I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust.
My job depends upon it.
There has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in.
Now in the old days, conducting, music making, was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion.
Up to and around about the Second World War, conductors were invariably dictators -- these tyrannical figures who would rehearse, not just the orchestra as a whole, but individuals within it, within an inch of their lives.
But I'm happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it.
We now have a more democratic view and way of making music -- a two-way street.
I, as the conductor, have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine.
For myself, of course, I have to completely trust my body language.
That's all I have at the point of sale.
It's silent gesture.
I can hardly bark out instructions while we're playing.
(Music) Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Ensemble.
(Applause) So in order for all this to work, obviously I have got to be in a position of trust.
I have to trust the orchestra, and, even more crucially, I have to trust myself.
Think about it: when you're in a position of not trusting, what do you do?
You overcompensate.
And in my game, that means you overgesticulate.
You end up like some kind of rabid windmill.
And the bigger your gesture gets, the more ill-defined, blurry and, frankly, useless it is to the orchestra.
You become a figure of fun.
There's no trust anymore, only ridicule.
And I remember at the beginning of my career, again and again, on these dismal outings with orchestras, I would be going completely insane on the podium, trying to engender a small scale crescendo really, just a little upsurge in volume.
Bugger me, they wouldn't give it to me.
I spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms.
And how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis who said, "Conducting, Charles, is like holding a small bird in your hand.
If you hold it too tightly, you crush it.
If you hold it too loosely, it flies away."
I have to say, in those days, I couldn't really even find the bird.
Now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me, in terms of music, has been my adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view, but a country which, through its musical culture, has taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust.
Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company.
So I went out there, and I auditioned, mainly in rural township locations, right around the country.
I heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers, the majority of whom were black, but there were a handful of white performers.
Now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had, in his previous incarnation, been a member of the South African police force.
And in the last years of the old regime, he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community.
Now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room, the general atmosphere.
Let's be under no illusions.
In South Africa, the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community.
So how do we recover from that, ladies and gentlemen?
Simply through singing.
We sang, we sang, we sang, and amazingly new trust grew, and indeed friendship blossomed.
And that showed me such a fundamental truth, that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot.
So we got some shows off the ground.
We started touring them internationally.
One of them was "Carmen."
We then thought we'd make a movie of "Carmen," which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha.
The piece was sung entirely in Xhosa, which is a beautifully musical language, if you don't know it.
It's called "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" -- literally "Carmen of Khayelitsha."
I want to play you a tiny clip of it now for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about South African music making.
(Music) (Applause) Something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music making is that it's so free.
South Africans just make music really freely.
And I think, in no small way, that's due to one fundamental fact: they're not bound to a system of notation.
They don't read music.
They trust their ears.
You can teach a bunch of South Africans a tune in about five seconds flat.
And then, as if by magic, they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can.
Now those of us that live in the West, if I can use that term, I think have a much more hidebound attitude or sense of music -- that somehow it's all about skill and systems.
Therefore it's the exclusive preserve of an elite, talented body.
And yet, ladies and gentlemen, every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis.
And if I can broaden this out for a second, I'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity, with total confidence, about movies, probably about literature.
But how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music?
Why is this?
And what I'm going to say to you now is I'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence, to take the plunge, to believe that you can trust your ears, you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue, fiber, DNA, what makes a great piece of music great.
I've got a little experiment I want to try with you.
Did you know that TED is a tune?
A very simple tune based on three notes -- T, E, D.
Now hang on a minute.
I know you're going to say to me, "T doesn't exist in music."
Well ladies and gentlemen, there's a time-honored system, which composers have been using for hundreds of years, which proves actually that it does.
If I sing you a musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G -- and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet, same scale: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T -- there you go.
T, see it's the same as F in music.
So T is F.
So T, E, D is the same as F, E, D.
Now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme, which is TED.
Have a listen.
(Music) Do you hear it?
Or do I smell some doubt in the room?
Okay, we'll play it for you again now, and we're going to highlight, we're going to poke out the T, E, D.
If you'll pardon the expression.
(Music) Oh my goodness me, there it was loud and clear, surely.
I think we should make this even more explicit.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly time for tea.
Would you reckon you need to sing for your tea, I think?
I think we need to sing for our tea.
We're going to sing those three wonderful notes: T, E, D.
Will you have a go for me?
Audience: T, E, D.
Charles Hazlewood: Yeah, you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings.
Shall we try that one again?
And look, if you're adventurous, you go up the octave.
T, E, D.
Audience: T, E, D.
CH: Once more with vim.
(Audience: T, E, D.)
There I am like a bloody windmill again, you see.
Now we're going to put that in the context of the music.
The music will start, and then at a signal from me, you will sing that.
(Music) One more time, with feeling, ladies and gentlemen.
You won't make the key otherwise.
Well done, ladies and gentlemen.
It wasn't a bad debut for the TED choir, not a bad wilkersonjack@example.org.
Now there's a project that I'm initiating at the moment that I'm very excited about and wanted to share with you, because it is all about changing perceptions, and, indeed, building a new level of trust.
The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which as you can imagine, if you don't have an experience of it yourself, is quite a big thing to take on board.
But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden, the community of disabled people.
And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement.
Of course there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust, to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion.
So I find myself asking: where is music in all of this?
You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people, in the U.K. alone, with massive musical potential.
So I decided to create a platform for that potential.
It's going to be Britain's first ever national disabled orchestra.
It's called Paraorchestra.
I'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had.
It was a really extraordinary moment.
Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians.
Normally when you improvise -- and I do it all the time around the world -- there's this initial period of horror, like everyone's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring, an awful pregnant silence.
Then suddenly, as if by magic, bang!
We're all in there and it's complete bedlam.
You can't hear anything.
No one's listening.
No one's trusting.
No one's responding to each other.
Now in this room with these four disabled musicians, within five minutes a rapt listening, a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music.
(Video) (Music) Nicholasbfa:9cc5:cc69:6ac6:826c:c37d:5606:9fa1 My name's Nicholas McCarthy.
I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist.
And I was born without my left hand -- right hand.
Can I do that one again?
(Music) Lyn: When I'm making music, I feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane.
I become alive.
(Music) Clarence: I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk.
There's so much joy and things I could get from playing an instrument and performing.
It's removed some of my paralysis.
(Music) (Applause) CH: I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today, so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are.
Paraorchestra is the name of that project.
If any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point, please let me know.
Now my parting shot comes courtesy of the great Joseph Haydn, wonderful Austrian composer in the second half of the 18th century -- spent the bulk of his life in the employ of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, along with his orchestra.
Now this prince loved his music, but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time, which is just on the Austro-Hungarian border, a place called Esterhazy -- a long way from the big city of Vienna.
Now one day in 1772, the prince decreed that the musicians' families, the orchestral musicians' families, were no longer welcome in the castle.
They weren't allowed to stay there anymore; they had to be returned to Vienna -- as I say, an unfeasibly long way away in those days.
You can imagine, the musicians were disconsolate.
Haydn remonstrated with the prince, but to no avail.
So given the prince loved his music, Haydn thought he'd write a symphony to make the point.
And we're going to play just the very tail end of this symphony now.
And you'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt.
I'm pleased to say, the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance, and the musicians were reunited with their families.
But I think it sums up my talk rather well, this, that where there is trust, there is music -- by extension life.
Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away.
(Music) (Applause)
Automation anxiety has been spreading lately, a fear that in the future, many jobs will be performed by machines rather than human beings, given the remarkable advances that are unfolding in artificial intelligence and robotics.
What's clear is that there will be significant change.
What's less clear is what that change will look like.
My research suggests that the future is both troubling and exciting.
The threat of technological unemployment is real, and yet it's a good problem to have.
And to explain how I came to that conclusion, I want to confront three myths that I think are currently obscuring our vision of this automated future.
A picture that we see on our television screens, in books, in films, in everyday commentary is one where an army of robots descends on the workplace with one goal in mind: to displace human beings from their work.
And I call this the Terminator myth.
Yes, machines displace human beings from particular tasks, but they don't just substitute for human beings.
They also complement them in other tasks, making that work more valuable and more important.
Sometimes they complement human beings directly, making them more productive or more efficient at a particular task.
So a taxi driver can use a satnav system to navigate on unfamiliar roads.
An architect can use computer-assisted design software to design bigger, more complicated buildings.
But technological progress doesn't just complement human beings directly.
It also complements them indirectly, and it does this in two ways.
The first is if we think of the economy as a pie, technological progress makes the pie bigger.
As productivity increases, incomes rise and demand grows.
The British pie, for instance, is more than a hundred times the size it was 300 years ago.
And so people displaced from tasks in the old pie could find tasks to do in the new pie instead.
But technological progress doesn't just make the pie bigger.
It also changes the ingredients in the pie.
As time passes, people spend their income in different ways, changing how they spread it across existing goods, and developing tastes for entirely new goods, too.
New industries are created, new tasks have to be done and that means often new roles have to be filled.
So again, the British pie: 300 years ago, most people worked on farms, 150 years ago, in factories, and today, most people work in offices.
And once again, people displaced from tasks in the old bit of pie could tumble into tasks in the new bit of pie instead.
Economists call these effects complementarities, but really that's just a fancy word to capture the different way that technological progress helps human beings.
Resolving this Terminator myth shows us that there are two forces at play: one, machine substitution that harms workers, but also these complementarities that do the opposite.
Now the second myth, what I call the intelligence myth.
What do the tasks of driving a car, making a medical diagnosis and identifying a bird at a fleeting glimpse have in common?
Well, these are all tasks that until very recently, leading economists thought couldn't readily be automated.
And yet today, all of these tasks can be automated.
You know, all major car manufacturers have driverless car programs.
There's countless systems out there that can diagnose medical problems.
And there's even an app that can identify a bird at a fleeting glimpse.
Now, this wasn't simply a case of bad luck on the part of economists.
They were wrong, and the reason why they were wrong is very important.
They've fallen for the intelligence myth, the belief that machines have to copy the way that human beings think and reason in order to outperform them.
When these economists were trying to figure out what tasks machines could not do, they imagined the only way to automate a task was to sit down with a human being, get them to explain to you how it was they performed a task, and then try and capture that explanation in a set of instructions for a machine to follow.
This view was popular in artificial intelligence at one point, too.
I know this because Richard Susskind, who is my dad and my coauthor, wrote his doctorate in the 1980s on artificial intelligence and the law at Oxford University, and he was part of the vanguard.
And with a professor called Phillip Capper and a legal publisher called Butterworths, they produced the world's first commercially available artificial intelligence system in the law.
This was the home screen design.
He assures me this was a cool screen design at the time.
(Laughter) I've never been entirely convinced.
He published it in the form of two floppy disks, at a time where floppy disks genuinely were floppy, and his approach was the same as the economists': sit down with a lawyer, get her to explain to you how it was she solved a legal problem, and then try and capture that explanation in a set of rules for a machine to follow.
In economics, if human beings could explain themselves in this way, the tasks are called routine, and they could be automated.
But if human beings can't explain themselves, the tasks are called non-routine, and they're thought to be out reach.
Today, that routine-nonroutine distinction is widespread.
Think how often you hear people say to you machines can only perform tasks that are predictable or repetitive, rules-based or well-defined.
Those are all just different words for routine.
And go back to those three cases that I mentioned at the start.
Those are all classic cases of nonroutine tasks.
Ask a doctor, for instance, how she makes a medical diagnosis, and she might be able to give you a few rules of thumb, but ultimately she'd struggle.
She'd say it requires things like creativity and judgment and intuition.
And these things are very difficult to articulate, and so it was thought these tasks would be very hard to automate.
If a human being can't explain themselves, where on earth do we begin in writing a set of instructions for a machine to follow?
Thirty years ago, this view was right, but today it's looking shaky, and in the future it's simply going to be wrong.
Advances in processing power, in data storage capability and in algorithm design mean that this routine-nonroutine distinction is diminishingly useful.
To see this, go back to the case of making a medical diagnosis.
Earlier in the year, a team of researchers at Stanford announced they'd developed a system which can tell you whether or not a freckle is cancerous as accurately as leading dermatologists.
How does it work?
It's not trying to copy the judgment or the intuition of a doctor.
It knows or understands nothing about wilkersonjack@example.org.
Instead, it's running a pattern recognition algorithm through 129,450 past cases, hunting for similarities between those cases and the particular lesion in question.
It's performing these tasks in an unhuman way, based on the analysis of more possible cases than any doctor could hope to review in their lifetime.
It didn't matter that that human being, that doctor, couldn't explain how she'd performed the task.
Now, there are those who dwell upon that the fact that these machines aren't built in our image.
As an example, take IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that went on the US quiz show "Jeopardy!" in 2011, and it beat the two human champions at "Jeopardy!"
The day after it won, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by the philosopher John Searle with the title "Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!'"
Right, and it's brilliant, and it's true.
You know, Watson didn't let out a cry of excitement.
It didn't call up its parents to say what a good job it had done.
It didn't go down to the pub for a drink.
This system wasn't trying to copy the way that those human contestants played, but it didn't matter.
It still outperformed them.
Resolving the intelligence myth shows us that our limited understanding about human intelligence, about how we think and reason, is far less of a constraint on automation than it was in the past.
What's more, as we've seen, when these machines perform tasks differently to human beings, there's no reason to think that what human beings are currently capable of doing represents any sort of summit in what these machines might be capable of doing in the future.
Now the third myth, what I call the superiority myth.
It's often said that those who forget about the helpful side of technological progress, those complementarities from before, are committing something known as the lump of labor fallacy.
Now, the problem is the lump of labor fallacy is itself a fallacy, and I call this the lump of labor fallacy fallacy, or LOLFF, for short.
Let me explain.
The lump of labor fallacy is a very old idea.
It was a British economist, David Schloss, who gave it this name in 1892.
He was puzzled to come across a dock worker who had begun to use a machine to make washers, the small metal discs that fasten on the end of screws.
And this dock worker felt guilty for being more productive.
Now, most of the time, we expect the opposite, that people feel guilty for being unproductive, you know, a little too much time on Facebook or wilkersonjack@example.org.
But this worker felt guilty for being more productive, and asked why, he said, "I know I'm doing wrong.
I'm taking away the work of another man."
In his mind, there was some fixed lump of work to be divided up between him and his pals, so that if he used this machine to do more, there'd be less left for his pals to do.
Schloss saw the mistake.
The lump of work wasn't fixed.
As this worker used the machine and became more productive, the price of washers would fall, demand for washers would rise, more washers would have to be made, and there'd be more work for his pals to do.
The lump of work would get bigger.
Schloss called this "the lump of labor fallacy."
And today you hear people talk about the lump of labor fallacy to think about the future of all types of work.
There's no fixed lump of work out there to be divided up between people and machines.
Yes, machines substitute for human beings, making the original lump of work smaller, but they also complement human beings, and the lump of work gets bigger and changes.
But LOLFF.
Here's the mistake: it's right to think that technological progress makes the lump of work to be done bigger.
Some tasks become more valuable.
New tasks have to be done.
But it's wrong to think that necessarily, human beings will be best placed to perform those tasks.
And this is the superiority myth.
Yes, the lump of work might get bigger and change, but as machines become more capable, it's likely that they'll take on the extra lump of work themselves.
Technological progress, rather than complement human beings, complements machines instead.
To see this, go back to the task of driving a car.
Today, satnav systems directly complement human beings.
They make some human beings better drivers.
But in the future, software is going to displace human beings from the driving seat, and these satnav systems, rather than complement human beings, will simply make these driverless cars more efficient, helping the machines instead.
Or go to those indirect complementarities that I mentioned as well.
The economic pie may get larger, but as machines become more capable, it's possible that any new demand will fall on goods that machines, rather than human beings, are best placed to produce.
The economic pie may change, but as machines become more capable, it's possible that they'll be best placed to do the new tasks that have to be done.
In short, demand for tasks isn't demand for human labor.
Human beings only stand to benefit if they retain the upper hand in all these complemented tasks, but as machines become more capable, that becomes less likely.
So what do these three myths tell us then?
Well, resolving the Terminator myth shows us that the future of work depends upon this balance between two forces: one, machine substitution that harms workers but also those complementarities that do the opposite.
And until now, this balance has fallen in favor of human beings.
But resolving the intelligence myth shows us that that first force, machine substitution, is gathering strength.
Machines, of course, can't do everything, but they can do far more, encroaching ever deeper into the realm of tasks performed by human beings.
What's more, there's no reason to think that what human beings are currently capable of represents any sort of finishing line, that machines are going to draw to a polite stop once they're as capable as us.
Now, none of this matters so long as those helpful winds of complementarity blow firmly enough, but resolving the superiority myth shows us that that process of task encroachment not only strengthens the force of machine substitution, but it wears down those helpful complementarities too.
Bring these three myths together and I think we can capture a glimpse of that troubling future.
Machines continue to become more capable, encroaching ever deeper on tasks performed by human beings, strengthening the force of machine substitution, weakening the force of machine complementarity.
And at some point, that balance falls in favor of machines rather than human beings.
This is the path we're currently on.
I say "path" deliberately, because I don't think we're there yet, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is our direction of travel.
That's the troubling part.
Let me say now why I think actually this is a good problem to have.
For most of human history, one economic problem has dominated: how to make the economic pie large enough for everyone to live on.
Go back to the turn of the first century AD, and if you took the global economic pie and divided it up into equal slices for everyone in the world, everyone would get a few hundred dollars.
Almost everyone lived on or around the poverty line.
And if you roll forward a thousand years, roughly the same is true.
But in the last few hundred years, economic growth has taken off.
Those economic pies have exploded in size.
Global GDP per head, the value of those individual slices of the pie today, they're about 10,150 dollars.
If economic growth continues at two percent, our children will be twice as rich as us.
If it continues at a more measly one percent, our grandchildren will be twice as rich as us.
By and large, we've solved that traditional economic problem.
Now, technological unemployment, if it does happen, in a strange way will be a symptom of that success, will have solved one problem -- how to make the pie bigger -- but replaced it with another -- how to make sure that everyone gets a slice.
As other economists have noted, solving this problem won't be easy.
Today, for most people, their job is their seat at the economic dinner table, and in a world with less work or even without work, it won't be clear how they get their slice.
There's a great deal of discussion, for instance, about various forms of universal basic income as one possible approach, and there's trials underway in the United States and in Finland and in Kenya.
And this is the collective challenge that's right in front of us, to figure out how this material prosperity generated by our economic system can be enjoyed by everyone in a world in which our traditional mechanism for slicing up the pie, the work that people do, withers away and perhaps disappears.
Solving this problem is going to require us to think in very different ways.
There's going to be a lot of disagreement about what ought to be done, but it's important to remember that this is a far better problem to have than the one that haunted our ancestors for centuries: how to make that pie big enough in the first place.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)