Age of Robots

The father-and-son authors of The Future of the Professions predicted radical change in the sector. 

But the tense skepticism in the room dissipated as each senior partner or director quietly acknowledged he or she would be a survivor, even if algorithms and artificial intelligence swept away the consultant or solicitor in the next seat.

This cohort may well reach retirement unscathed — and without much incentive to alter how they work. 

As Richard Susskind said afterwards, “it’s hard to convince a room full of millionaires that they have got their model wrong”. 

But change is coming. The main difference of opinion is over its pace and extent.

You can already ask Kim, a legal “virtual assistant” launched by Riverview Law, for help managing your caseload, or get Ross, IBM Watson’s “super intelligent attorney”, to research the entire body of law in seconds. 

A report by The Law Society, the trade body for solicitors in England and Wales, expects the impact of this type of automation to level off by 2020. 

Take financial journalism. Three years is typically spent as a trainee building confidence and skill by churning out news about corporate earnings. 

This is precisely the type of report that, quite rightly, Associated Press now produces automatically, in partnership with a company called — ominously for all columnists — Automated Insights.

Another parallel is aviation, where crashes often trigger fears that autopilots are undermining human skills. 

Interviewed last year about the 2009 Air France crash, Delmar Fadden, Boeing’s former chief of cockpit technology, told Vanity Fair that, having automated 98 per cent of pilots’ routine work, “we really worry about the tasks we ask them to do just occasionally”.

The answer is not to halt the march of the robots. Indeed, technology is part of the solution. 

Novice astronauts are not trained by sending them on repeated costly moonshots. 

They practice the tasks and challenges they will face in carefully designed simulations, until they are finally ready for the launch pad.

As Prof Susskind points out, law students at the University of Strathclyde play out real-world legal problems in a fictional virtual community called “Ardcalloch”.

Knowledge can be imparted in other ways, including simply by working closely, apprentice-style, with senior colleagues. 

Most will value the guidance received as a beginner from experienced editors and writers but no longer are they needed to write five similar corporate earnings stories a day to achieve mastery. 

Newbies can acquire specific skills through working, under close supervision, on a sample of the basic tasks they once spent years slogging through.

We are living in a different age and sooner or later this age will cause serious and unanticipated implications for everyone.

Security by Robot

Bob the security robot (left) moves around at the G4S Technology offices in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

It may look more like the robot from 'Lost in Space' than the terrifying droids in 'Terminator', but this machine could be the future of fighting crime.

Bob, the first robotic security guard in the UK, is the latest recruit employed by G4S to help secure its headquarters in Gloucestershire.

When the metal minder spots something out of place, he stores the information on his internal hard-drive and quickly reports it to his human counterparts.

The autonomous android can even speak to his colleagues, ask for help when he gets stuck, and plug himself in to charge when his battery runs low.

The blue machine is part of a £7.2 million ($12.2 million) robot pilot project by the University of Birmingham to get robots in offices around the world.

"Bob is not about replacing our security officers; the security officers are at the point of use," said G4S spokesman Stewart Angell.  "They are able to make incisive, very, very quick decisions about changes in the environment.  Bob is a complimentary activity that can do guard tours over a period of time overnight or during the day, but also pick up on some of the low level activities that the guard doesn't necessary need to be involved in."

Bob knows the floor plan of the office in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and rolls from room to room, scanning and filming in 3D.

If he spots something has changed since his last visit, he analyses it and sends the information to a real security guard.  

Using cameras and scanners he is able to create a map of his surrounding area, plotting the location of desks and chairs, as well as detecting people moving, and learning how the environment changes. 

Dr Nick Hawes, from the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, said: 

"Current robots aren't very good with their hands, or able to manipulate objects, however Bob is good at driving around and monitoring objects, so is perfect for a job in security as a night or day watchman where he can monitor what is going on in his immediate surroundings."

Muscle Madness

Scientists have developed a new robotic 'muscle', thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, which can catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself - faster than the blink of an eye.

Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in US demonstrated a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that is able to catapult very heavy objects over a distance five times its length within 60 milliseconds.

"We've created a micro-bimorph dual coil that functions as a powerful torsional muscle, driven thermally or electro-thermally by the phase transition of vanadium dioxide," said study leader, Junqiao Wu.

"Using a simple design and inorganic materials, we achieve superior performance in power density and speed over the motors and actuators now used in integrated micro-systems," Wu said.

What makes vanadium dioxide highly coveted by the electronics industry is that it is one of the few known materials that is an insulator at low temperatures but abruptly becomes a conductor at 67 degrees Celsius.

This temperature-driven phase transition from insulator-to-metal is expected to one day yield faster, more energy efficient electronic and optical devices.

However, vanadium dioxide crystals also undergo a temperature-driven structural phase transition whereby when warmed they rapidly contract along one dimension while expanding along the other two.

This makes vanadium dioxide an ideal candidate material for creating miniaturized, multi-functional motors and artificial muscles.

Wu and his colleagues fabricated their micro-muscle on a silicon substrate from a long "V-shaped" bimorph ribbon comprised of chromium and vanadium dioxide.

When the V-shaped ribbon is released from the substrate it forms a helix consisting of a dual coil that is connected at either end to chromium electrode pads.

Heating the dual coil actuates it, turning it into either a micro-catapult, in which an object held in the coil is hurled when the coil is actuated, or a proximity sensor, in which the remote sensing of an object causes a "micro-explosion," a rapid change in the micro-muscle's resistance and shape that pushes the object away.