It's no secret that automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence and maybe even robots are going to completely change the world of work in the next decade. And it's already playing a role in how Google works. So how can we humble homo-sapiens prepare ourselves for our new robot overloads? By learning from the past. I'll take you through stories of success and failures of interactions between the robots and the humans and leave you with a practical approach to avoid search marketing extinction.

1. Search Marketers’ Guide to Our
New Robot Overlords
@KelvinNewman - State of Search, 2016

2. @kelvinnewman
So, who is this guy?
@kelvinnewman

3. Founder of BrightonSEO
@kelvinnewman
kelvin@brightonseo.com
http://www.slideshare.net/kelvinnewman
Kelvin Newman

4. @kelvinnewman
I’m from the United Kingdom
@kelvinnewman

5. @kelvinnewman
In the seaside resort of Brighton
@kelvinnewman

6. @kelvinnewman
Actually; I live in Worthing

7. @kelvinnewman
Which is famous for one thing…
@kelvinnewman
Birdman Competition where people see how far
they can jump of the pier

8. @kelvinnewman
Room above the pub
I started organising a meet up in
the upstairs room of this pub
@kelvinnewman

9. @kelvinnewman
And 3500 people came
along to the last one
@kelvinnewman

10. @kelvinnewman
Because I organise an SEO
conference I spend more time
than is healthy thinking
about what SEO is really
about
* this isn’t actually me thinking about the
future of search, I’m reading my emails, but it
makes me look moody and enigmatic

11. @kelvinnewman
Consequently, I’m really interested in how
technology works

12. @kelvinnewman
But I’m most interested in the
people who use technology
@kelvinnewman

13. @kelvinnewman
And the impact that technology
has on people.
@kelvinnewman

14. @kelvinnewman
I also spend a lot of time
assembling stupid stuff I
bought of eBay

15. @kelvinnewman
But I got told that’d be a
boring topic for a talk
though…

16. @kelvinnewman
So what is this presentation
about?
@kelvinnewman

17. @kelvinnewman
Well, this presentation isn’t
about…
@kelvinnewman

18. @kelvinnewman
If you spend fifteen minutes
doing this you’ll get seventy
billion links
“
“
It’s more about getting you to think differently about the future.
And the impact technology has on people.

19. @kelvinnewman
It will introduce you to our new
marketing robot overlords

20. @kelvinnewman
Most of the SEO talks about AI,
Machine Learning, robots, etc.
focus on the search engine,

21. @kelvinnewman
Not the search engine optimizer

22. @kelvinnewman
I want to talk about both.

23. @kelvinnewman
When we talk about robot
overlords you probably think
of things like…

24. @kelvinnewman@kelvinnewman

25. @kelvinnewman@kelvinnewman

26. @kelvinnewman

27. @kelvinnewman
Or the scariest robot of all, one
that will send shivers down
your spine and give you
nightmares.

28. @kelvinnewman

29. @kelvinnewman
But the ones that should the
ones that should really scare us
look very different.
@kelvinnewman

30. @kelvinnewman@kelvinnewman

31. @kelvinnewman
Or don’t even really look like
robots at all
@kelvinnewman

32. @kelvinnewman
So why should I be scared
@kelvinnewman

33. @kelvinnewman
Mark Carney
Governor of the Bank of
England
He’s not a robot you should
be scared of.
But his organisation is behind
a report that scared me.

34. @kelvinnewman
Taking the probabilities of automation, and multiplying them by
the numbers employed, gives a broad brush estimate of the
number of jobs potentially automatable.
For the UK, that would suggest up to 15 million jobs could be at
risk of automation. In the US, the corresponding figure would be
80 million jobs.
“
“
Andy Haldane
Chief Economist at the Bank of England

35. @kelvinnewman
Is 15 Million a lot of Brits
though?
@kelvinnewman

36. @kelvinnewman
Hands up who’s birthday is between Jan 1st and May 2nd?
@kelvinnewman

37. @kelvinnewman
Sorry the robot’s taken your job.
@kelvinnewman

38. @kelvinnewman
That’s about a third of the
population who’s job is at risk
due to “robots”

39. @kelvinnewman
oops
I made a mistake
15 million is a third of the population,
but actually about half of the working
population

40. @kelvinnewman
That’s 30
times as many
U.S jobs as
lost in the
2008 financial
crash
@kelvinnewman

41. @kelvinnewman

42. @kelvinnewman@kelvinnewman
OK, breathe, I don’t flip
burgers in McDonald’s so I’m
alright?!?

43. @kelvinnewman
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
Perception &
Manipulation
Creative
Intelligence
Social
Intelligence
Frey and Osborne have examined how
susceptible jobs are to computerisation

44. @kelvinnewman
Three types of task
Perception &
Manipulation
Robots are still unable to
match the depth and
breadth of human
perception.
Tasks that relate to an
unstructured work
environment can make
jobs less susceptible to
computerisation.
Creative
Intelligence
The psychological
processes underlying
human creativity are
difficult to specify.
The principal obstacle to
computerising creativity is
stating our creative values
sufficiently clearly that
they can be encoded in
an program.
Social
Intelligence
Human social intelligence
is important in a wide
range of work tasks, such
as those involving
negotiation, persuasion
and care.
The realtime recognition
of natural human emotion
remains a challenging
problem.

45. @kelvinnewman
Things people are good at…
Tasks requiring perception
in unstructured
environments.
Creative tasks which rely
both on novelty and
value.
Non-routine social tasks
which rely on hard to
articulate “common
sense”
Things machines are good at…
Routine tasks in structured
environments.
Tasks which require novelty
and experimentation.
Analysis at a speed and
scale.

46. @kelvinnewman
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2015/speech864.pdf

47. @kelvinnewman
What do I actually mean by
robots?
@kelvinnewman

48. @kelvinnewman
Automation by hardware
Where routine tasks are carried out by
a machine rather than a human.
@kelvinnewman

49. @kelvinnewman
New Holland CR10.90
@kelvinnewman
GPS guided, touchscreen controlled, airplane-style joystick ... and yes, a
fridge and cup holder

50. @kelvinnewman
These sort of things probably won’t
affect “us”
i.e. people who muck about all day in front of a computer
@kelvinnewman

51. @kelvinnewman
Automation by software
Where routine tasks are carried out by software rather than a human.
@kelvinnewman

52. @kelvinnewman
https://ifttt.com/recipes/search?q=discover+weekly

53. @kelvinnewman
https://zapier.com/

54. @kelvinnewman
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-archiver/pkanpfekacaojdncfgbjadedbggbbphi?hl=en
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-archiver/pkanpfekacaojdncfgbjadedbggbbphi?hl=en

55. @kelvinnewman
Answer the
Public scrapes
and probes
Google Suggest
answerthepublic.com

56. @kelvinnewman
These sort of things aren’t sexy
But are likely to have the biggest most immediate impact on your life.
@kelvinnewman

57. @kelvinnewman
Machine learning
is sexy
And Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and other
sort of related things along those lines.
@kelvinnewman

58. @kelvinnewman
Artificial Intelligence, Machine
Learning and Deep Learning
What’s the difference between
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/07/29/whats-difference-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-deep-learning-ai/

59. @kelvinnewman
I studied media studies at Uni not
computer science or anything like it…
Now feels like a good time to share
@kelvinnewman

60. @kelvinnewman
Computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human
intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making,
and translation between languages.
What is artificial intelligence?
@kelvinnewman

61. @kelvinnewman
The wide availability of GPUs that make parallel processing ever faster,
cheaper, and more powerful.
All aided by practically infinite storage and a flood of data sources.
Why AI has exploded?
@kelvinnewman

62. @kelvinnewman
There’s three levels of artificial intelligence in rising levels of nightmarish-ness
Difference between narrow, general and
super intelligence

63. @kelvinnewman
AI that specializes in one area. There’s AI that can beat the world
chess champion in chess, but that’s the only thing it does.
Ask it to figure out a better way to store data on a hard drive, and
it’ll look at you blankly.
Artificial Narrow Intelligence
(ANI)

64. @kelvinnewman
A computer that is as smart as a human across the board—a
machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human
being can. Creating AGI is a much harder task than creating ANI,
and we’re yet to do it.
Artificial General Intelligence
(AGI)

65. @kelvinnewman
Mustafa Suleyman
Our mission is to solve
general intelligence
“ “

66. @kelvinnewman
Artificial Superintelligence ranges from a computer that’s just a
little smarter than a human to one that’s trillions of times
smarter—across the board.
Artificial Superintelligence
(ASI)

67. @kelvinnewman
ASI is likely to either
mean we become immortal
or face extinction
@kelvinnewman

68. @kelvinnewman
The 24k words on AI on
this blog will literally
blow your mind
http://waitbutwhy.com/
2015/01/artificial-
intelligence-
revolution-1.html

69. @kelvinnewman
But enough of the sci-fi
dystopia stufff

70. @kelvinnewman
Machine Learning
Machine Learning at its most basic is the practice of using algorithms to
parse data, learn from it, and then make a determination or prediction
about something in the world.
So rather than hand-coding software routines with a specific set of
instructions to accomplish a particular task, the machine is “trained” using
large amounts of data and algorithms that give it the ability to learn how to
perform the task.

71. @kelvinnewman
Deep Learning
A branch of machine learning based on a set of algorithms that attempt to
model high level abstractions in data by using a deep graph with multiple
processing layers, composed of multiple linear and non-linear
transformations.

72. @kelvinnewman

73. https://www.flickr.com/photos/61408718@N02/6333712753/
When Robots
impressed me

74. @kelvinnewman
That previous slide was
made by slidebot.io
25,352,683 images combine with 10,000+ design rules and 237 unique
layout styles to create one powerful presentation.

75. @kelvinnewman

76. @kelvinnewman
The rest of the slides I made
myself. But could the machine of
done better?

77. @kelvinnewman

78. @kelvinnewman

79. @kelvinnewman
Spotify’s key staff share how it works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=qhYlmnqSDV0&index=7&list=PLSRBXQp3FvKJa4J5ZlKsupg189WJ4YhYc

80. @kelvinnewman
Beatles artificial intelligence
Flow Machine - Daddy’s Car
http://www.flow-machines.com/ai-makes-pop-music/
A Beatles-esque song written by artificial intelligence
@kelvinnewman

81. @kelvinnewman
To me it sounds more like the
Beach Boys than the Beatles,
but still hugely impressive

82. @kelvinnewman
https://github.com/david-gpu/srez
A Neural Networks that can
reconstruct Pixelated faces

83. @kelvinnewman
An Artificial Intelligence that
finds art like current news photos
http://recognition.tate.org.uk/

84. @kelvinnewman
Newspaper sports reports are often
generated by machines
Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at
Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona
was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre,
who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled
in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona
piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …
https://www.wired.com/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/

85. @kelvinnewman
The software also generate natural
language Google Analytics Reports.
https://www.narrativescience.com/quill-engage

86. @kelvinnewman
IBM Watson and cancer
treatments
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/technology/ibm-is-
counting-on-its-bet-on-watson-and-paying-big-money-for-
it.html?_r=0

87. @kelvinnewman
At the University of North Carolina School of Medicine,
Watson was tested on 1,000 cancer diagnoses made by
human experts. In 99 percent of them, Watson
recommended the same treatment as the oncologists.
In 30 percent of the cases, Watson also found a treatment
option the human doctors missed. Some treatments were
based on research papers that the doctors had not read —
more than 160,000 cancer research papers are published a
year.

88. @kelvinnewman
Eliza simulated conversation by using a 'pattern matching' and substitution
methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the
program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Eliza the 1960s rubbish robot
people loved

89. @kelvinnewman
https://theringer.com/meet-the-man-who-created-a-virtually-immortal-joey-
tribbiani-21b910295b1f#.ykixtfnhz
A video chat bot that generates
new lines for Joey from friends

90. @kelvinnewman
When the robots disappointed me

91. When 30 of the US’s biggest companies lost 9% of their value for no
apparently caused by algorithmic trading
May 2010 Flash Crash
I did a whole deck about the the implications of the flashcrash on how we think about SEO
http://bit.ly/flashcrashlessons

92. @kelvinnewmanhttps://blog.arik.io/facebook-m-the-anti-turing-test-74c5af19987c#.mq0ix93r2
Facebook’s Fake Robots
Their AI Assistants sometimes are actually people

93. @kelvinnewman
http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2016/09/at-the-bleeding-edge-of-ai-quantum-grocery-picking-and-transfer-learning/
Everything but packing the bag
Ocado have automated nearly every aspect of their business
apart from packing the shopping bags
@kelvinnewman

94. @kelvinnewman
There’s software used across
the country to predict future
criminals.
And it’s racist.
https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-
sentencing

95. @kelvinnewman
Should we resist and fight back?

96. @kelvinnewman
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/
William_Lee_(inventor)
Elizabeth 1st
refused patent for
knitting machine
out of fear it
would cause mass
unemployment

97. @kelvinnewman
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/
the_dismal_science/1997/01/
the_accidental_theorist.html
Technology tends
to ultimately
displace rather
than completely
replace jobs.

98. @kelvinnewman
Anything that is in the world when you’re
born is normal and ordinary and is just a
natural part of the way the world works.
Douglas Adams
@kelvinnewman

99. @kelvinnewman
Anything that’s invented between when
you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and
exciting and revolutionary and you can
probably get a career in it.
Douglas Adams
@kelvinnewman

100. @kelvinnewman
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the
natural order of things.
Douglas Adams
@kelvinnewman

101. @kelvinnewman
I’m 33, so I hoping the rate of
change slows down a bit

102. @kelvinnewman
So what are the actions?
@kelvinnewman

103. Things you can do when you
get back to the office…
@kelvinnewman

104. @kelvinnewman
Panic!
and drink

105. @kelvinnewman
Buy shares in Uber, Amazon
and Google
@kelvinnewman

106. @kelvinnewman
OK, here’s some serious
advice
@kelvinnewman

107. @kelvinnewman
Never do a job a machine
could do quicker
Or better than you…
@kelvinnewman

108. @kelvinnewman
Examine the rough edges and
the exceptions to the rules.
@kelvinnewman

109. @kelvinnewman

110. @kelvinnewman

111. @kelvinnewman

112. @kelvinnewman

113. @kelvinnewman
Stay ten minutes ahead of
Google
@kelvinnewman

114. @kelvinnewman
Use the tech before it becomes part
of the core algo
@kelvinnewman

115. @kelvinnewman
Google are
taking machine
learning for
image
recognition
seriously

116. @kelvinnewman

117. @kelvinnewman
image recognition open source
GoogleBrain have released their image captioning system
available as an open source model in TensorFlow.
https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/show-and-tell-image-captioning-open.html

118. @kelvinnewman
https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/introducing-open-images-dataset.html
Released a huge learning set of images - a
dataset consisting of ~9 million URLs to
images that have been annotated with
labels spanning over 6000 categories

119. @kelvinnewman
Is it part of the core algorithm

120. @kelvinnewman
Probably not

121. @kelvinnewman
Will it be?

122. @kelvinnewman
Certainly

123. @kelvinnewman
Is the lag an opportunity?

124. @kelvinnewman
Certainly

125. @kelvinnewman
How much could you improve you
alt text on your website if you ran
your images through this
captioning system?

126. @kelvinnewman
Use some
off the shelf
options

127. @kelvinnewman
Altify
Uses deep learning to caption
images in an HTML file and fills
out its alternative text attributes
with the related caption
https://github.com/ParhamP/altify
@kelvinnewman

128. @kelvinnewman
https://algorithmia.com/
A marketplace for algorithms

129. @kelvinnewman

130. @kelvinnewman

131. @kelvinnewman
Tutorials on use Machine
Learning on over 1M hotel
reviews finds interesting insights
https://blog.monkeylearn.com/machine-learning-1m-hotel-reviews-finds-interesting-insights

132. @kelvinnewman
Leave you with a final thought
@kelvinnewman

133. @kelvinnewman
Your job is to be
Luke Skywalker
Inexplicably understand the robots
when nobody else can
“ “

134. @kelvinnewman@kelvinnewman

135. Thanks for listening
Kelvin Newman - Founder of BrightonSEO
@kelvinnewman
kelvin@brightonseo.com
http://www.slideshare.net/kelvinnewman