some imagination. As global legacy companies struggle to adapt, Maltese entrepreneurs have a golden opportunity to become early adopters and creators of AI technology targeted at global markets. There are already some exceptional local leaders in this field, notably Angelo Dalli, but many more are needed.
Another opportunity within the AI boom is to pivot towards products and services that are human by nature, such as craftsmanship, art, performance, positions of legal responsibility, therapy, personal training, teaching, hospitality, and theoretical fields. These may be the kinds of job roles that gain in value, as a number of other services become cheaper and more automated. History has shown us that no matter how advanced automated manufacturing becomes, people will always want their Ferrari’s, Rolexes and and high art to be handmade.
An AI therapist might be good at getting to the root of your problem, but it can’t experience concern for you. A robot will never be as charming as the host of a great B&B, and an AI notary might catch issues in your contract, but it can’t take legal responsibility for errors. In such fields, humans have an edge, and thankfully Malta’s existing economy already emphasises things like hospitality, legal, and financial services.
But even if opportunities to capitalise or pivot do exist, I’m not sure that those alone can absorb the shrinking need for human capital. When AI and robotic technology have advanced to the point of parity with human counterparts and human labour is decoupled from economic productivity, then an even more fundamental adjustment will need to be made. We will need to devise a new system for putting money in people’s pockets and keeping the economy and society going. After all, without wage-earning consumers nothing about our current system makes sense.
As things stand today, with prescient futurists like Ray Kurtzweil predicting that human level artificial intelligence will arrive by the end of the decade, it becomes harder to ignore calls for serious discussion about universal basic income (UBI), and new systems of fractional ownership of the means to production. Whether we will redistribute wealth through the stock market, sovereign wealth funds, UBI, or other means remains nebulous and controversial, but this is another area where Malta has an opportunity to take an outsized role in a global event.
We tried this with Blockchain Island, and whatever the ultimate result, the spirit of that idea was a good one. Revolutionary technologies require social and legal reorganisation in order for society to adapt and capitalise. With Malta’s extensive resource of top legal minds, we have the opportunity to dig deep into issues of regulation, reg-tech, and innovation in legal and corporate systems to accommodate for the new questions raised by AI.
Whichever path we choose to take, it seems more certain now than ever that AI is no longer science fiction, or science future, but a very real and present wave of change that is forcing us to adapt quickly. There are many ways this technology could go, but deep and disruptive change seems inevitable, and presents a need for great leadership in Malta if we want emerge as winners in this global economic reshuffle.
Beppe Coleiro is the co-founder of Blonde and Giant and an advisor to Venture Capital Funds and Tech Startups, helping them raise over €2bn in Europe and North America.
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