The work of the future and its traps: interview with director David Ayllon

With his short film, Production Line, David Ayllon participated in the International Short Film Festival Flash Forward, to talk about tomorrow’s world of work. In this interview, he tells us about how the world will be in a hundred years.

“New technologies are able to revolutionize the world of work”. David Ayllon, the director of Production Line, one of the short films in competition at Flash Forward – International Short Film Festival, the film festival featuring the future, organized by the Scuola Holden, is sure about that. Set in a dystopian future, Ayllon’s movie features four workers grappling with the limits imposed by the robotization of work and its unpredictable consequences. “Production Line talks about how the work will be in the future. – explains the director – It is a story about how, in the future, humans will manage the actual process of losing jobs». In the claustrophobic laboratory in which the entire film is set, the four protagonists must perform a mysterious task in the shortest possible time, facing externals difficulties and unexpected obstacles: the perfect background to stage the challenge between robots and humans.

Below there is a short interview in which the director shares his opinions about future, work and epochal changes.

Automation of work is accelerating and will force us to face technological unemployment shortly. How much time do you think we have before it’s too late?

I don’t think it will ever be too late, I think we will always have a choice. We can always take things into consideration and choose what is right and what is wrong. What we need are good leaders who make the right decisions. And not only at the political level, but also in companies. Any innovation, such as artificial intelligence, puts infinite possibilities at our disposal, but if we make the wrong choices, it could become a problem.

Bill Gates proposes taxes on robots, experts from Silicon Valley are promoting the adoption of a Universal basic Income claiming that we can create a society of people who can spend their time making art, culture and high level researches. What’s your position about this topic?

I think it’s something amazing – the idea that people won’t need to work to live. If done in the right way it could be the next level for humanity. Humans can go and live their passions and improve themselves as people. Let’s be realistic: this is not going to happen, or we will not able to see it anyway.

I think that new technologies are able to revolutionize the world of work. Have you ever seen a film and asked yourself: “Who wrote it? Why is it so strange? It almost seems that it was made by an artificial intelligence “. The problem is not if Artificial Intelligence is able to create art, but it is more about how we create art: a machine will never be as creative as we are, because from this point of view we will always improve. But the point is that we are no longer improving, we are stuck.

What are the biggest challenges we will face in the next 10 years, 50 years, 100 years?

We can see the great changes that are awaiting us as problems or as opportunities. It will depend a lot on the people who will handle these changes. The real question is not what changes, but who will deal with them. Let’s talk, for example, about immigration problems: are they really a problem or are they rather big opportunities? I think they are opportunities, because we are opening new boundaries and new frontiers, people can do new experiences, discover new things, but the point is that we do not know how to deal with these opportunities. In the next few years, the biggest problems of society will be those related to health, food and migration. And that’s where technology will come into play: if we do the right thing, the quality of life will improve and we will probably succeed in eliminating the social classes, but first we have to choose the right leaders.

With your short film you put the focus on critical aspects of technology and our present/future. Are you positive about the future?

It depends. I am critical about some things but very optimistic about others. Nothing is written and nobody knows how the future will be. It could be good, or bad, nobody knows all the variations. Until 20 years ago nobody would have expected this evolution of some technologies. Something will be surprising, something will make us think we have no hope.

From 1 to 10 how much power do you think we have on the possibility to drive it in the best direction?

It depends, one day could be a 10, one day only 1. I want to think that the next few years will be amazing because we will discover new things. In storytelling, I think there is some possibility with virtual reality, actually, the possibilities are already incredible. Some things are already starting to change: I think we can be optimistic.