Robots Still Haven’t Taken Over: A brief history of machine anxiety
lithub.com
lithub.com
What's interesting to me is that as technology progressed, the gap between fiction and fact keeps narrowing. Take for example Der Sandmann. While true artificial intelligence is still far away, I think we'll see animated sex dolls in the next ten or twenty years that rival the capabilities Olimpia displays. As we already have a small number of people that prefer dolls to humans, I wonder where the tipping point will be where, say, about as many people are gay as are robophile.
Now that's a interesting observation.
It might happen in China first, which has about a 1.3 to 1 ratio of marriage-age men to women and a big electronic gadget industry.
The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one. I suspect the first hints of that are programs that write sports copy for newspapers. I have known a couple of sports writers over the years and they really liked what they did, and would (and sometimes did) do the job for free.
Most train drivers like driving trains, something like London's DLR doesn't have train drivers (a human _can_ drive the train, but when they take over it deliberately goes slowly for safety reasons, so this is not normally used in paying service). A five year old (or a twenty-something going on five years old) gets to sit at the front and pretend they're driving, which is fun for them but it's not a job any more.
Some people enjoy operating a simple mechanical loom. Some expensive cloths are still today "hand woven" with such a loom because the legal protection for the name of the cloth mandates that they be produced this way. Probably everything else you have that was woven is woven automatically by a machine because machines produce the same quality as a skilled weaver but in enormous volume and more quickly.
The question is never whether machines will displace people from jobs, but about whether new jobs will come into existence (in large numbers) to replace those jobs. It's not "Can a machine do my job?" so much as "Is there anything I could get paid to do that a machine couldn't do?".
Now we can use neural nets and all sorts of mechatronics to create our own automation and bots. Software's free and hardware is cheap. What will so many people with so much free time on their hands, and with needs that are unfulfilled, do?
Imho that hardware part really depends on scale. As nice as the thought might be, I doubt there are enough resources on Earth for a future where 8 billion people live a leisurely first world lifestyle in their smart homes with IT gadgets all around them, while robots take care of all the manual labor that needs to be done.
All that hardware requires resources and those resources are finite, at least on that little piece of rock we like to call Earth. As of right now that's pretty much the current ceiling for humanities progress and it ain't a very high one.
The question is
(i) who is going to pay you to do your work during the day, and (ii) will the rest of society accept that it is work of a type that fulfils the reciprocity requirement.
Without both of those the machines won't be ordered to produce anything by those who run and operate them.
We expect to receive something of value in return for the machine's output.
Work for free or even pay for the privilege of working. See some short distance truck drivers working 20 hours a day making losses on some weeks after paying for their truck lease and other costs that were externalised from the employer to the employee. You can't exploit a robot but you can exploit a human.
That's a bold philosophical statement about the nature and uniqueness of man.
Like working in high-finance? A sector that's been overtaken by algorithms pretty much the earliest among all the industries. Imho "the machines" have already "won", humans are mostly mere cogs in a whole collection of systems which see planet Earth as a gigantic perpetual "economic engine" in need of constant acceleration, or else it might come crashing down all around us.
As for the meme about man's creations killing their maker, with an ever growing power of technology, statistically, isn't it just a matter of time ?
In a country where they have a word for the extremely socially withdrawn (Hikikomori), I could believe that 15% number. Not because those people wouldn't want a partner but simply because they believe their chances of getting one are 0% (and in their mind it's not worth trying).
It's also not something unique to humans, lots of other animals hump inanimate objects due to reproductive drive/hormonal urges, some primate species are actually quite infamous for their "lewd behavior".
Along with that came the emergence of the "herbivore men" in Japanese society, partly also a reaction to the immense pressure put on Japanese men to be "successful" in an economy that can't supply "successful jobs" to everybody. Japanese men pretty much invented that whole mgtow-thing before it became popular.
The scary angle is a comparison with John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiment [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
Then we developed nuclear weapons, and everyone finally realized the end was in sight, no need to panic, the threat was finally existential and real. Our response to this realization was to mutually stockpile enough nuclear weapons to destroy most human life and all human civilization many times over. Still, like the crossbow nuclear weapons have not totally destabilized society, and now intellectual people are looking for the next threat, and for the first time all of them are potentially world ending. That doesn't mean the world will end, as we've seen many times in the past, but as you say the gap is narrowing, and we're never going back to a time and we don't have the means to actually end it all.
I think people worry about robots because it's the most comfortable thing to worry about, compared to nukes and climate change at least.
I have no idea how we'll survive that.
Or an alternative(maybe): all technologies will be inside highly regulated environments.building a 3d printer from scratch is really hard.
It definitely is right now. Suppose for a moment that a 3D printer were invented that could turn raw materials into perfect copies of itself. Suppose also that the raw materials could be automatically extracted from household and electronic waste. A machine that can turn garbage into copies of itself and other objects with similar complexity to the original machine.
The only remaining obstacle would be software (and data files). If we are to assume that machine learning and AI progress in parallel to the development of such a machine, it's difficult to see how we could ever prevent somebody from putting the pieces together.
It's hard, yes, but we only have eight hours every weekday forced out of us. That's a bit different from the past.
The major difference is that, factory automation aside, they don't look like robots. They look like the normal everyday items that they replaced, except they are imbued with more intelligence.
Take, for example, modern cars. They're really as much software as hardware these days. Networked processors talking to each other via CAN bus. Just because they're driveable robots doesn't mean they're not robots.
That's leaving aside the other issue, which is that it turns out it's much easier to automate non-physical processes.
How long has it been since most people have hand-written a letter?
Electronic messages outnumber paper letters, but humans still control both.
When I pay at the supermarket, the checkout person's job is to stand nearby in case I have trouble with the self-checkout machine.
When I walk through the gates on the metro, the assistant's job is to stand nearby in case the tap-to-pay machine malfunctions.
When I stand on the rail platform, I grit my teeth when the automated tannoy announces "sincere apologies" for the late running service.
When I take delivery of mail, the delivery guy's job is to beep the barcode and take my signature on a touchscreen.
When I get an Uber, I wonder if the driver is aware that we are both helping Uber build the databases intended to power their driverless cars.
Robots can help or hinder, but it is their owners who are steadily depersonalising our daily experiences, particularly for city dwellers. They are determined to de-skill the remaining human workforce in pursuit of ever tighter margins. This will continue until the humans are so obviously obsolete that it becomes literally unimaginable that such roles should continue.
Don't be confused: Society is as much run by the machines as society runs the machines. People do not recognize this, for precisely the same reason you're disputing me: It seems like humans are fully in control. We lack all but the grossest influence over most of the fully automated systems - we can pull the plug, but we can never go back to non-automated from where we are today.
Complex systems are chaotic and rapidly exceed the capabilities of humans to understand and control.
If something changed the physics of our planet so that all modern technology stopped working, such as in the Dies the Fire book, then although most humans would starve, the survivors would start over with a medieval society (plus being able to use the scraps from modern world). That's the fundamental difference.
A world run by machines could exist after us and continue or build it's own civilization, which presumably Skynet would be able to do if it had won. The Matrix is more mixed, because the machines need humans to satisfy a lot of their power needs.
When you consider how nearly half of working age adults are unemployed, how many of those actually in jobs spend most of their time largely inactive and unproductive, and how many people are removed from the job market entirely by being warehoused in education or incarcerated, it's astonishing how much our lives have been "taken over".
How about some evidence that the things you point to are in some way connected to increased automation.
Labor force participation rate is not the inverse of the unemployment rate. To support your position, you'd need to show dramatic reductions in labor force participation and show a causal link with automation. I am skeptical that you can.
Automation may not be solely responsible, it is one of many synergistic factors.
Ha, yes, obviously meant subsistence. Damn you autocorrect, etc. :)
(1) Parents/children (2) Gods/humans (3) Owners/slaves
Sometimes these comparisons are evoked explicitly (in Blade Runner, Roy Batty says "I want more life, Father"--which alludes to both the religious and parental Father--and later, "That's what it is to be a slave.")
An article saying "chill out people, robots won't ever take over because they haven't so far" is missing the point by kilometers. Our robots are dumber than an individual ant and have zero concept of self, life, death, needs, or their own place in the world.
"Robots haven't taken all jobs because we haven't invented a robot that can do all jobs yet."
The point is, we have no reason to believe that such a robot is even possible.
The most compelling argument I've heard is, "they're getting smarter faster, so eventually they'll be infinity smart."
But... the logic is flawed. Another good argument is "humans exist that could do any job, and humans are just biological robots, so a mechanical robot could do it too."
But that one is just as flawed. I will concede a sufficiently human-like AI could do any job, but a sufficiently human-like AI isn't necessarily meaningfully different from a human with an iPhone, which means it doesn't free employers from the human rights burdens that make AIs such attractive employees.
I am not saying that though. No, robots aren't getting smarter at all. Just a corporation investing a bit more in 2000+ if/elses that they sell as "intelligent home cleaner". We all know it.
> But... the logic is flawed. Another good argument is "humans exist that could do any job, and humans are just biological robots, so a mechanical robot could do it too."
Not sure what your argument is. I know I am not saying that quote either.
All I was saying is that the article is meaningless. It basically goes like this: "hey people, don't you get so worried, nothing happened so far, so it won't ever happen". This is children's logic and serves no purpose except for laughing at the author, really.
Maybe what I said is tautology. Not sure. But what the author is saying is "what comes after is caused by what came before", which is basically the first thing any logic law will forbid you to conclude. Practically the first law of logic is: "after doesn't mean because of".
No, we're not safe just because nothing happened so far. That will never be true. We're safe because our robots are just as dumb as the time the first robot was invented. And that might change at any moment.
What is a "long time"? That is the question, right?
Given that artificial neural networks were only invented a few decades ago and have since improved by many orders of magnitude, who's to say this won't happen during our lifetimes?
And in no way this is a problem for society. New technology created new job opportunities.
Heh. If you hadn't noticed... society's not doing so hot, and it's largely due to an absence of opportunity in non-urban areas.
They can be piloted remotely by a human.
The day that someone sets up a quadcopter controlled by AI and computer vision....
Is the day we should probably fear robots.
Already been done a long time ago, just not by civilians.