Robots Are Already Killing People
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
With AI safety features we can only see the gains in human life growing. At least until the robot dogs with needles for teeth start hunting down people who read books or the justice drones start shooting protestors with exploding freedom rockets.
Guess I won't be recommending that to anyone: I can't justify 20-30 years of lowered life expectancy for any job.
And welding seems like a great job, you surely hear about someone's cousin making good money that does it. Everyone does, which is why there's a huge glut of talent at the entry level end struggling to find work. It is not the labor printer outsiders think it is. I guarantee you that at any given walmart you can find 3 employees there who own a welder and aren't awful with it.
From the DIYer perspective you can get a good and comfortable silicone half face respirator setup for like $50. There's really no reason not to have one. I tend to favor 3M 7503 (or 7502/7501 for size), plus 60921 or 2297 (OV or not).
No doubt I invested well over $1000 in shoes and even more on suits while I sold cars.
Are you telling me a welder can't spend his own money to make his life better like I did?
Every time an autonomous vehicle causes a car accident, there are many people calling to ban them. Yet when a human causes an accident, it’s “just the way it is, people need to get to work, nothing we can do about it”. Doesn’t matter if the rate of incidence is lower, people would rather have more accidents they can emphasise with. Human bias is so fascinating.
- People put the probability of them getting involved in an accident that is their fault at 0. - People put the probability of them getting involves in an accident that is a robot's fault at >0
This is why people are afraid of flying and not driving. The agency is the big problem.
If your objection is "what about others" - humans are naturally selfish and will hold whatever belief that are incentivized to.
For example, I know driving is somewhat dangerous... But I also know that if I have my newborn in the car with me on the way home from the hospital, I am able to drive 1000x more cautiously than my typical drive to work at 6am.
Someone getting hurt or killed by a machine in a factory likely wasn't following the proper and ideal safety protocols for one reason or another.
Lots of people are careless and don't care enough about safety rules in my experience. So it's not hard to end up with a lower number of total incidents when robot are put in charge.
But for some person who is not careless and who does follow safety protocols religiously, a robot causing them harm could be outside of their own control, even if they are following all the safety protocols and are always very careful.
Can you see how that could be a problem?
People are allowed to operate with their own additional steps of safety precautions which may be much more conservative than the steps assigned to an automated machine that they must now interact with.
I'm talking about general personal safety protocols that a person could follow, that could be safer and more conservative than the protocols governing a more automatic machine.
A machine being controlled by AI could have unpredictable behavior, I mean look at other areas of AI. Can we really predict what will always happen?
It’s natural to expect robots to be several times more safe than humans if we are to let them into dangerous situations with us.
Also, I think people are rightfully concerned about a future in which self driving cars result in more cars on the road as opposed to fewer. An unbounded congestion potential!
At our current trajectory, we're more likely to get those rather than welding robots replacing the blue collar workforce.
But are robots safer than all humans? Safer than the humans who religiously follow all safety protocols?
It's hard to fault a person who normally operates very safely for being afraid of losing control of their equipment to a robot which could be unpredictable.
Surely it's valid to worry about a robot making a deadly mistake that you wouldn't have ever made yourself.
You personally wouldn't be upset at all if a loved one died to a bug in the software that caused the self-driving car to make an obvious mistake that the loved one would never in a million years have made themselves?
I can see how people can have concerns at least, when control it taken away.
Riding a motorcycle is 60x more dangerous than a car per mile.
I have easily done over 100,000 miles on a sportsbike in California traffic.
That's the equivalent of 6 Million miles in a car. I have had one close call in 10 years. Never even stubbed a toe on a motorcycle.
I consider ceasing to interpret my own survivor bias as skill instead of luck, getting over myself.
But honestly, I am a pretty skilled rider. I just don't have to use most of it on the road... I said myself I only had one close call in 10 years. Only that moment really involved skill.
The smart and the wise seek automation and others to multiply their effort. The lazy and the less molecular wedge-like instruments do things the hard way(tm) themselves. It doesn't take a particle physics PhD to be resourceful, improvisational, and productive.
The choices are:
1. Ordinary machines under human control
2. Machines that perform fixed, repetitive operations automatically
3. Machines that perform variable, repetitive operations at unexpected times, automatically
4. Autonomous machines that perform a variety of operations without human control
5. Tanks, UAVs, and rifles under human control
6. 5. but under semi-automatic human control (At present time, the US mil absolutely requires an officer to issue a lethal order.)
Any factory I have been to calls the machines that do fixed repetitive motions, automatically, robots.
My dad learned he had lung cancer because the tumor migrated to the base of his skull and started damaging his vision until he had a car accident. Then the scans revealed his lung cancer and the migrated tumor. Welding and metalwork for so many years probably played a part in his cancer. They removed 1/3rd of his right lung and now he has a metal plate in his head from getting that tumor removed.
He was 63 when diagnosed, and is a stubborn old Texas Marine who is still around about 5 years later. Overall, I think he spent more time doing other work than welding, but I remember him always talking about any time he welded it always gave him black boogers.
Vs. if you have any idea of how dangerous non-robot industrial machinery was in the 1820 - 1920 era...41 deaths in 25 years is less than a rounding error.
Compare that to the probability of human beings air-striking elementary schools, which humans have shown many times they're perfectly willing to do during war.
I’ve had a few beers, but this is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long while.
Why is it given that an AI or algorithm has to be less ethical than humans? I don't think it has to be, and hell, ChatGpt (with or without guidance/censorship) already shows a greater capacity for moral reasoning than some (many?) humans. We didn't evolve for some sort of absolute moral superiority, we're just a smart violent ape with in and out groups, quite prone to otherization and dehumanization on a whim. And we elect, follow, and worship sociopaths that strongly exhibit those traits... over and over.
Every parent hopes their children will be better people. With AI we might actually be able to make that happen, unbounded by human genetics, though of course other challenges will arise.
Shrug. Maybe Skynet is around the corner. But maybe not. There's uncertainty and thus hope there, at least, whereas I guarantee you the human species, unchanged, will keep producing genocidal dictators every decade or three.
I'm a lot less worried about industrial accidents, and a lot more worried about the path of military accidents. Drones /will/ outpilot human pilots, and AIs /will/ out-strategize humans. That's inevitable at this point. Bugs will creep in too, as will cyberattacks.
In a war, no one will have time to dive into AI ethics, let alone capacity to apply them.
Maybe the AI will at least use modern, quick-killing weapons.
Genocide is ancient, but humanity somehow stumbles on as a species.
I'm more worried because we developed technology capable of wipe out all of humanity (and potentially, all life on Earth) in the fifties with thermonuclear bombs. The number of potentially humanity-destroying technologies has grown exponentially since, and with biological weapons, the cost and complexity has fallen.
I can think of directions to take humanity to take extermination off-the-table, but we don't seem able to implement big changes anymore.
I’d sumbit AI bombs will be less errant than their humans who are not accountable.
The future is going to be more robots work in parallel to humans and collaborate. Robot manufacturers should ensure the collaboration between robots.
We can claim it's not robots killing people; it's people killing people because they decided to use the robot.
That's specious. We have something resembling a free market world. Anybody 'deciding' to not use automation (or AI or whatever) will be outcompeted by folks using the cheaper alternative. The playing field inevitably will become robot and AI dominated.
Make all the regulations we want; money will force the issue. As long as they don't egregiously slaughter people they will win.
Like slavery and indentured servitude before, and removal of indigenous populations, and exploitation of natural resources. The tragedy of the commons or something similar, where you have to join the throng or be outcompeted and your efforts extinguished. Only efficient market competitors can possibly survive.
All the rest is philosophy (sophistry?)
In the US, 16 people were murdered today (by another human).
Worldwide, one person is murdered every second, or 1,440 murders per day.
Perspective...