Lamp lighters once performed a vital service for Londoners. Every evening as dusk fell they lit the gas lamps that illuminated the city’s shadowy streets, returning just before dawn to extinguish the flames. It was a respectable job, often passed from father to son. But, apart from the small band of British Gas engineers who maintain the 1,500 gas lamps still clustered around the royal parks, Westminster and Covent Garden, lamp lighters are now a thing of the past, their jobs snuffed out by automated timers and electricity.



The lamp lighters are part of a wider narrative that shapes every city: technological change. Scientific advances and new technologies often enable dramatic improvements in public services and urban life, eradicating some jobs while creating new types of employment. But the next chapter of urban automation might be more profound than any previous one. In fact, it’s already begun.

“Smart cities” offer a seductive vision of a world where everything runs as smoothly as the latest iPhone. Need a parking space? An app will tell you where one’s available, and notify you (and your friendly neighbourhood parking inspector) when your time is up. It’s the kind of technology many cities are trialling, embedding sensors in streetlights, curbs and buildings to monitor parking, traffic and air pollution – even crime.

So-called smart bins notify collection crews when they’re full, allowing them to send rubbish trucks to areas where they’re needed, rather than having to stick to set routes. The Volvo Group, together with universities in Sweden and the United States, has even developed a robot that can automatically collect bins from the street and deliver them to a waiting rubbish truck. Throw driverless technology into the mix, and it’s easy to see how refuse collectors might follow lamp lighters into the obscure past of urban life.

Waste not, want not … a smart bin developed by South Korean startup, Ecube Labs

But Trevor Dorling, director of Digital Greenwich, the council’s in-house smart city programme, is sceptical of companies that pitch automation technologies as a means of cutting staff. “I don’t think that’s our starting point at all,” he says. “We want to embrace technology and improve services, and try to square the circle of increasing demand at a time of severe cuts in public funding.

“The population of Greenwich is growing rapidly,” Dorling adds. “That places tremendous pressures on infrastructure and services, and there’s no longer the money to solve those problems in the way they’ve traditionally been solved. A form of driverless shuttle can really help address air quality, and also improve mobility by connecting people to the main transport nodes.”

Are pedestrians going to feel more or less safe if they can’t look into the eyes of the driver? Rick Robinson

Still, it’s easy to guess where old municipal jobs might vanish. In London, driverless buses that can run bumper-to-bumper would make the new Routemaster seem as antiquated as a Morris Minor – and potentially supplant London’s 22,500 bus drivers. Far fetched? Well, earlier this month, the French city of Lyon rolled out a new driverless minibus service that many are calling a “world first”. These electric vehicles, fitted with hi-tech equipment including laser sensors, stereo vision and GPS, can ferry around 15 passengers at a top speed of 12mph (20kph).

Of course, driverless buses could also change some of the interactions that characterise urban life. “Are pedestrians and cyclists sharing street space with automated vehicles going to feel more or less safe if they can’t look into the eyes of the driver and understand whether they’re about to stop to let them cross?” asks Rick Robinson, IT director of smart data and technology at Amey, one of the UK’s largest engineering and infrastructure services companies (and joint operator of the driverless DLR line). “These are very basic things, but they have a huge influence on the vitality of urban environments and what takes place within them.”

In October 2014, Transport for London (TfL) also unveiled 250 “driverless” tube trains which should come into service from 2022. TfL claims they will enable a faster, more frequent and reliable service, and boost capacity on the Piccadilly, Central, Waterloo and City, and Bakerloo lines.

A ‘world first’: driverless minibus in Lyon. Photograph: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images

Initially the new trains will still have drivers, though in the longer-term they may be redeployed as “train captains”, performing a similar role to attendants on DLR trains. The Victoria, Central, Northern and Jubilee lines already use Automatic Train Operation systems: the driver in the cab only operates the train in an emergency situation, but retains control of the doors. However, automated underground trains aren’t flawless: 756 suffered computer failures last year. Aslef, the drivers’ union, has also warned that the introduction of driverless trains could lead to “all-out war”.

Jarmo Eskelinen, chief innovation and technology office at Future Cities Catapult, argues future transport networks will react faster to emergency situations. “At the moment they adapt based on the reaction speed of people, and their reaction speed is often very slow. In future this will be automated so that they respond in near real-time, stopping transport flows to the emergency zone.”

What we need is the people who are doing tasks that are fairly dull freed up to attack the real infrastructure problems Phil Purnell

Could cities even become self-repairing? Leeds University is leading a £4.2m project to create a fleet of robot repair workers that can spot infrastructure problems before they become disruptive – including drones that perch on lampposts to change bulbs, automated machines that fix potholes without digging up half the road, and robots that live in utility pipes and patch cracks. Professor Phil Purnell, who leads the school of civil engineering research team at Leeds University, likens these machines to a city’s “white blood cells”, repairing damage before it requires a major intervention.

He says putting road workers out of work is absolutely not the objective of the exercise. “What we need is the people who are doing tasks that are fairly dull and don’t need much skill freed up to attack the real infrastructure problems, of which there are hundreds upon hundreds that we’re burying our heads in the sand about.”

If dull tasks are the target of automation, then many back-office council roles are susceptible. Spurred on by the austerity mantra of “doing more with less”, councils are beginning to apply robotic process automation, which mimics human interaction with computer systems, to repetitive tasks such as signing people up for council tax direct debit payments. In theory this should free up staff for more demanding strategic work. Machines do the boring data entry tasks, which they generally perform faster and more accurately than human beings. And human beings use their time, empathy and creativity to improve frontline services.

Amelia, the robot customer service agent. Photograph: IPsoft

I, Robot

Enfield council is going one step further – and her name is Amelia. She’s an “intelligent personal assistant” capable of analysing natural language, understanding the context of conversations, applying logic, resolving problems and even sensing emotions. She’s designed to help residents locate information and complete application forms, as well as simplify some of the council’s internal processes. Anyone can chat to her 24/7 through the council’s website. If she can’t answer something, she’s programmed to call a human colleague and learn from the situation, enabling her to tackle a similar question unaided in future.

Amelia is due to be deployed later this year, and is supposed to be 60% cheaper than a human employee – useful when you’re facing budget cuts of £56m over the next four years. Nevertheless, the council claims it has no plans to get rid of its 50 call centre workers.

The Singaporean government, in partnership with Microsoft, is also planning to roll out intelligent chatbots in several stages: at first they will answer simple factual questions from the public, then help them complete tasks and transactions, before finally responding to personalised queries.



Robinson says that, while artificially intelligent chatbots could have a role to play in some areas of public service delivery: “I think we overlook the value of a quality personal relationship between two people at our peril, because it’s based on life experience, which is something that technology will never have – certainly not current generations of technology, and not for many decades to come.”

But whether everyone can be “upskilled” to carry out more fulfilling work, and how many staff will actually be needed as robots take on more routine tasks, remains to be seen. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne’s influential 2013 paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?, estimates that 47% of US jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years. Another report by Deloitte found that in London, 29% of admin and support services jobs, and a whopping 72% of transport and storage roles, are at “high risk” of automation.

However, a report Forrester published last year was less pessimistic about people’s future employment prospects, suggesting that only 9.1 million US jobs will be automated by 2025. Robinson is more inclined to believe Forrester’s estimate. “It’s inarguable that as technology develops, it will automate certain tasks. But ‘tasks’ are very different to ‘jobs’. I also think some reports are hugely optimistic about what technology will be able to accomplish in [the] future.”

If Google or another tech giant does eventually manage to create an artificial general intelligence that can successfully perform any task a human can, the job losses would dwarf anything we’ve seen before – and not only among the 1.5 million people employed by local government in England. A universal basic income, which would provide everyone with enough money to maintain a decent standard of living, is often cited as a solution to this problem. But in the medium term we might find robots still need our help; that there are things we simply do better than machines.

For example, humans working cooperatively with machines are generally regarded as the strongest chess-playing entities, each drawing upon their skills to beat opponents. Identifying what those skills are in public service terms, and how best to combine them with automated systems to improve urban life, is a challenge no city can afford to ignore. Otherwise more people might find, as London’s lamp lighters once did, that their services are no longer required.

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