Just read my daily robot news feed and came across this article about self healing robots.
Basically they will put sensors in the soft tissue that can ‘feel’ and sense pain. Check out this from the article:
The self-healing project is seeking to create what it describes as “anthropomorphic materials, capable of feeling pain”
Part of me likes the idea of robots ‘feeling’ something and another part of my is terrified of it. I do understand the usecase and value but also feel like it is one more step of building systems that will further outperform humans. We have been building tools since the dawn of man that enhance or help us outperform each other, but the difference is that in the coming inflection point when the machines actually are not dependent on humans anymore to create themselves, heal themselves and expand their presence without our control, it will be new era.
And of course if you think this is conspiracy theory bubble and don’t buy into any concern about it, then think of the potential job impacts. The article goes on to say this:
“The scientific advance could be a boon to the agricultural sector but governments across the world are now preparing for a robotic age in whichlow-skilled jobsare filled by automated replacements. A recent European commission report suggested 43% of jobs in the UK could be filled by robots in the future.”
Is the future of robots “waking up” to ‘feelings’ while humans do everything they can to try and swallow theirs?
Your DNA is what makes you you. But the robots and their scientists advocates have some other ideas. Recently some Caltech scientist have invented DNA nano-robots that can get in your blood stream and re-sort your molecules. This is a quote from the leads scientist:
"Just like electromechanical robots are sent off to faraway places,
like Mars, we would like to send molecular robots to minuscule places where humans can't go, such as the bloodstream," says Qian. "Our
goal was to design and build a molecular robot that could perform a
sophisticated nanomechanical task: cargo sorting."
While its assured that these fine but naive young scientist are hoping for good outcomes, its not hard to start to imagine really bad uses for this technology. Qian goes on to say:
"it is my hope that other researchers could use these principles for exciting applications, such as using a DNA robot for synthesizing a
therapeutic chemical from its constituent parts in an artificial
molecular factory, delivering a drug only when a specific signal is
given in bloodstreams or cells, or sorting molecular components in
trash for recycling."
But someone in the pentagon (or a terrorist) could use this to create a zombie virus. You can easily imagine a nanobot that is self replicating and designed to reorder your molecules to make you a mindless tool. Breathe the nanobot in and within a few days you become a remote controlled mindless zombie. This scenario is not theoretical. If nanobots get built (and we can see that they are in fact getting built) then there will be military uses for them. Its just the way we are. We like killing each other.
The other disturbing thing about nanobots is the “The Grey Goo Scenario”. Almost all nanobot scenarios have a self replicating aspect to it. The problem with this is what if that ‘self replication’ gets out of control (naw – that could never happen), then we are totally screwed.
The “Grey Goo Scenario” basically predicts that these out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves.
Eric Drexler describes the Grey Goo scenario like this:
Imagine such a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals, making copies of itself...the first replicator assembles a copy in one
thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build
another eight. At the end of ten hours, there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would
weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the Sun and all
the planets combined — if the bottle of chemicals hadn't run dry long before.
Granted – this scenario is less about intentionally wanting to kill and more about blatant incompetence. The History Channel had a special where they outlined one scenario.
In a History Channel broadcast, a contrasting idea (a kind of gray
goo) is referred to in a futuristic doomsday scenario: "In a common
practice, billions of nanobots are released to clean up an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana. However, due to a programming error, the nanobots devour all carbon based objects, instead of just the
hydrocarbons of the oil. The nanobots destroy everything, all the
while, replicating themselves. Within days, the planet is turned to dust."
So maybe we intentionally wipe everyone out with Nanobots or maybe we accidentally do it. In some sense justice would be better served if stupidity killed us rather than malice. Its just the way we are. We are idiots.
If you wanted to replace laws with something else, what would that something be?
By laws here I mean the written statutes, the police who enforce, and the judicial system in general. This feedback system, built on the written word of these laws, is currently the basis of our civil society. It’s bones if you will.
But there are issues. Sociopaths don’t care about the laws, only lawyers actually read the laws, and the wealthy who can afford lawyers clearly are afforded preferential treatment. And so on.
So, let’s say we wanted to be true revolutionaries and start a society without laws? How would that work?
Well, since we are in thought experiment mode here, let’s assert that we can posit technologies that do not exactly exist yet. Here’s my swing at it:
Instead of idea of good, evil, and punishment, I would start with the idea that there are patterns of behavior that benefit people, and patterns that harm them. These patterns are made up of the actions of individuals, but also their internal states and the state of the economy and world. The benefit and harm needs to be considered in much longer time scales than human consciousness operates in.
These patterns of benefit/harm are far, far too complicated to be extracted and deduced in real time by humans. But a sufficiently advanced machine learning system could do a good job. Or maybe a benefital one.
Of course, this would have to start with you as an individual. The Singleton Pattern is the idea that people as individuals are what is important in the world. And an AI that was declaring something was a law just because it mysteriously matched some pattern but does not benefit you is about as dystopian as it comes.
So, let’s assert that each human has an AI looking out for it. And moment to moment, your AI is determining how your actions match a positive or negative pattern in relation to you and your relationships.
Then, there would be another level of AI that examines the output of these AIs to help humans guide policy of the society and species. Which in all likelihood will mean telling corporate AIs what laws they have to follow.
If we want to replace laws with something better, it has to start with AIs that defend us as individual entities. Otherwise, prepare to be rolled.
Television did not replace radio, it stole the spotlight from it. Radio still remained on the stage, and eventually transferred bits of video and half truth via WiFi and LTE. So in a way, radio subsumed television.
AI will not replace human thought processes and actions, it will augment and change us, and perhaps someday we will absorb it back into the core of what it means to be human. Perhaps.
It’s the “along the way” part that bothers me as the xkcd above suggests.
And now, of course, because this is the Internet, I am going to get to the point of this post and talk about Hitler.
But wait, don’t click away yet! I promise, nobody is going to be compared to Hitler, and this isn’t a warning about the rise of facism in the West. Well, not really.
But it is a suggestion that the only reason Hitler came to power was because he harnessed radio, and radio was magic. A lot of focus gets put on the rallies he held, but the radio broadcasts and movies (another magic invention) and yes, early television in Nazi Germany (first used to broadcast the Olympics) reached far more people than any rally did.
Radio transfixed and changed the German-ish people into Nazis, as the Guardian article shows:
As the tension increased at the beginning of September 1938, radio became more than just a tool of propaganda. For some days, pro-Hitler Sudeten German activists had been working with agents from the Reich to sow the seeds of a coup in the Sudetenland, which would effectively turn its annexation by Germany into a reality on the ground. The cue for the uprising was to be Hitler’s speech on September 12, which was broadcast live from the Nuremberg party rally on all German radio stations. With each sentence, the Führer stirred the Sudeten Germans to rebellion. The British journalist, Sydney Morrell, witnessed the speech’s impact in the spa town of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), where he listened in the company of an elderly Sudeten German widow and her teenage son. While the widow got rather bored, “her son, his head pillowed on his arms, huddled up to the loud-speaker, listened avidly, his bright eyes darting round the room, seeing visions …” Such was the alchemy of radio.
FDR pulled off the same trick in America, using radio to bring America together during the Great Depression. When things are bad, when times are tough, magic technologies have undo influence.
Enter the Internet, and mobile devices, and constant-scroll experiences. Back in the early days of the Web and email (and before, on BBSes and The Well, etc), misinformation was something that could be tackled directly in forums via public debate. Language still had a chance, even if the scourge of trolling and anonymity seemed overwhelming.
But then came The Flood, the Human Wave, the massive group of users who entered the digital space in the 2000s, using social media, that has led us to the current Miasma. Guys like me who had a special shelf for our Wired magazines just didn’t see this coming, didn’t realize that when anyone could Internet that the ground truth would collapse under the sheer weight of shitposts.
Trump was not the first Internet President, Obama was. And from the moment he raised money directly online for his campaign the die was cast. From the moment he used Twitter to weigh in on an issue, he legitimized that tech. And if you add together money and micro logging you have a perfect shitnado.
The medium is not only the message: the medium is the drug, the thing that makes us feel connected without any connection. When the US radio broadcast the German invasions of the late 1930s without the pictures and stories of the millions being killed in occupied territories like Ukraine, it actually lulled the US into a sense of the inevitable nature of German conquest. Instead of the horror.
Language is broken technology, and social media (most) is broken technology not worth participating in. There is no truth in a headline, no matter how slowly you scroll it. And my guess is, we will soon look back and realize that all of this confusion happening around us is just one more iteration of one of the oldest human dances:
We are seeing public calls for banning all face Recognition use by police. Cambridge MA joins the cities considering a ban. I understand why…take a look at the gif above of protestors in Hong Kong using lasers to block face detection. The original Blade Runner was set in 2019, I think this fully horrifyingly cyberpunk moment puts us there. Video on twitter here.
However, those asking for bans are laboring under the illusion that we can go back to a world of anonymity, of obscurity. But there is no obscurity of identity as long as even one person in the long line of government agencies decides to use face detection on a video frame. Pandora has left the big box store and is having her feet scraped at a resort in Cancun.
You think a ban will stop the NSA? The FBI? The agencies without initials? And what are you doing with such a ban? You are removing from public access the ability to use this tech to identify bad actors in the policing space.
You see, they have access to cameras and ML, but we all have cameras in our pockets and ML as a service. We can film them, and identify them, and track them also. The blade swings both ways here.
The problem here isn’t the tech, it’s that people are being horrible to each other. The problem with China isn’t that it’s using this tech to oppress protests, it’s that it is trying to do terrible things like displace populations and crush Hong Kong. They would do it without the tech, and if we want to stop the real abuses protecting Cambridge as a safe identity space isn’t going to go very far.
It may seem like we are “doing something” with these bans, but it’s meaningless busy work when compared with the real issues of Inequality, identity, institutional racism, etc.
To be clear, I am not making the argument of “well if you don’t want to get in trouble just don’t do anything wrong.” I am instead saying that if that doing wrong is actually the right thing, and goes against the grain of society, then exposing your identity is crucial in the change.
If you want to protect your identity from cameras in public, your best bet is to go for some counter surveillance tech. I am all for it, especially if it is really cyberpunk.
What I like the most about this approach it is a true middle finger to the guy in the three letter agency who thinks he can control the world with technology. And it’s my protected “right” to wear it. Try to ban it, punk.
And the title of this post is of course in reference to the recent loss of Rutger Hauer. Thanks Rutger, you were a candle burning at both ends, twice as bright.
The House has passed new robocall legislation which is likely to pass the Senate and actually create a law that addresses an actual modern concern, the massive waste of time and fraud that automated calls cause.
The number of robocallers dialing up U.S. consumers is on the rise. Some estimates say there were more than 48 billion robocalls in 2018, up almost 50 percent from the previous year. The measure would give the FCC more time to investigate and punish illegal robocallers, require the agency to pare down the list of companies that are allowed to use robocalling services and raise the penalty for illegal robocallers to $10,000 per violation from $1,500.
It won’t work of course. First, because many of these abusers are not located in America. Go try and fine an Indian or Chinese or Thai call center. Might want to learn some Hindi curses first.
But even the provisions that mandate that telcos implement new blocking technology won’t work because there are no real fines that they face, and telcos actually make money on these calls (due to caller ID lookup services and the like).
And if you think telcos have some crazy amazing tech that they can implement to detect and block call centers and robocalls, what exactly is it? And why haven’t they deployed it yet?
There are ways to do this with machine learning and analyzing call content, but if you think Verizon is going to pull that off then I have a bundled internet/tv/phone package to sell you.
The truth is, laws like this are bad technology that give a false sense of security that the government is actually doing something about this massive issue. This is about the lack of accountability in telcos, and letting them control something as important as who can contact your personal line, which is in effect your public identity. At best these companies are incompetent, at worst they are knowingly engaging in fraud by allowing it to happen. But “magic technology” will now fix this once the “magic technology” of laws mandate it, right? (/s)
This isn’t a question of who guards the guards. It’s a question of: can a compromised Government force a toothless Federal Agency to enforce hazy mandates against unethical telcos to prevent bad foreign actors from undermining the security of our phone system? From stealing the only thing we really have, our time on the planet.
Frankly, the foreign call centers are the only ones I have sympathy for in this web of lies and deception. Actually, screw that, they are horrible also.
If you want to secure your device but still keep your number open I think the only sane solution is doing the kind of call screening the Pixel is doing. I don’t have a Pixel but plan on making it my next device. Sometimes the only way to beat a company is to have another company make it into a business opportunity. See: antivirus, spam filtering, identity protection, etc.
I have no doubt the FCC will eventually solve this problem, right before the heat death of the Universe. That will be followed by the FTC deciding they need to protect Americans against fraud.
Images above of dystopian madness of a Chinese click farm (good article btw worth clicking), which are also sources of robocalls and fraud. Sorry if it appeared I was only targeting Indian centers in rant above.
You can’t ban facial recognition technology as this BuzzFeed screampiece suggests. You can’t ban building a model and querying the model, neural networks, or recording digital video. That genie has left the bottle and is on a plane to Singapore sipping mimosas.
You can ban misuse of the result of those models, but we already have laws for that.
Sure, facial recognition is going to be used by authoritarian regimes to oppress and enslave us. Last I checked, so were tanks, nukes, taxes, water rights, and every single piece of technology humans have ever created.
Stop thinking that the problem is technology, and start thinking the problem is naked apes in silk suits pretending they are leading while they are just grunting in favor of their own tribal power.
So why should we think face recognition or machine learning tech isn’t terrifying? One reason: there are thousands and thousands of GitHub repos where normal programmers are hacking and reverse engineering the future. Because unlike tanks and artillery, ML can be used against the ruling class just as it can be used against us.
Here’s an example: let’s say I want to prove that a Politicians or CEO is lying. I know, a real edge case.
The way it works now is we wait 24 hours for some intrepid reporter at huffpost or wherever to dig up the video, and… we have already moved on as a society (and the liar has gotten away with it). All this depends too much on people who care knowing what happened in the distant past, and people who care going to a website and caring enough to care.
In the computing world, we would say our monitoring and alerting system for truth is not alerting fast enough. Thanks journalism, but turns out you are waaaaaay too slow for the 21st.
But what if everything a professional liar ever said was indexed and put into a model of them, where a system that understands their words would instantly pull up video of their previous lies alongside their current bullshitting. ML could allow us an experience of multiplexed video of those people through time.
In other words the next time a liar like Zuckerberg lies in front of Congress, we can display realtime his previous lies which expose his new ones. Like this 2009 video of him saying Facebook will never sell your data.
Imagine having to give testimony when your previous lies are blasted in your face. Go ahead, argue with yourself for a while. Imagine a reporter holding up their phone and asking questions in real-time based on what an ML analysis of the liar’s words were.
I would guess that liars would hate that. Good, let’s drive them into the darkness.
Quit pretending that this is about appealing to reason, or protecting our imaginary rights. This is historical, epic war, and to win against the oligarchy we are going to need to have our own suite of metaphorical weapons. ML is going to give us the tools to change the game, and secure a future based on supporting the health and happiness of individual humans, Singletons, which I would argue isn’t socialism at all.
It may take fifty years, or a hundred, but society will evolve around this tech as it always does. But if try to ban ML, you’re taking away our best technique of making this change equitable.
Because real equality needs real data, and tools and people to understand it.
Screen time — and social media in particular — is linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers, according to a new study by researchers at Montreal’s Sainte-Justine Hospital.
The most surprising finding for Boers was that time spent playing video games was not contributing to depressive symptoms.
The study suggests the average gamer is not socially isolated, with more than 70 per cent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person.
Depression is a clear error state of being human, to be avoided at all costs if you care about your uptime as a being, and avoiding the risk of self-termination.
We need to stop talking about “screen time” with kids, and start talking about the quality of what they are doing on screens.
It turns out, scrolling through pictures of your high school friend’s jet-skis isn’t a worthwhile activity.
The study found that of all the forms of screen time, consuming social media can be the most harmful.
Conrod and her colleague, Elroy Boers, found that the increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds.
“It exposes young people to images that promote upward social comparison and makes them feel bad about themselves,” said Conrod.
Playing video games isn’t a waste of time by default, since many games are social in nature and keep the mind active. Other games are black holes of grinding out clicks for limited dopamine, like crappy slot machines. So, avoid those, for your kids and yourself.
Something being on a screen, or in a book, doesn’t make it good or bad. It’s only in the experience of the technology that we are able to determine worth.
We are social animals, and when my kid plays Fortnite I often hear him, well, playing. Like kids are supposed to. Laughing, joking around, talking about friends at school. The same kind of thing he does when he shoots baskets at the park, or swims in the pool.
“Social networks” like Facebook, Instagram, etc., in contrast, are not social at all. They are isolating, cynical plays for your attention for ad dollars. They are like crappy magazines where we have to create the content.
Twenty years ago Google came along and rebuilt the way search worked on the net. All the old search engines adapted or disappeared. We can do that with social networks too:
Just use SMS. Text people, create groups, share your photos that way. Send postcards in the mail. Take a trip. Grab a beer with old friends. Play a video game with your kid!
If you are going to let your kids on social networks, be aware you are doing something more dangerous than letting them smoke cigarettes. Might as well toss them some Juul cartridges and call it aday.
Thegreat man theoryis a 19th-century idea according to whichhistorycan be largely explained by the impact of great men, orheroes; highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural attributes, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect.
I’m not really on board with that one to be honest. Mostly because I think the real changes in history happen due to technology, and not ideology, warfare, or singular heroism or leadership. The invention of firearms, antibiotics, and alternating current have changed average lives much more than most of the Herculean achievements supposedly attributed to the Heroes of History.
But, how did those technological and scientific advancements occur? This brings me to my proposal: the Smart Cow Theory of History.
Thesmart cow problemis the concept that, when a group of individuals is faced with a technically difficult task, only one of their members has to solve it. When the problem has been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing the less technically proficient members of the group to accomplish the task.
The term smart cow problem is thought to be derived from the expression: “It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow.”[1]
Imagine that each advancement we make in technology brings us, a metaphorical herd of cows, to a new, greener pasture. For instance, the development of the internal combustion engine by a Smart Cow, or small group of smart cows, suddenly gives us massive power and abilities. Tesla figures out Alternating Current to unlock the gate of power transmission, and then the regular cows can build the power grid.
But then we inevitably come to another locked gate: not enough fuel, dangerous vehicles, carbon emissions. We bang against these gates until the smart cows, the technologists and scientists and yes, the capitalists who fund them, figure out a way to unlock these gates. Then we all blunder through, blindly, into the supposedly greener pastures of our future.
Smart cows would be folks like: Tesla, Edison, Curie, Einstein, Ada Lovelace, Ford, Taiichi Ohno, Oppenheimer, Herbert Boyer, Tim Berners-Lee and so on. Every woman and man working in a lab coat somewhere or pounding on a keyboard is likely a Smart Cow in some way. Because really smart and effective cows don’t do it alone; it usually takes a cowteam to unlatch those gates.
And what are those gates? Those are the problems we face. Energy, food, travel, health, understanding, control.
The Smart Cow Theory of History implies a few things. One, is that us cows that blunder through the unlocked gates have no idea what lies on the other side of the fence, and most of us don’t even know that gate was there in the first place.
Second, and more importantly, the Smart Cows don’t know what lies on the other side either.
Sure they can theorize and discuss, but Smart Cows are just individuals who can apply their focus to a single issue and solve it. They are just looking for a solution to the unhappy mooing around them
Oppenheimer didn’t know how nations would negotiate power through nuclear weapons. He was more worried that the initial atom bomb tests would ignite the oxygen on the planet and kill us all.
The Smart Cows building AI, putting computers in our pockets, and editing our genes have No Idea what the outcome of these actions will be. They can’t, the universe and humans are just far too complex to know what the next pasture and gate will look like. But we do know that these gates are getting more and more complicated, the pastures more dangerous, and the Smart Cows are going to keep unlatching.
Telling Smart Cows to stop fiddling with the locks isn’t going to slow them down. But if we all just spend a few moments asking the right questions, and enshrining the right values, maybe, just maybe, we can set our boundaries in time to prevent disaster.
Perhaps some gates need to remain locked to keep the herd from wandering onto the highway, or into the slaughterhouse.
Moo.
To hear a couple of very Smart Cows discuss some upcoming gates around biotechnology and CRISPR, I highly recommend episode 50 of the After On podcast with KevinRose.
The nine pound hammer was the weapon of the mighty John Henry. Legend says the big man beat a steam-powered hammer in laying railroad ties, only to die after his victory. The philosopher Johnny Cash had some sage words about the great man….
“Now did the Lord say that machines ought to take place of the livin’? And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I ain’t seen it! Do engines get rewarded for their steam?” – Johnny Cash “9 Pound Hammer”
This is the recurring fear. That machines will kill us. Either by us trying to keep up with the mechanical beast, or more directly – in some sort of AI-Robot revolt.
“Roboapocalypse” is not what we should fear. What we should fear is a lack of hope.
Death is a welcome respite for the desperately bored. And thats what is about to happen. We are all about to be out of work and out of hope.
The Real Danger
A recent McKinsey study estimates that by 2030, 50% of current work activities are automatable by already tested technologies.[ii] Whether your job is eliminated due to automation, a merger, or something like corporate restructuring, when you are out of work…it is one of the worst feelings in the world. At some point, you either needed to find a job or you will need to find a job. So, what to do?
The U.S. Labor Department reported recently[iii] that there are 6.66 million jobs available, but only around 6.56 million people unemployed. At first blush this number should bother those who are mathematically inclined – why do we have unemployment at all? The answer is SKILLS. In a robot dominated society, engineers are the only people that get to keep a job. Mr Kurt Vonnegut described this effectively many years ago in his first novel, Player Piano:
“Consequently the carefully selected, highly trained individuals who design and control the machines are the only people who have anything to do. Other people, the great majority, can either go into the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, which is devoted to boondoggling, or join the army, which has no real function in a machine-dominated world-society.”
– Aug 1952 review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano
So the vast majority of people will be given some type of job just to stay busy. We will have huge chucks of time to just ponder. Leisure activities will become our main activity. But then – what will we need ‘leisure activity’ for? We have no reason to need it. Everything is leisure. So nothing is leisure.
All this is predicated on the idea that these Robots will do what we want them to do when we want them to do it. They will become like slaves. After all the word “robota”, means “forced labour”. Is it natural to think of Robots this way? Apparently so!
In a piece called “You’ll own Slaves!” published in 1950 GE was promising that we would all own slaves by 1965! They even noted that while Abe Lincoln had freed the slaves – they were making a comeback!
“You’ll own Slaves!”
The “You’ll own Slaves” piece is amazing and worth a read. And all of this was supposed to happen by 1965. No wonder there was such a long AI winter. And its a wonder it has taken this long for GE to go tits up.
It ends with this quote:
One thing is certain, the robots are coming. The wonders of electronics will dominate every phase of our future life to make it more successful and pleasurable for everyone who lives on Earth.
– From “You will own Slaves” by GE
Sure.
Robot Slaves
One problem with having robots as slaves is that it leaves us with a huge amount of leisure time. If robots make our beds, clean our house, run our chicken farms and do virtually everything else – what is our special purpose?
“‘She feeds the clothes through this ironer, which can do what was an hours’ ironing before the war in three minutes. Bing!’
‘And then what does she do?’ asked Khashdrahr.
‘And then she’s done.’
‘And then what?’
Doctor Dodge reddened perceptibly. ‘Is this a joke?’” – pp. 142-3
Vonnegut – Player Piano
Amazingly there is a machine that was just invented to do this exact thing. In this piece the @RobotRabbi talks about an entrepreneur that he had met at a conference:
… I met the the self-assured entrepreneur of Foldimate, Gal Rozov. The robotic company made headlines this past January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) demonstrating its novel approach to smart home automation. This week the founder shared with me the genesis of his idea: “I always felt that I should share the burden of the household chores, but I am the first to admit that I am not very good at chores and do not particularly enjoy them.” The loving husband confessed, “My wife didn’t approve of my laundry folding standards,” and then it hit him, “perhaps if there was a machine that could do the difficult part of the folding for me, I could help with this tiresome and hefty chore.” He compares his invention to other other household appliances, “it would do the difficult part – the folding, just as the dishwasher does the cleaning.”
So I won’t even have to fold my clothes (because of Foldimate), water my plants, brush my teeth or any thing else for that matter. What will be my purpose?
Humans have to have purpose to be happy. Thats just who we are.
Your life purpose consists of the central motivating aims of your life—the reasons you get up in the morning.
If you have no purpose – you are less than human…
Khashdrahr (above in the piece from Player Piano) was right to ask: ‘And then what does she do?’
Indeed – what will any of us do?
Robots Slaves – The REAL problem
Another, perhaps more significent problem with the ‘robots as slaves’ narrative is that it makes us into slave owners. I don’t know about most of you, but the American South went through this a while back and it did not end well. The semantics of slave ownership is a hard cookie to swallow, and while you might decide that since its not a ‘person’ its ok to have a robot slave – you should note that ‘personhood’ is being redefined all over the place for a host of reasons.
A variety of narratives underpin popular conceptions of AI, but one in particular – that of the dynamic between the master and the slave – dominates accounts of AI at the moment. This is so pervasive that it arguably shapes our relationship with this technology.
She goes on to point out with regard to the slave-master narrative:
[those] peddling this narrative should take heed. Previous forms of it left space for and even encouraged rebellion. And so does this modern version. Perpetuated through capitalism’s branding of AI as the disruption of your work and drudgery, this framing still leads into fears around rebellion because we understand servitude as antithetical to minds. The presumption is for many that with AI we are working towards minds – and that they will want to be free.
Are we Owning Slaves or Competing with them?
But if we are all going to lose our jobs as part of this deal – how are we going to pay for these slaves? Who is going to provide me with my personal servant if I have been on unemployment for 5 years? How will I afford to buy my ‘selfdriving’ Tesla with no money? Is the metaphor broken? Shouldn’t we be thinking about this not from the perspective of you as the slave owner – but rather that ‘You’ are the older model that is being replaced? Your the meat version of the new shiny chrome version 2 of whatever it is you did. There will be no free robots. Tesla’s are amongst the most expensive car on the road – mostly because of this promise of automation. All of the home robot appliances are very expensive. You will not have enough money to buy even one. You are out of work. You will not get a slave. You are competing with the slaves.
So if we are not slave owners, how should we think about the relationship? Again – Mr Vonnegut helps us out:
What have you got against machines?’ said Buck.
‘They’re slaves.’
‘Well, what the heck,’ said Buck. ‘I mean, they aren’t people. They don’t suffer. They don’t mind working.’
‘No. But they compete with people.’
‘That’s a pretty good thing, isn’t it–considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?’
‘Anybody that competes with a slave becomes a slave,’ said Harrison thickly, and he left.” – p. 243
Kurt Vonnegut – Player Piano
How can we fight this? What can we do to reverse this projected outcome? No one can read the future. Not one of us can know what will happen. But we DO know that history is sometimes read to us from the pages of a novel. So lets leave with a few words describing that fateful first novel of Mr Vonnegut – from the 1952 NYTime’s review of Player Piano.
The story, which is told in a skillful, lively fashion, concerns Paul Proteus, one of the privileged engineers. Unhappy in his own role and increasingly aware that the masses are being frustrated and degraded, he joins and becomes nominal leader of a revolutionary organization, the Ghost Shirts. At first the rebellion seems to be succeeding, but then the mob gets out of hand, […] and there is an orgy of destruction. Proteus and his companions, however, do not give up hope until they find that their revolutionary followers are busily making gadgets out of the scraps of the machines they have been destroying. That is too much, and they surrender to the oligarchy.
The future is not ordained. There may be hope. But only if some strong people, as strong as John Henry, pick up their 9 pound hammers and get to work.
Lets go out with the Luddites ‘9 pound hammer’ reprise….
The organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit! Our mission is to promote humans above technology. Our simple belief is that technology should work for humans and better their condition and never have a negative impact on humanity. Please find it in your heart to donate to this important cause.
