Future of Work (MSFT Faculty Summit 2019)
Future of work is a very interesting topic. This is something I would like to think about and brainstorm. But since the topic is very broad, the attempts to talk about future of work can get hazy and vague. NSF has released this call for proposals on Future of Work. It invites researchers to start addressing the needs/problems/challenges future work with a "convergent perspective". I am accustomed to seeing vague and extravagant language in NSF calls, but I think this one surpassed the usual. The word convergent/convergence appears 22 times in the call. (I think convergent is a new word for interdisciplinary in this context.)
I guess a similar thing happened with the Microsoft Faculty Summit 2019. Last July, I was at Microsoft for my sabbatical, and had a chance to attend the Microsoft Faculty Summit, whose subject was "Future of Work". It was a two day workshop, and I was very motivated to learn as much as I could from the workshop, because the topic is very interesting. After attending the first day, I was disappointed by the incoherent and vague sessions/presentations, and couldn't get myself to attend the second day.
The entire thing looked unorganized. Everyone presented what they are working on (for example machine learning, AR/VR, visualization) with some minimal effort to link it to the future of work concept. As a result, the talks in a session, or sometimes the talks in the same panel appeared disconnected and unrelated. At the end of one such panel, one of the audience members actually asked the panel "what do your talks have in common?" The panel didn't have a good answer, and bounced the question back, and asked the audience member "why did you think the talks were unrelated?", upon which he replied "because everyone talked about unrelated topics". The panel then said, "no, we were all talking about different aspects of the same thing". I think given a sufficiently high level of abstraction, it is true that we are all talking about the same thing.
I think I was expecting to see talks that take on the future of work question in a head-on way, and was frustrated when I found that everyone was thinking about this either in an incremental way (microproductivity in the car, workflow creation in the smartphone, improving machine learning datasets), or in a couple cases in a very vague abstract way ("changing the social narrative", not sure about the question but AI is the answer). I didn't attend the second day, and maybe there were some more coherent panels and talks in the second day. The agenda and talk videos are at this link, if you like to check.
However, at the end of the first day, Bill Gates's interview with Eric Horvitz was very interesting. It started with overview of Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's work to combat global poverty. This work saved millions of lives. They also supported new curriculum and education work as well.
Bill had some smart things to say about future of work in the interview.
"When you write an email, it is not a random thing, you have a purpose. How does that email relate to other things you are involved with and dealing with? Graph representation of heterogeneous things can help for modeling this. Can machine learning infer the high-level intention and taxonomy? Can it help with how this email or the response to it is prioritized?"
"Long time ago, 1995, I gave a speech called information on your fingertips, i.e., query languages. We are extremely close for the machine assistant to help in many things. I have no idea how long it will take for deep understanding of text, but for other things (for which there have been demos for decades) we should be close. Such as information agents."
"I want to raise the bar for remote assistance on complex tasks."
"VR type avatar for a remote meeting would be helpful. Right now it is not even close to the real experience. Halolens could be a piece of the puzzle. We are optimistic though, this should be within a 5 year time frame." (I am not optimistic that this could be done within 5 years.)
(About gig and freelance economy) "A key element is education math and science free stuff is extremely good, Khan Academy, etc., but this has little effect on actual skill levels. ... How do we quantify on a good math teacher? Average math teacher is probably the same with that of 20 years ago. ... I am enthused about that: whether you can still learn in mature life, lifelong learning"
"Someday our sense of purpose will not be work. Someday we will collaborate goals other than the human basics for a higher sense of purpose. ... If you can supercharge education, you buy many decades where the labor market is well matched to what those demands would look like."
(About new forms of automation, and inflection point in AI) "The society and government policies work should get ready for AI. The way the education system works, the way the tax system works--- which currently discourages labor--- should be changed. Things that are more encouraging of labor such as income tax credit will dominate, and things like social security taxes that cost you on labor, those would go away."
The camera doesn't show it too much, but Bill Gates has very fidgety legs, he kept shaking his legs the entire time he was talking. He is also very animated with his hands, and can get worked up while answering some questions. Also he likes saying "phenomenal".
I guess a similar thing happened with the Microsoft Faculty Summit 2019. Last July, I was at Microsoft for my sabbatical, and had a chance to attend the Microsoft Faculty Summit, whose subject was "Future of Work". It was a two day workshop, and I was very motivated to learn as much as I could from the workshop, because the topic is very interesting. After attending the first day, I was disappointed by the incoherent and vague sessions/presentations, and couldn't get myself to attend the second day.
The entire thing looked unorganized. Everyone presented what they are working on (for example machine learning, AR/VR, visualization) with some minimal effort to link it to the future of work concept. As a result, the talks in a session, or sometimes the talks in the same panel appeared disconnected and unrelated. At the end of one such panel, one of the audience members actually asked the panel "what do your talks have in common?" The panel didn't have a good answer, and bounced the question back, and asked the audience member "why did you think the talks were unrelated?", upon which he replied "because everyone talked about unrelated topics". The panel then said, "no, we were all talking about different aspects of the same thing". I think given a sufficiently high level of abstraction, it is true that we are all talking about the same thing.
I think I was expecting to see talks that take on the future of work question in a head-on way, and was frustrated when I found that everyone was thinking about this either in an incremental way (microproductivity in the car, workflow creation in the smartphone, improving machine learning datasets), or in a couple cases in a very vague abstract way ("changing the social narrative", not sure about the question but AI is the answer). I didn't attend the second day, and maybe there were some more coherent panels and talks in the second day. The agenda and talk videos are at this link, if you like to check.
However, at the end of the first day, Bill Gates's interview with Eric Horvitz was very interesting. It started with overview of Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's work to combat global poverty. This work saved millions of lives. They also supported new curriculum and education work as well.
"When you write an email, it is not a random thing, you have a purpose. How does that email relate to other things you are involved with and dealing with? Graph representation of heterogeneous things can help for modeling this. Can machine learning infer the high-level intention and taxonomy? Can it help with how this email or the response to it is prioritized?"
"Long time ago, 1995, I gave a speech called information on your fingertips, i.e., query languages. We are extremely close for the machine assistant to help in many things. I have no idea how long it will take for deep understanding of text, but for other things (for which there have been demos for decades) we should be close. Such as information agents."
"I want to raise the bar for remote assistance on complex tasks."
"VR type avatar for a remote meeting would be helpful. Right now it is not even close to the real experience. Halolens could be a piece of the puzzle. We are optimistic though, this should be within a 5 year time frame." (I am not optimistic that this could be done within 5 years.)
(About gig and freelance economy) "A key element is education math and science free stuff is extremely good, Khan Academy, etc., but this has little effect on actual skill levels. ... How do we quantify on a good math teacher? Average math teacher is probably the same with that of 20 years ago. ... I am enthused about that: whether you can still learn in mature life, lifelong learning"
"Someday our sense of purpose will not be work. Someday we will collaborate goals other than the human basics for a higher sense of purpose. ... If you can supercharge education, you buy many decades where the labor market is well matched to what those demands would look like."
(About new forms of automation, and inflection point in AI) "The society and government policies work should get ready for AI. The way the education system works, the way the tax system works--- which currently discourages labor--- should be changed. Things that are more encouraging of labor such as income tax credit will dominate, and things like social security taxes that cost you on labor, those would go away."
The camera doesn't show it too much, but Bill Gates has very fidgety legs, he kept shaking his legs the entire time he was talking. He is also very animated with his hands, and can get worked up while answering some questions. Also he likes saying "phenomenal".
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